What Doubt (or Acceptance) Says About You
In order to push a boundary, you have to risk exceeding that boundary. Otherwise, if you err on the side of 90% caution, you will 90% of the time fall too far on the inside and not push. To go beyond, you have to say what is viewed as the same outlandish and “obviously” false.
This doesn’t license one to disgorge any ill-conceived thought and hold it up as if it’s battle-tested, as one should be cognizant (and transparent!) when speculation for the sake of innovation is being used. However, simultaneously, eager critics shouldn’t alacritously (sometimes even happily) crush a burgeoning set of ideas because it falls outside the purview of known science. We need both. And we need to be honest about what flavor of idea they’re presenting.
On the side of the overzealous creators of the theories / hypotheses, don’t mistake conjecture / works-in-progress for fully formed ideas that only need the system to take them seriously and have no internal flaws. On the side of the maligners, don’t be so quick to annihilate new works, but instead contextualize them as tentative proposals without a team of validators behind them to sharpen them up.
Almost every idea now considered undeniable was once denied, vehemently, both rightly and unrightly so. It’s a mix of both. The proposers of new ideas see attacks as injustice, and the doubters see attacks as due process.
Sometimes, knowing how desperate you are to prove or disprove an idea tells you about your psychological disposition toward that idea (or toward the person(s) proposing that idea), which actually says more about you than about the idea.
I want to hear from you in the Substack comment section below. I read each and every response.
—Curt Jaimungal
PS: This is technically known as a trade-off between Type I and Type II error in scientific progress. You can minimize false positives (minimize “accepting a bad idea”) at the cost of more false negatives (you overlook a transformative one). Aggressive speculation flips this in the other direction. However, it’s more interesting (and informative) to look at how determined you are… how disturbed someone or their claims make you… as indicators of something more than mere rational dispassionate assessment of the theories / ideas being suggested.
Someone or something living “rent-free” in your mind only means it’s uncostly to them, not you.
My god, you speak straight to this little gal's heart. I want to throw the most simplistic of blankets over all of this - "there's room enough for us all" - we're just in the transitional phase. A vast new landscape of ideas is emerging, there's a place for conservatism and a place for radicalism and everthing in between, and I believe we'll find a better balance
I am not so naive as to believe this post is directly pointed at my attempt to get eyes on my humble "Forge", but it lands adjacent nonetheless. For my own perspective, I always attempt to see the perspective of each party in all situations to varying degrees of success.
For me, I worked my ass off on Forge, and have done all that I could to get any kind of feedback whatsoever. I have never been uncomfortable with being wrong in something, but I am supremely uncomfortable in being completely ignored, not even able to get a sense of what I understand well and what I do not.
My experience in being one of the "poorly tested crackpot idea" promoters is that both sides has valid points. For me, not being given even a simple "piss off ya blimey wanker" that might allow me to deepen some understanding lost on me currently is understandable, but it also results in my continuing to work on a framework that might be flawed from the floor up, and I'd be very late to notice.
On the other hand, many people that dream up an idea either half-ass the work, or simply demand to be heard. Both are things that I hope I do not participate in. However, the people that do practice these things ruin it for the ones who are respectful and just seeking to be pushed back against in order to further their understanding of the universe.
Which all results in people not being given the chance to grow in some ways. I am not an academic, so I'd take what I say with a grain of salt, because; what do I know?