wacky and strange ideas being explored by highly educated contrarians
I mean, we can start with this list here. I guarantee you there are highly educated people who buy into pretty much every conspiracy on that list. It’s not at all hard to find, for example, engineers who think 9/11 was an inside job. Ted kascynski was a mathematics professor, etc, you get the point.
The list of possible wrong beliefs outnumbers the list of possible correct beliefs by many orders of magnitude. That stands for status quo opinions as well, but they have the advantage of withstanding challenges and holding for a longer period of time. That’s the reason that if someone claims they’ve come up with a free energy machine, it’s okay to dismiss them, unless you’re feeling really bored that day.
Now, EA is exploring status quo ideas that are much less tested and firm that physics, so finding holes is much easier and worthwhile, and so I agree that strange ideas are worth considering. But most of them are still gonna be wrong, because they are untested.
I mean, we can start with this list here. I guarantee you there are highly educated people who buy into pretty much every conspiracy on that list. It’s not at all hard to find, for example, engineers who think 9/11 was an inside job. Ted kascynski was a mathematics professor, etc, you get the point.
The list of possible wrong beliefs outnumbers the list of possible correct beliefs by many orders of magnitude. That stands for status quo opinions as well, but they have the advantage of withstanding challenges and holding for a longer period of time. That’s the reason that if someone claims they’ve come up with a free energy machine, it’s okay to dismiss them, unless you’re feeling really bored that day.
Now, EA is exploring status quo ideas that are much less tested and firm that physics, so finding holes is much easier and worthwhile, and so I agree that strange ideas are worth considering. But most of them are still gonna be wrong, because they are untested.