Link: The Cook and the Chef: Musk's Secret Sauce - Wait But Why

On top of this you have Scott Alexander's "Life Hack Paradox", where those self-help habits that aren't hard become saturated, and simply become the cost of doing business (E.G Goal setting, Caffeine)

"Hard" is just a dormitive principle here. If we observe many people attempting a thing and few succeeding, we call it hard because that is what the word means. It is not an explanation of why most fail, only an observation that they do.

Einstein wasn't following the ideal to be open about him playing dice

We may be at cross purposes. I am not claiming that all scientists, always, have had functionally-open minds about everything they should have had open minds about; I am claiming that science has always espoused in principle the ideal that minds should be open, and that its espousal of this principle leads scientists to have more-open minds than they would have if that principle weren't around. (I will also claim that this is part of why science works as well as, in practice, it appears to work.)

However: I'm not sure Einstein's mind was so closed on this point. For sure, he had a strong opinion, but there's nothing wrong with that. I don't think the evidence available to Einstein was strong and clear enough that he should have decided that God plays dice after all. And he certainly engaged with the ideas of QM closely enough, e.g., to be one of the originators of the EPR "paradox", which depends on a careful analysis of what QM predicts in some situations.

It's not even clear that QM requires that God play dice. For instance, the Everett ("many worlds") interpretation, popular both here on LW and among physicists, is entirely deterministic. Observers see every possible series of outcomes, and it just turns out that "most" (in the relevant sense) series of outcomes look random.

On the continent the expedition was important.

Yup. In England, Newton was more or less just assumed to be right, whereas in continental Europe it was controversial how right he was. What (so far as I can see) there wasn't, anywhere, was a consensus that Newton was wrong, and that's what you appeared to be claiming there was.

The idea that Newton was simply accepted everywhere when he published his book is [...]

... Is one that I never stated nor implied. What I said is that it was very quickly recognized as first-rank science and as something that shouldn't simply be dismissed; are you claiming otherwise?

Aristoteles already had a firm idea of the earth being round

On the basis of well known repeated observations, which are in fact almost as good a source of information as controlled experiments (you need the experiments when the observations are misleading or insufficient). If Eratosthenes had done his measurement and found "r=infinity", do you think no one among the ancient Greeks would have considered the possibility that the earth is flat after all and the observations that suggest otherwise are illusions?

The dogma is that DNA gets transcribed into RNA and that RNA gets translated into proteins.

Here is what Francis Crick actually wrote:

The central dogma of molecular biology deals with the detailed residue-by-residue transfer of sequential information. It states that such information cannot be transferred back from protein to either protein or nucleic acid.

This doesn't say anything about reverse transcription from RNA to DNA being impossible.

It's true that sometimes the term "central dogma" was applied to something broader (claiming that DNA->RNA is also one-way) but I question whether that was ever treated as a closed question.

Take a look at this draft of Crick's paper from 1956 in which the Central Dogma is first named. Its very first diagram shows a dotted arrow from RNA back to DNA and says it's a possibility.

that makes the term "dogma" quite silly as a dogma is by definition closed.

Yeah, Crick said, more than once and in so many words, that "dogma" was a bad choice of term and that when he came up with the name he didn't really know quite what "dogma" means. (See, e.g., the last two quotations on the Wikipedia page about the Central Dogma.)

Today it's much more an open question than it was 20 years ago.

That may well be true; that is, current estimates for the probability distribution of what fraction of DNA is how useful are more "optimistic" than the estimates of 20 years ago. But you seem to be suggesting that that's indicative of some kind of problematic closed-mindedness among scientists, but to me all it suggests is that scientists aren't always immediately correct about how likely various possibilities are. Which is hardly a surprise and hardly indicates anything very bad.

Ah, that's the definition about which we were talking past each other. I certainly wouldn’t say that "Reiki might work, and until we test it we just don't know!" Perhaps it "works" somewhat through the placebo effect, but even in the unlikely event of a study showing some random placebo controlled health benefit, it would still be astronomically unlikely that ki was the mechanism. (That's not to say that no one will look at the real mechanism after the fact, and try to pick out some superficial similarity to the idea of "ki".)

But that’s beside the point. For hypotheses that are worth our time to test, we test them precisely because it’s an open question. Until we take the data, it remains an open question. (at least for certain definitions of “open question”) I think that’s the point the author was trying to get at with his infeasible historical example.