The whole article starts with a straw man about aliens making incorrect deductions based on a version of chess that doesn't correspond to actual chess. This is used to illustrate a very obvious point about local maxima that is in turn extrapolated in an entirely unsupported way to try to draw some conclusions about science and allow the author to make some strange and entirely unnecessarily edgy statements like "Logical positivism is kind of theoretical lobotomy"... "tweaking equations like an oblivious autist is Science" etc.

It's very disappointing to see this on HN