I think there are (at least) two reasons popular ideas might be, on average, less wrong than unpopular ones. One possibility is that, while popular opinion isn’t great at coming to correct conclusions, it has at least some modicum of correlation with correctness. The second is that popular ideas benefit from a selection effect of having many eyeballs on the idea (especially over a period of time). One would hope that the scrutiny would dethrone at least somepopular ideas that are wrong, while the universe of weird ideas has received very little scrutiny.
“Popular being more likely to be true” is only a good heuristic under certain circumstances where there is some epistemically reliable group expertise and you are not familiar with their arguments.
Modesty epistemology if taken to extreme is self defeating, for example majority of Earth’s population is still theist, without the memetic immune system radical modesty epistemology can lead to people executing stupid popular believed ideas to their stupid logical conclusion. I also take issue with this idea along the lines of “what if Einstein never tried to challenge Newtonian mechanics because from the outside view it is more likely he is wrong given the amount of times crackpots have failed to move the rachet of science forward” . I also personally psychologically cannot function within the framework of “what if I am a crackpot against the general consensus”, after certain amount of hours spent studying the material I think one should be able to suggest potentially true new ideas.
“The most likely explanation for a weird new idea not being popular is that it’s wrong. ”
I agree with much of the rest of the comment, but this seems wrong—it seems more likely that these things just aren’t very correlated.
I think there are (at least) two reasons popular ideas might be, on average, less wrong than unpopular ones. One possibility is that, while popular opinion isn’t great at coming to correct conclusions, it has at least some modicum of correlation with correctness. The second is that popular ideas benefit from a selection effect of having many eyeballs on the idea (especially over a period of time). One would hope that the scrutiny would dethrone at least some popular ideas that are wrong, while the universe of weird ideas has received very little scrutiny.
“Popular being more likely to be true” is only a good heuristic under certain circumstances where there is some epistemically reliable group expertise and you are not familiar with their arguments.
Modesty epistemology if taken to extreme is self defeating, for example majority of Earth’s population is still theist, without the memetic immune system radical modesty epistemology can lead to people executing stupid popular believed ideas to their stupid logical conclusion. I also take issue with this idea along the lines of “what if Einstein never tried to challenge Newtonian mechanics because from the outside view it is more likely he is wrong given the amount of times crackpots have failed to move the rachet of science forward” . I also personally psychologically cannot function within the framework of “what if I am a crackpot against the general consensus”, after certain amount of hours spent studying the material I think one should be able to suggest potentially true new ideas.
‘New’ is probably a lot of the reason