Oh, so as part of your concern that it shouldn't be "improper" to think about, discuss, or enjoy Loeb's ideas, you suggest that the author of that video should "feel bad" about criticizing it? Nice, that's really cool of you. Loeb is allowed to enjoy the ideas of it being an alien spaceship about to Dark Forest us, but no one is allowed to push back against it.

There's no such thing as a "dispute" about what ideas are proper to discuss and enjoy. There might be a dispute concerning leveraging Harvard credentials and a Harvard domain name to distribute playtime fun math with no basis in observational reality, because the first thing every article written about this paper will now say is "Harvard researcher" [1]. That's academic misconduct. Go start a substack; I'm sure Joe Rogan would love to have you on a guest, and you might even get Netflix to give you a show [2]. Three beautiful avenues available to even the most crackpot individuals; way more profitable, too.

Loeb states "there has been to-date absolutely no sign from spectroscopic analysis of cometary activity on 3I/ATLAS." A week later: Look at that, its ejecting water and is almost definitely a comet [3].

If you walk into a doctor's appointment with a tummy ache, and the doctor says "well, its probably just food poisoning, but wouldn't it be a fun exercise to pretend its stomach cancer?"; be serious, do you believe that is an appropriate way for a doctor to behave? Why would anyone think that any professional in any field, most of all at a respected institution like Harvard, should be held to such low standards of behavior? Discussion and postulation is awesome and fine, but if you can't consider the implications of your authority and the choice of medium, you won't have either for very long.

[1] https://www.wionews.com/trending/when-will-alien-invasion-on...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Apocalypse

[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14916

It's weaponised language that pseudo academics hurl around at each other to try and denigrate the research outputs of other people. In the distant past it had a meaning which was that research was being published in small parts in order to get more academic kudos from it, but now literally all research is published this way based on the judgement of the submitter about what they can get accepted where.

In this case Loeb seems to have decided to delight in publishing out-there ideas, probably with a bit of a mission to open up debate and widen the range of acceptable topics in the field of astronomy for younger less established researchers. Basically, he's at a point in his career where he simply doesn't care what anyone things of him and his research and so he's spending credit so that if someone younger and more at risk than him comes up with a startling idea they will hopefully be more likely to share it.

I think it's a good thing, obviously a bunch of people really don't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing_tactics#Salami_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_publishable_unit