#DrFatima published an awesome essay on Feyerabend's "against method" and I got thoughts now.
Her talk about heliocentrism vs geocentrism assumes that the two theories were in competition with each other. Which they were. But this "competition between theories" does not need to become a "competition between scientists". Heliocentrism did not have good arguments going for it when Galileo kept defending it, but if the only goal was to keep the theory alive until the data to prove it came along, then it could have existed as a funny thing to speculate about, or a world building exercise, or even just as a less proven theory. Scientists did not need to stake themselves in a theory (or stake each other). We could have kept it going in many ways that were not harmful to any participants.
It might be better if science worked that way, if we kept open to the range of possible theories given the facts we've built about the world, and did not try to snuff out theories that have less support, and treated the scientists saying those theories like people who have valuable things to contribute (even if we don't agree with their favourite explanation)
There is an asterisk with theories of reality that are actually harmful, but I don't have the energy to elaborate on that right now
