your misunderstanding of what the Overton window is supposed to be and how it’s supposed to work.

No, I did understand it. I rejected it. And I gave reasons. Which you never did address. When you tried to give historical examples, I told you why they didn’t apply, and you never answered my objections. You just retreated in “it’s still true and I don’t need to show that it ever actually happens”. Same with the dog-whistling. Or maybe you think it exists in some realm beyond truth or whatever.

Anyway, you think there can’t be anything wrong with the idea—it must be something wrong with me. I said I was in physics and you drew all kinds of conclusions about why I can’t understand what you’re talking about. This is exactly the sort of thing that ideas like the Overton Window lead to.

They collect data, but they are interested in theorising beyond the data in a way that science does not.

If their “theories” say things which cannot even in principle be tested in any way, then to that they extent they may be philosophy or religion, but they cannot be science. Feynman’s essay, “Cargo Cult Science”, may be worth looking up. What’s the point of data and regression analysis if you make hypotheses which can never be addressed by them?

It’s not so much about making a specific prediction that can then be falsified, as about providing the theory that best accomodates the data and enables useful patterns of explanation.

So how do you judge that it “best accomodates the data”? You have something that can be proven less wrong than something else, by appealing to data. Make up your mind. Do you need evidence for the things you say, or not?

Explanations without data abound throughout human history. Leibniz’s monads, for example. It’s the difference between philosophy and science. Decide which you want to be and stick to it.

You want a certain kind of data and a certain kind of analysis, but these theories are operating on the metalevel.

Meaning that you and only you get to decide whether they are any good, according to criteria you refuse to specify. But there’s something wrong with ME for not believing you know what you are talking about.

if they’re not verifiable, then they’re meaningless— and I will note that this same objection applies to the verification principle itself, and that’s why Logical Positivism is dead.

Having read Popper, and others such as David Hume, I have more sense than to make that argument. Popper’s argument was anything that cannot, in principle, be proven false is not science, which is the opposite of the “verification principle”.

So what we are left with is that you have a license to make statements which can only be evaluated according to criteria that only you get to specify, and which you can apparently change whenever you want to. Yet the rest of us are supposed to give respectful weight to these statements.