“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.
Either, Sam altman jokes a bit too much if you are in the memer/redditor mindset you can find a good amount of his tweets to be some form of jokes not to be taken seriously.
But then again I have found people who over-psychoanalyse all his joke tweets to reaching conclusions like “he has severe trauma and salvation fantasy” so I don’t know where to draw the line in reading his tweets but then again since it’s twitter and elon musk is trying to be funny I generally lean with the former.
I think a good amount of joking culture was increased by E/acc memeing their way against AI safety crowd on twitter.