Like you said, people take the Standard Model seriously not because they like it (in fact, there is a level of embarrassment that physicists seem to have on this because the theory is so ugly), but because it has been experimentally verified within its regime. The fine-tuned constants have been experimentally derived.
So you're right, fine-tuning by itself is not necessarily a problem ... if it's experimentally tested. If you don't have experimental guidance, what else is left? At that point, you're a mathematician working in abstract worlds.
>The reason theoretical physicist pay attention to String Theory is because it's the only consistent theory of Quantum Gravity we know o
Another String Theory wart ... the theory fits more naturally in a universe with a negative cosmological constant - which is not our universe.
To be clear, I'm not making an argument that String Theory should be abandoned. I'm not physicist or a mathematician so I don't have the expertise to make that kind of judgement, although there are credible physicists who do make this argument. But at at least part of the popularity of String Theory entails an interesting socio-cultural phenomena that should be studied and analyzed by philosophers of science.
So you're right, fine-tuning by itself is not necessarily a problem ... if it's experimentally tested. If you don't have experimental guidance, what else is left? At that point, you're a mathematician working in abstract worlds.
>The reason theoretical physicist pay attention to String Theory is because it's the only consistent theory of Quantum Gravity we know o
Another String Theory wart ... the theory fits more naturally in a universe with a negative cosmological constant - which is not our universe.
To be clear, I'm not making an argument that String Theory should be abandoned. I'm not physicist or a mathematician so I don't have the expertise to make that kind of judgement, although there are credible physicists who do make this argument. But at at least part of the popularity of String Theory entails an interesting socio-cultural phenomena that should be studied and analyzed by philosophers of science.