{"id":"b14d9acd-d568-499e-a39f-fcaa240acf42","arxiv_id":"2507.03565","paper_version":1,"verdict":"CONDITIONAL","confidence":"HIGH","novelty_score":6.0,"correctness_risk":"medium","formal_verification":"none","parameter_count":0,"one_line_summary":"In today's collider landscape, particle physics models that are ad hoc, narrow, and complex can be rationally pursued when they are radically novel or immediately testable.","lead":"A philosopher of physics argues that the current experimental situation in high-energy physics makes 'ugly' models worth pursuing. The paper examines four actively studied models and claims novelty and testability, not beauty or elegance, are what justify working on them.","discovery_kind":"extension","skeptic_critique":{"model":"deepseek-v4-flash","headline":"The central context-dependence claim is underdetermined by the four selected cases and the implicit step from actual to rational pursuit; a comparative baseline is needed.","rationale":"The strongest reading of the thesis is normative: in the current HEP context, models can be rationally pursued even when ugly, provided they are radically novel or immediately testable, and the experimental context strongly determines this weighting. The paper's evidence is (i) four case studies and (ii) the absence of new discoveries and near-term higher-energy colliders. Both are needed, but neither is sufficient. The cases are chosen because they are 'relatively popular' and because they exhibit the two target features; this makes them illustrations, not tests. The context description supports the weaker claim that testability is a reasonable consideration when one must use existing apparatus, and that novelty is reasonable after old approaches have failed. But these are general pursuit criteria, since ease of test and heuristic interest already appear in the literature the paper cites; their presence in the cases does not show that the experimental context changed their weighting. The missing comparative baseline is the load-bearing gap: if novelty and testability were already dominant before the Higgs discovery and the end of near-term collider prospects, the central thesis is false even if all four case descriptions are accurate. Likewise, the normative conclusion requires a premise that actual pursuit tracks rational pursuit; the paper gestures at division of labour but does not rule out alternatives such as sunk costs, funding pressure, and hype, as the 750 GeV episode cited in Sec. 3.2 illustrates. Because the paper openly concedes it offers only a 'pluralistic sketch' and that the context can change, the CONDITIONAL verdict already given is appropriate. The concern does not require rejection, but it does require a systematic empirical check before the context-dependence claim can be treated as established, so the verdict remains UNCHANGED relative to the reader's CONDITIONAL assessment.","tokens_in":17124,"tokens_out":5093,"duration_ms":64668,"concrete_test":"Using a stratified random sample of BSM model-building papers from arXiv hep-ph in two windows (e.g., 2008–2012 and 2018–2023), blind-code the papers' stated motivations for pursuing a model, scoring the presence and relative weight of novelty, testability, simplicity, scope, consistency, and analogy, with two independent coders and a reported inter-coder reliability score. If the post-Higgs/no-collider window does not show a significantly larger share of papers whose primary motivations are novelty or testability than the earlier window, or if the earlier window already shows the same weighting, the context-dependence thesis fails. As a complement, check whether papers proposing models that lack both novelty and testability are still actively pursued; if they are, the two criteria are not as determining as claimed.","verdict_should_be":"UNCHANGED","load_bearing_attack":"The paper's central normative claim is that in the current HEP context, ugly models are pursuitworthy because experimental context strongly determines pursuit and currently weights novelty and immediate testability heavily (Sec. 3.2 and Sec. 3). The load-bearing support is descriptive: four 'relatively popular' cases (Sec. 3.1) plus the absence of new discoveries and of a near-term higher-energy collider (Sec. 3). This support underdetermines the thesis in two connected ways. First, the cases are selected because they instantiate novelty and/or testability, so they illustrate the criteria but cannot show that those criteria, rather than sunk costs, fashion, citation incentives, or standard 'ease of test' and 'interest' considerations from the accounts the paper itself cites, are what make pursuit rational. There is no comparison with a pre-2012 context or with pursued models lacking both features. Second, the move from 'physicists pursue these models' to 'these models should be pursued by some' is not independently justified; the discipline-level division-of-labour defense is so permissive that almost any minimally consistent model with a small chance of payoff qualifies, weakening the claim that the experimental context has strong determining force. The paper's own concessions, that the account is a 'pluralistic sketch' and context-dependent, do not repair the missing baseline.","agreement_with_reader":"agree"},"referee_report":{"model":"deepseek-v4-flash","summary":"King argues that decisions about which models to pursue — as opposed to accept — are strongly shaped by the experimental context, and that contemporary high-energy physics (HEP) illustrates this dependence. Because no new physics has emerged at the LHC since the Higgs discovery and no higher-energy collider is expected soon, he claims that pursuit criteria in HEP have been reweighted toward two features: radical novelty of the class of solutions and immediate testability with existing apparatus. Models that exhibit at least one of these features can be rationally pursued even when they are 'ugly' by traditional standards: ad hoc, narrow in scope, complex, fine-tuned, or inconsistent with adjacent theories. Four case studies are presented — the NMSSM singlino-like neutralino, the relaxion, repulsive gravity, and models of lepton flavour universality violation — each said to be both ugly and pursuitworthy. The paper contrasts its context-sensitive, pluralistic picture with the fixed-criterion accounts of Laudan, Franklin, McKaughan, and Nyrup, and concludes that experimental context strongly determines pursuitworthiness.","tokens_in":17306,"tokens_out":20929,"duration_ms":224334,"significance":"If the thesis is accepted, the paper makes a genuine contribution to the pursuitworthiness literature: it identifies a concrete mechanism — the experimental situation — that reweights pursuit criteria, and it defends the rationality of pursuing models that fall short of traditional theoretical virtues. The paper's strengths are considerable. It is grounded in the current experimental literature (LHC exclusion limits, HL-LHC and FCC timelines, the ALPHA-g measurement, LHCb flavour results). It draws a useful distinction between radical novelty and predictive novelty. It engages fairly and seriously with recent work, including Nyrup (2015), Shaw (2022), Duerr and Fischer (2025), and Wolf and Duerr (2024). It is honest about its own limitations, repeatedly describing the account as a pluralistic sketch and conceding that a general account may be impossible. The four case studies are concrete and mostly well documented.","major_comments":[{"comment":"The four case studies instantiate precisely the two features the paper wants to promote — radical novelty and immediate testability — so they can illustrate those features but cannot by themselves establish that the experimental context, rather than other drivers of research activity (sunk costs, institutional inertia, citation incentives, or the mere elimination of alternatives), is what makes these models pursuitworthy. The paper says the cases are 'relatively popular models and are representative of the best and more pursuitworthy models particle physicists have to work on' (Sec. 3.2), but no comparative baseline is supplied: no pre-2012 context, no pursued models lacking both features, and no systematic ruling out of the alternative explanations just listed. Internal evidence even cuts against the author's reading in the first case, since the NMSSM is pursued in part because 'one only looks at this model because other models have been ruled out' (Sec. 3.1). Because the abstract's central claim is that experimental context 'strongly determines' pursuitworthiness, this underdetermination is load-bearing. The author should add a baseline comparison (for example, a short discussion of what was pursued before the LHC null results, or of a pursued model lacking both features) or narrow the thesis to what the cases actually support.","section":"Sec. 3.1-3.2 (case selection and the 'strongly determines' thesis)"},{"comment":"The normative conclusion that ugly models 'should be worked on by some' rests on a division-of-cognitive-labour argument: 'Many avenues of research are rational to pursue... a reasonable division of labour at the level of the discipline.' As stated, that argument is so permissive that it establishes at most that pursuing these models is not irrational; it does not establish that the experimental context has strong determining force on what is pursuitworthy. The sentence 'It is more of a possibility than a plausibility that counts' gestures at a cost-benefit asymmetry (small probability, very large payoff, low marginal cost), but the paper does not develop a criterion that could be applied or tested, and it does not explain why that asymmetry is now strong enough to outweigh the model's failures on the traditional criteria. Either a more substantive account of low-probability, high-payoff pursuit (for example, in terms of risk diversification or expected epistemic value) is needed, or the normative conclusion should be explicitly lowered to a permissibility claim.","section":"Sec. 3.2 (normative step from actual to rational pursuit)"},{"comment":"The abstract asserts that 'experimental context strongly determines pursuitworthiness,' and the conclusion says the context 'strongly determines in some cases what the dominant features of pursuitworthy models are.' These formulations are stronger than the body's own qualifications: the account is called a 'pluralistic sketch' (Sec. 3.2), the author is 'reluctant to offer anything more formal' (Sec. 3.2), and the paper agrees with Shaw that a general account of pursuitworthiness may not be possible (Sec. 1). The reader is left unsure whether the thesis is (a) that the experimental context determines the relative weights of pursuit criteria, or (b) that it determines which models are pursuitworthy. The evidence supports (a) more than (b). The paper should state its thesis at the level of generality that the supporting argument actually establishes, and the abstract and conclusion should match the qualifications the author already accepts in the body.","section":"Abstract and Sec. 3.2 (strength of the thesis versus stated limitations)"}],"minor_comments":[{"comment":"There is a duplicated word in 'would would always lose out' in the paragraph on Laudan; it should read 'would always lose out.'","section":"Sec. 2"},{"comment":"Two word-level errors appear: 'should be competed around 2028' should be 'should be completed around 2028,' and 'has provide constraints on dark photons' should be 'has provided constraints.'","section":"Sec. 3"},{"comment":"The claim that the relaxion 'is not even technically natural (in the sense of 't Hooft, 1980), since it breaks a gauge symmetry' is imprecise as written; the standard objections concern the explicit breaking of the axion shift symmetry and the resulting axion quality problem, so the sentence should be rephrased and supported by a specific citation to that critique.","section":"Sec. 3.1, relaxion"},{"comment":"The statement that 'the MSSM parameter space combined with DM relic abundance and direct detection data from LUX and XENON1T, is effectively excluded' is too strong, since viable MSSM neutralino regions (for example the s-channel h and A funnels and stau coannihilation) survive these constraints; the argument only needs 'highly constrained,' which is also what the next sentence, with its 'tiny, but not excluded' parameter space, actually uses.","section":"Sec. 3.1, neutralino dark matter"},{"comment":"The claim that the LFU models had a 'rate of problem solving effectively 0' is hyperbolic, since those models did accommodate the R_K anomaly within a narrow domain, at the price of tensions elsewhere; a phrase like 'no net problem-solving progress' would be more accurate.","section":"Sec. 3.2"},{"comment":"The timeline claim that the FCC feasibility study 'will be completed in 2025' can be updated: the study was delivered in March 2025, and a sentence on the subsequent CERN strategy discussion would make the description of the current experimental context more precise.","section":"Sec. 3"},{"comment":"The sentence 'These models I presented are not cherry-picked as the ugliest models on the market, since those I probably would not have heard of' is informal and the aside should be removed or rephrased; the representativeness claim that follows needs at least a one-sentence specification of the population the four cases are meant to sample (for instance, BSM models with active LHC and low-energy phenomenology).","section":"Sec. 3.2"}],"recommendation":"major_revision","confidential_remarks":"The paper is a good fit for a philosophy-of-science journal with an interest in contemporary physics. The self-citations (Bechtle et al. 2022; Martens and King 2023) are used appropriately as background context rather than as evidence for the central claim. My principal concern is the mismatch between the strong thesis in the abstract and the illustrative rather than probative case studies; I do not see a correctness error that would require rejection, but I do think the author needs either to supply a comparative baseline or to narrow the thesis, which is why I recommend major revision."},"author_rebuttal":null,"desk_editor":{"model":"deepseek-v4-flash","letter":"Jamie —\n\nQuick take: this is a well-written philosophy-of-science essay that does something useful. It gives a concrete, current example of pursuitworthiness being context-dependent, and it argues that in today's LHC-era, two features — radical novelty and immediate testability — can each be sufficient reasons to pursue a model even when it is ad hoc, narrow, fine-tuned, or inconsistent with adjacent theories. The paper is honest about its own limits, and the four case studies (NMSSM neutralino, relaxion, repulsive gravity, LFU violation) are described carefully enough to carry the descriptive weight.\n\nWhat's genuinely new is the packaging: the claim that these two desiderata are independently sufficient in the present experimental context, and that this follows from the experimental situation (no new physics since the Higgs, no near-term higher-energy collider). That's a stronger and more specific claim than the general 'pursuit is context-dependent' line you get from Laudan or Franklin. The paper also does a fair job of discussing extant accounts (Nyrup, Franklin, McKaughan) and showing why they don't capture the weighting shift.\n\nThe soft spots are real but not fatal. The biggest one is the inference from 'these models are actually pursued and have these features' to 'these models are rationally pursuitworthy'. The paper leans on a division-of-labour argument — at the discipline level, it's rational for some to work on easy-to-test or novel models even if implausible — and that argument is plausible, but it's permissive enough that almost any minimally consistent model with a small chance of payoff would qualify. That weakens the claim that the experimental context *strongly* determines pursuit; it shows it *shapes* it. Relatedly, the four cases are selected because they instantiate novelty and/or testability, so they illustrate the criteria but can't show those criteria are what make pursuit rational rather than sunk costs or fashion. A comparative case — a model that was pursued despite lacking both features, or the same models in a pre-2012 context — would have helped. The paper acknowledges its own pluralism and context-dependence, so the author is not overreaching; it's more that the normative conclusion is somewhat underdetermined by the evidence.\n\nThe citation pattern looks fine, including the author's own previous work, which is used as supporting context. No equations to check, no data to reanalyze — it's a conceptual argument, and it's internally coherent.\n\nWho's it for? Philosophers of science working on theory choice or pursuitworthiness, and physicists interested in how model-building is rationally structured. It deserves a serious referee and will likely get a revise-and-resubmit: the central thesis holds up, but the sufficiency claim needs more argument or a more explicit scope restriction.\n\nRecommendation: send it out.","headline":"A clear, honest case that the current HEP context can make novelty and testability sufficient for rational pursuit, though the four case studies illustrate the claim more than they prove its generality.","tokens_in":17845,"tokens_out":2732,"would_cite":true,"duration_ms":31369,"reading_group":"yes","serious_thinker":"yes","would_accept_peer_review":true},"rs_alignment":null,"lean_confirmation":null,"pith_extraction":{"msc":[],"pacs":[],"model":"deepseek-v4-flash","headline":"Experimental context strongly determines which models deserve pursuit: in today's particle physics, ugly models are rationally pursued when they are radically novel or immediately testable with existing apparatus.","keywords":["pursuitworthiness","philosophy of experiment","theoretical virtues","values in science","philosophy of particle physics","radical novelty","testability","ugly models"],"falsifier":"A systematic check of the central claim would be to catalogue the beyond-Standard-Model model-building papers published between 2015 and 2025 and test whether the models actually pursued are predominantly of the two kinds the paper identifies: radically novel classes of solutions, or models making definite predictions testable with existing LHC, low-energy, or table-top apparatus. If the majority of pursued models are ordinary extensions of older frameworks with neither feature, the descriptive basis of the argument collapses. A second, temporal check: if a clear new-physics signal appeared at the LHC and publication patterns did not reweight away from novel-but-implausible and cheaply-testable models toward more plausible, beautiful ones, the context-dependence thesis would be falsified.","tokens_in":16870,"feed_emoji":"⚛️","tokens_out":19604,"duration_ms":193920,"temperature":0.7,"pith_summary":"Scientists choose not only which theories to accept but also which models to work on before the evidence is in, and this paper argues that the choice of what to pursue is shaped decisively by the experimental situation. In contemporary high-energy physics, where no new particles have been found since the Higgs boson was discovered in 2012 and no higher-energy collider will arrive for decades, the traditional theoretical virtues have lost their grip: the surviving new-physics models are ad hoc, narrow in scope, complex, fine-tuned, and often inconsistent with neighbouring theories. The paper claims that these ugly models are nonetheless worth pursuing when they have at least one of two features: a radically novel class of solutions, or immediate testability with existing or cheaply modified apparatus. Four case studies—the next-to-minimal supersymmetric neutralino, the relaxion, repulsive gravity, and lepton-flavour-universality-violating models—show that novelty and testability can outweigh plausibility, elegance, and even consistency. If the paper is right, the standards that make a model worth working on are reset by the instruments and discoveries available at the time, so rational pursuit is a moving target rather than a fixed list of virtues.","feed_headline":"Ugly physics models are rational to chase right now","feed_subtitle":"With no new particles and no new collider, pursuit shifts to radical novelty and cheap tests, the paper argues.","key_machinery":"The load-bearing machinery is a distinction between acceptance and pursuit: accepting a theory demands strong epistemic justification, while pursuing a model is a short-timescale decision about where to allocate work before the evidence is conclusive, so the two contexts legitimately use different criteria. The paper then installs its own positive machinery: a pair of context-sensitive desiderata distilled from the four cases. Radical novelty is a new class of solutions that reorients problem-solving tools and insights, deliberately distinguished from predictive novelty. Immediate testability is the property of making clear predictions at reachable energies, testable with existing apparatus or small, cheap modifications, building on the 'ease of test' criterion familiar from the pursuit literature. These two are presented as independently sufficient reasons for pursuit rather than goods to be maximized, and the paper argues that their weight relative to the standard list of pursuit criteria—interest, informativeness, plausibility, analogy to past successes, and problem-solving power—is set by the experimental situation. The machinery does the work of explaining how models that score poorly on all the traditional virtues can still be rational targets of work, and why the same model type can lose its pursuitworthiness when the experimental context changes.","core_discovery":"The paper's central claim is that experimental context strongly determines pursuitworthiness, and it identifies the conditions under which experiment encourages the pursuit of ugly models: the absence of new physics discoveries combined with the absence of a new higher-energy experiment. That context makes two desiderata dominant in high-energy physics today. Radical novelty means a genuinely new class of theoretical solutions that lets physicists approach problems with new tools and insights, rather than merely new predictions from an old framework. Immediate testability means clear predictions at achievable energies and sensitivities, testable with existing facilities or small, cost-effective amendments. Because pursuit is a decision about where to allocate work before decisive evidence exists, these two desiderata can outweigh the traditional virtues and can even override minimal criteria such as consistency and empirical adequacy. The four case studies are presented as representative: the singlino-like neutralino of the next-to-minimal supersymmetric model is ad hoc and confined to a tiny surviving region of parameter space but can be probed with existing LHC data; the relaxion is a radically new solution to the Higgs naturalness problem that is not technically natural and needs roughly $10^{33}$ e-foldings; repulsive gravity is baroque, proposes multiple dark copies of the known matter content, and conflicts with general relativity but was cheaply and decisively testable with antiprotons already produced as a by-product of LHC operations; and lepton-flavour-universality-violating models were narrow in scope and heavily fine-tuned but made direct contact with anomalous LHCb data. The normative conclusion operates at the level of the discipline: it is rational for some physicists to pursue such models as part of a division of cognitive labour, even though no individual physicist is obliged to pursue any particular one.","pith_inferences":["The account predicts behaviour the paper does not test: in any research field with the same two conditions—no new discoveries and no new experimental frontier—the mix of pursued models should shift toward radically novel and cheaply testable hypotheses; stalled searches such as proton decay or fifth-force experiments would be natural places to look for the same pattern.","The context-dependence thesis could be checked against the record of the last decade: if the 2015 diphoton excess at $750$ GeV drew pursuit effort proportional to its statistical weakness rather than its cheap testability, that would actually strengthen the paper's account, since the response would show that tantalizing data and easy tests, not plausibility, drive pursuit.","The paper declines to formalize pursuit, but its two desiderata map naturally onto option value: testability buys information even on the pessimistic branch, while radical novelty supplies uncorrelated upside; a portfolio model of a scientific community allocating effort could make the 'division of cognitive labour' claim precise and testable."],"forward_implications":["A model can be rationally pursued even when it is ad hoc, narrow in scope, complex, fine-tuned, or inconsistent with established theories, provided it is either radically novel or immediately testable with existing or cheaply modified apparatus.","Plausibility can play very little role in pursuit when testability is high: repulsive gravity was pursued and tested with the expectation of a negative result, because the antiprotons were already available and the test was decisive—it ruled the hypothesis out at a probability below $10^{-15}$.","The pursuit criteria are reweighted when the experimental context changes: a new discovery or the eventual arrival of a higher-energy collider would shift the balance back toward more beautiful, plausible models, and today's ugly models could lose their pursuitworthiness.","Rational pursuit operates at the scale of the discipline rather than the individual: the open-ended situation makes a division of cognitive labour rational, with some physicists working on untestable beautiful theories and others on ugly but testable or novel models.","The later disappearance of the lepton-flavour-universality anomaly does not retroactively show that pursuing those models was irrational, because narrow, fine-tuned models can still be worth working on when they make direct, cheap contact with existing data."],"supporting_citations":[{"why":"Supplies the distinction between the context of acceptance and the context of pursuit on which the entire argument rests.","marker":"(Laudan, 1977)"},{"why":"Provides the minimal-criteria versus desiderata distinction used to argue that even minimal epistemic criteria are not required for pursuit.","marker":"(Douglas, 2009)"},{"why":"Contributes the notion of ease of test with existing or modestly modified apparatus that the paper's immediate-testability desideratum builds on.","marker":"(Franklin, 1993)"},{"why":"Documents the European strategy assessment that no new physics has been found and that theory effort has shifted toward models addressing single unexplained facts, grounding the description of the current experimental context.","marker":"(Ellis, 2019)"},{"why":"The original relaxion proposal, the paradigm case of radical novelty making a non-technically-natural, cosmologically strained model pursuitworthy.","marker":"(Graham et al., 2015)"},{"why":"The antimatter-gravity measurement that ruled out repulsive gravity at a probability below $10^{-15}$, grounding the claim that cheap decisive testability can outweigh low plausibility.","marker":"(Anderson et al., 2023)"},{"why":"The $3\\sigma$ LHCb hint of lepton flavour universality violation that made narrow, fine-tuned LFU models directly testable and hence pursuitworthy.","marker":"(Aaij et al., 2021)"},{"why":"The review of the next-to-minimal supersymmetric standard model used for the neutralino dark matter case study, an ad hoc model pursued in a tiny surviving region of parameter space.","marker":"(Ellwanger et al., 2010)"},{"why":"ATLAS exclusion limits on chargino and neutralino production that establish how heavily constrained the accessible parameter space has become.","marker":"(Aad et al., 2023)"},{"why":"The ATLAS/CMS dark matter benchmark models, cited to show that neutralino and other dark matter searches are high-priority analyses with existing experiments.","marker":"(Abercrombie et al., 2020)"}],"fun_headline_variants":["No new particles, no new collider: ugly models become rational","Radical novelty or easy tests: why physicists now chase ugly models","Ugly models gain ground when experiments stall","Physics pursuit shifts to ugly models amid experimental drought","When experiment runs dry, ugly models take over"],"cache_read_input_tokens":3200,"weakest_assumption_plain":"The argument's load-bearing premise is factual, set out in Section 3: that particle physics today is genuinely in the stalled state described, with no new physics found since the Higgs and no higher-energy collider for decades, and that the four case studies of Sections 3.1 and 3.2 fairly represent what physicists actually pursue; if the visible research programmes reflect sunk costs, fashion, or career incentives rather than rational division of labour, the inference from what is pursued to what should be pursued collapses.","fun_headline_variants_meta":{"raw":{"variants":["No new particles, no new collider: ugly models become rational","Radical novelty or easy tests: why physicists now chase ugly models","Ugly models gain ground when experiments stall","Physics pursuit shifts to ugly models amid experimental drought","When experiment runs dry, ugly models take over"]},"model":"deepseek-v4-flash","effort":"low","cost_usd":0.000565,"raw_usage":{"total_tokens":2766,"prompt_tokens":1122,"completion_tokens":1644,"prompt_tokens_details":{"cached_tokens":384},"prompt_cache_hit_tokens":384,"prompt_cache_miss_tokens":738,"completion_tokens_details":{"reasoning_tokens":1566}},"tokens_in":738,"tokens_out":1644,"duration_ms":12668,"temperature":1.0,"reasoning_tokens":1566,"cache_read_input_tokens":384,"cache_creation_input_tokens":0},"cache_creation_input_tokens":0},"created_at":"2026-08-06T20:06:44.809881+00:00","model_set":{"reader":"deepseek-v4-flash"},"falsifier":"A systematic check of the central claim would be to catalogue the beyond-Standard-Model model-building papers published between 2015 and 2025 and test whether the models actually pursued are predominantly of the two kinds the paper identifies: radically novel classes of solutions, or models making definite predictions testable with existing LHC, low-energy, or table-top apparatus. If the majority of pursued models are ordinary extensions of older frameworks with neither feature, the descriptive basis of the argument collapses. A second, temporal check: if a clear new-physics signal appeared at the LHC and publication patterns did not reweight away from novel-but-implausible and cheaply-testable models toward more plausible, beautiful ones, the context-dependence thesis would be falsified.","supporting_citations":[{"cited_title":null,"cited_arxiv_id":null,"evidence_quote":"Supplies the distinction between the context of acceptance and the context of pursuit on which the entire argument rests."},{"cited_title":null,"cited_arxiv_id":null,"evidence_quote":"Provides the minimal-criteria versus desiderata distinction used to argue that even minimal epistemic criteria are not required for pursuit."},{"cited_title":null,"cited_arxiv_id":null,"evidence_quote":"Contributes the notion of ease of test with existing or modestly modified apparatus that the paper's immediate-testability desideratum builds on."},{"cited_title":null,"cited_arxiv_id":null,"evidence_quote":"Documents the European strategy assessment that no new physics has been found and that theory effort has shifted toward models addressing single unexplained facts, grounding the description of the current experimental context."},{"cited_title":"W., Kaplan, D","cited_arxiv_id":null,"evidence_quote":"The original relaxion proposal, the paradigm case of radical novelty making a non-technically-natural, cosmologically strained model pursuitworthy."},{"cited_title":null,"cited_arxiv_id":null,"evidence_quote":"The antimatter-gravity measurement that ruled out repulsive gravity at a probability below $10^{-15}$, grounding the claim that cheap decisive testability can outweigh low plausibility."},{"cited_title":null,"cited_arxiv_id":null,"evidence_quote":"The $3\\sigma$ LHCb hint of lepton flavour universality violation that made narrow, fine-tuned LFU models directly testable and hence pursuitworthy."},{"cited_title":null,"cited_arxiv_id":null,"evidence_quote":"The review of the next-to-minimal supersymmetric standard model used for the neutralino dark matter case study, an ad hoc model pursued in a tiny surviving region of parameter space."},{"cited_title":null,"cited_arxiv_id":null,"evidence_quote":"ATLAS exclusion limits on chargino and neutralino production that establish how heavily constrained the accessible parameter space has become."},{"cited_title":null,"cited_arxiv_id":null,"evidence_quote":"The ATLAS/CMS dark matter benchmark models, cited to show that neutralino and other dark matter searches are high-priority analyses with existing experiments."}],"review_version":1}