Crazy New Ideas⁠↗

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.

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.[1]

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.[2]

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.

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?

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.