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May 2021  
  
There's one kind of opinion I'd be very afraid to express publicly. If someone
I knew to be both a domain expert and a reasonable person proposed an idea
that sounded preposterous, I'd be very reluctant to say "That will never
work."  
  
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.   
  
Such ideas are not merely unsafe to dismiss, but disproportionately likely to
be interesting. When the average person proposes an implausible-sounding idea,
its implausibility is evidence of their incompetence. But when a reasonable
domain expert does it, the situation is reversed. There's something like an
efficient market here: on average the ideas that seem craziest will, if
correct, have the biggest effect. So if you can eliminate the theory that the
person proposing an implausible-sounding idea is incompetent, its
implausibility switches from evidence that it's boring to evidence that it's
exciting.   
  
Such ideas are not guaranteed to work. But they don't have to be. They just
have to be sufficiently good bets — to have sufficiently high expected value.
And I think on average they do. I think if you bet on the entire set of
implausible-sounding ideas proposed by reasonable domain experts, you'd end up
net ahead.  
  
The reason is that everyone is too conservative. The word "paradigm" is
overused, but this is a case where it's warranted. Everyone is too much in the
grip of the current paradigm. Even the people who have the new ideas
undervalue them initially. Which means that before they reach the stage of
proposing them publicly, they've already subjected them to an excessively
strict filter.   
  
The wise response to such an idea is not to make statements, but to ask
questions, because there's a real mystery here. Why has this smart and
reasonable person proposed an idea that seems so wrong? Are they mistaken, or
are you? One of you has to be. If you're the one who's mistaken, that would be
good to know, because it means there's a hole in your model of the world. But
even if they're mistaken, it should be interesting to learn why. A trap that
an expert falls into is one you have to worry about too.  
  
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?  
  
One reason they do it is envy. If you propose a radical new idea and it
succeeds, your reputation (and perhaps also your wealth) will increase
proportionally. Some people would be envious if that happened, and this
potential envy propagates back into a conviction that you must be wrong.  
  
Another reason people dismiss new ideas is that it's an easy way to seem
sophisticated. When a new idea first emerges, it usually seems pretty feeble.
It's a mere hatchling. Received wisdom is a full-grown eagle by comparison. So
it's easy to launch a devastating attack on a new idea, and anyone who does
will seem clever to those who don't understand this asymmetry.  
  
This phenomenon is exacerbated by the difference between how those working on
new ideas and those attacking them are rewarded. The rewards for working on
new ideas are weighted by the value of the outcome. So it's worth working on
something that only has a 10% chance of succeeding if it would make things
more than 10x better. Whereas the rewards for attacking new ideas are roughly
constant; such attacks seem roughly equally clever regardless of the target.  
  
People will also attack new ideas when they have a vested interest in the old
ones. It's not surprising, for example, that some of Darwin's harshest critics
were churchmen. People build whole careers on some ideas. When someone claims
they're false or obsolete, they feel threatened.  
  
The lowest form of dismissal is mere factionalism: to automatically dismiss
any idea associated with the opposing faction. The lowest form of all is to
dismiss an idea because of who proposed it.  
  
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. It doesn't just affect the way we think; it is the
Lego blocks we build thoughts out of. Popping out of the current paradigm is
something only a few people can do. And even they usually have to suppress
their intuitions at first, like a pilot flying through cloud who has to trust
his instruments over his sense of balance.   
  
Paradigms don't just define our present thinking. They also vacuum up the
trail of crumbs that led to them, making our standards for new ideas
impossibly high. The current paradigm seems so perfect to us, its offspring,
that we imagine it must have been accepted completely as soon as it was
discovered — that whatever the church thought of the heliocentric model,
astronomers must have been convinced as soon as Copernicus proposed it. Far,
in fact, from it. Copernicus published the heliocentric model in 1532, but it
wasn't till the mid seventeenth century that the balance of scientific opinion
shifted in its favor.   
  
Few understand how feeble new ideas look when they first appear. So if you
want to have new ideas yourself, one of the most valuable things you can do is
to learn what they look like when they're born. Read about how new ideas
happened, and try to get yourself into the heads of people at the time. How
did things look to them, when the new idea was only half-finished, and even
the person who had it was only half-convinced it was right?  
  
But you don't have to stop at history. You can observe big new ideas being
born all around you right now. Just look for a reasonable domain expert
proposing something that sounds wrong.  
  
If you're nice, as well as wise, you won't merely resist attacking such
people, but encourage them. Having new ideas is a lonely business. Only those
who've tried it know how lonely. These people need your help. And if you help
them, you'll probably learn something in the process.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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