For those curious; Scott makes the point that it’s good to separate “idea generation” from “vetted ideas that aren’t wrong”; and that’s it’s valuable to have spaces where people can suggest ideas without needing them to be right. I agree a lot with this.
I have this model where in a healthy society, there can be contexts where people generate all sorts of false beliefs, but also sometimes generate gold (e.g. new ontologies that can vastly improve the collective map). If this context is generating a sufficient supply of gold, you DO NOT go in and punish their false beliefs. Instead, you quarantine them. You put up a bunch of signs that point to them and say e.g. “80% boring true beliefs 19% crap 1% gold,” then you have your rigorous pockets watch them, and try to learn how to efficiently distinguish between the gold and the crap, and maybe see if they can generate the gold without the crap. However sometimes they will fail and will just have to keep digging through the crap to find the gold.
Good find, I didn’t see that discussion before.
For those curious; Scott makes the point that it’s good to separate “idea generation” from “vetted ideas that aren’t wrong”; and that’s it’s valuable to have spaces where people can suggest ideas without needing them to be right. I agree a lot with this.