That's not how I read the article's introduction. But under that interpretation, it would be meaningless for the aliens to try to understand the game in any more detail until they understood that kind of basic information.
That's the question the article is addressing. I think you're putting too much weight on the rough and sketchily defined example and missing the actual topic.
But the claim lives or dies by its example. The author's whole point is that he's discovered or imagined a situation in which doing science "badly" would be better than doing it "well". If his imaginary situation doesn't actually hold up then his whole argument is nonsense.
Analogies are simply tools to facilitate discussion, they can't themselves say anything definitive about the underlying claim. That's why it's useful to interpret them generously. If I came up with a flawed analogy for time dilation would that show that time dilation is nonsense?
I think a better approach on encountering a flawed analogy is to attempt to improve it, come up with a better one, or address the underlying claim directly, but saying "this analogy is unclear to me the end" isn't going to get you very far in life.
> Analogies are simply tools to facilitate discussion, they can't themselves say anything definitive about the underlying claim. That's why it's useful to interpret them generously. If I came up with a flawed analogy for time dilation would that show that time dilation is nonsense?
That's a bizarre attitude. Thought experiments were a major and important tool in developing the theory of relativity, precisely because they were taken seriously and done rigorously; contradictions weren't waved away as "just a tool to facilitate discussion".
> I think a better approach on encountering a flawed analogy is to attempt to improve it, come up with a better one, or address the underlying claim directly, but saying "this analogy is unclear to me the end" isn't going to get you very far in life.
On the contrary, being willing to call out nonsense has served me very well. There is no "underlying claim" here; the story is what's meant to carry the claim, and if the story doesn't work (and it doesn't) the whole thing falls apart (and it does). It's nonsense, top-to-bottom.
This isn't a formal physical theory, just a heuristic for evaluating lines of investigation. Richard Feynman gave a good explanation of the principle, which he said he found helpful in his work.
I mean, who is which color actually is a coin flip (it‘s random or as good as random and there are repeat games to make sure the first mover advantage doesn’t play a role), so the model seems to be correct in that regard. They modeled that part of reality correctly, just missed that that’s not what the game is about.
