[tdehnel]

To consider an observation “weird” you need a theory about what a normal observation looks like.

Additionally, all observations require baked in theories about the observation being accurate.

Btw, I didn’t appreciate your insulting first sentence.

Edit: here's a decent writeup to show what I mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness

[sdenton4]

If we are sufficiently expansive in our definition of what theory is, then sure, there is no experiment without theory, and experimentalists only discover things by being secretly theorists who occasionally stop thinking long enough to get their hands dirty. But I don't think this is typically what is meant by 'theory.'

CRISPR is again a good example - the initial 'weirdness' was an observation of lots of long-ish palindromic subsequences in bacterial DNA. To my knowledge, there was no pre-existing theory on the preponderance of palindromic subsequences in DNA.

Now, we could say that these researchers were proceeding from a theory that there's no easily discernable combinatorial macroscopic structure in DNA sequences, but I think that this would stretch the idea of 'theory' beyond common usage or even usefulness: There's no theorem or axioms of DNA sequencing being violated here.

In fact, I would expect that weirdness is a good sign of missing theory - a repeatable observation which is unsupported by existing theory. For perturbations in the orbit of Mercury, we see an explicit violation of Newtonian mechanics, but in many other cases (like CRISPR and palindromic subsequences) we have observations of structure in areas where theory simply does not yet exist.

(Apologies for the harsh first sentence; FWIW, your comment seemed belittling of the work of a large fraction of important scientists.)

[tdehnel]

i see what you mean, i suppose my concept of “explanation” could be closer to what you mean by theory