Crazy New Ideas
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Highlights
- Anyone who has studied the history of ideas, and especially the history of science, knows that’s how big things start. Someone proposes an idea that sounds crazy, most people dismiss it, then it gradually takes over the world.
- Most implausible-sounding ideas are in fact bad and could be safely dismissed. But not when they’re proposed by reasonable domain experts. If the person proposing the idea is reasonable, then they know how implausible it sounds. And yet they’re proposing it anyway. That suggests they know something you don’t. And if they have deep domain expertise, that’s probably the source of it.
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This all seems pretty obvious. And yet there are clearly a lot of people who don’t share my fear of dismissing new ideas. Why do they do it? Why risk looking like a jerk now and a fool later, instead of just reserving judgement?
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But the main thing that leads reasonable people to dismiss new ideas is the same thing that holds people back from proposing them: the sheer pervasiveness of the current paradigm.