Thank you for this.

I see you as highlighting a virtue that the current Art gestures toward but doesn't yet embody. And I agree with you, a mature version of the Art definitely would.

In his Lectures on Physics, Feynman provides a clever argument to show that when the only energy being considered in a system is gravitational potential energy, then the energy is conserved. At the end of that, he adds the following:

It is a very beautiful line of reasoning. The only problem is that perhaps it is not true. (After all, nature does not have to go along with our reasoning.) For example, perhaps perpetual motion is, in fact, possible. Some of the assumptions may be wrong, or we may have made a mistake in reasoning, so it is always necessary to check. It turns out experimentally, in fact, to be true.

This is such a lovely mental movement. Feynman deeply cared about knowing how the world really actually works, and it looks like this led him to a mental reflex where even in cases of enormous cultural confidence he still responds to clever arguments by asking "What does nature have to say?"

In my opinion, people in this community update too much on clever arguments. I include myself in that. I disagree with your claim that people shouldn't update at all on clever arguments, but I very much agree that there would be much more strength in the Art if it were to emphasize an active hunger for asking nature its opinion.

I think there's a flavor of mistake that comes from overemphasizing the direction I see you pointing at the expense of other virtues. I've known quite a number of scientists who think the way I see you suggesting who feel like they can't have any opinions or thoughts about things they haven't seem empirical tests of. I think they're in part trying to protect themselves against what Eliezer calls "privileging the hypothesis", but they also make themselves unnecessarily stupid in some ways. The most common and blatant I recall is their getting routinely blindsided by predictable social expectations and drama.

But I think Feynman gets it right.

And I think we ought to, too.

So again, thank you for bringing this up. It clarified something that had been nagging me, and now I think I see how to fix it.