It absolutely can be debunked, in just about the same way as a scientific paper. That is, people can write other papers and books tearing it to shreds. What people don’t like is that books tend to reach a broader audience and so that audience may not read the subsequent follow-up work debunking it. I’m torn on this because bringing science to a broader audience is generally a praiseworthy thing. (I would not have entered a scientific career but for some great science books.)
There is a difference between vulgarisation of science, and making money out of sensational unproven claims pretending it’s science. This is my moral compass in that matter.
Scientific papers aren't for money, but they are for faculty positions and tenure. They suffer from much of the same grandstanding and outright fabrication as books do.
We're living in a post-truth era, and it's a problem we need to solve.
Where I'd like to land isn't: "Harvard astronomer gets bullied by peers" or "Harvard astronomer makes millions of dollars from half-baked theory" but "Harvard astronomer presents half-baked theory, we have a serious conversation about it, and we treat it as a potential hypothesis."
I like quirky hypotheses, and I've found I've learned a lot investigating them.
"I'm being bullied!" claims are what everyone immediately says when their ideas aren't picked up by everyone else and then they decide to step right around the peer review process for their field.
I think Loeb's meta-argument is that the peer-review process is tilted towards discounting arguments that include the possibility of extraterrestrial life. You can't really have discussions about how the peer-review process should work within the peer-review process. And moreover, since society at large is providing the resources for our science, they should have some visibility and input into how those resources are spent. I say this as a scientist who generally thinks (at least my field's) peer review works pretty well, so to be clear I'm not saying this to discount expert opinion.
You can feel free to disagree with Loeb's points, but I dislike the characterization that some part of this process is "invalid" (bullying) or that communicating with the public is similarly invalid because it "steps around peer review". Even your comments disagreeing with Loeb's approach are part of the process by which science and society make progress, I just happen to disagree with them in this case.
Except the only reason he wants to have a meta-argument is because otherwise the main argument has no credibility. The only reason it exists is because the ET argument is weak. He has to discuss the peer-review process and call it unfair, because otherwise he'd have the problem that the most qualified people to analyze his arguments are all saying the same thing: that it's unconvincing.
I've read some of the criticisms, and I'm not sure that I disagree with you. But let's be clear what "unconvincing" means: it means that there is a single object and hence very little data, and what data we have isn't impossible to explain with non-ET reasoning. There's definitely some weird and unexplained stuff here, and if the result of convincing society "hey there's an outside chance this is a non-natural object and we should make plans to look for and investigate future such objects" is that society ever-so-incrementally does that, we'll end up with more data than we'd have otherwise.
I think either giving the book away for free (thus removing any profit motive to pump it) or constantly updating the book to cite responses (thus addressing the tendency of book readers not to perform their own literature surveys) would both be fair.
