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Crazy New Ideas
May 2021
There's one kind of opinion I'd be very afraid to express
publicly. If someone I knew to be both a domain expert and a
reasonable person proposed an idea that sounded preposterous,
I'd be very reluctant to say "That will never work."
Anyone who has studied the history of ideas, and especially
the history of science, knows that's how big things start.
Someone proposes an idea that sounds crazy, most people
dismiss it, then it gradually takes over the world.
Most implausible-sounding ideas are in fact bad and could be
safely dismissed. But not when they're proposed by reasonable
domain experts. If the person proposing the idea is
reasonable, then they know how implausible it sounds. And yet
they're proposing it anyway. That suggests they know something
you don't. And if they have deep domain expertise, that's
probably the source of it.
Such ideas are not merely unsafe to dismiss, but
disproportionately likely to be interesting. When the average
person proposes an implausible-sounding idea, its
implausibility is evidence of their incompetence. But when a
reasonable domain expert does it, the situation is reversed.
There's something like an efficient market here: on average
the ideas that seem craziest will, if correct, have the
biggest effect. So if you can eliminate the theory that the
person proposing an implausible-sounding idea is incompetent,
its implausibility switches from evidence that it's boring to
evidence that it's exciting. [1]
Such ideas are not guaranteed to work. But they don't have to
be. They just have to be sufficiently good bets -- to have
sufficiently high expected value. And I think on average they
do. I think if you bet on the entire set of
implausible-sounding ideas proposed by reasonable domain
experts, you'd end up net ahead.
The reason is that everyone is too conservative. The word
"paradigm" is overused, but this is a case where it's
warranted. Everyone is too much in the grip of the current
paradigm. Even the people who have the new ideas undervalue
them initially. Which means that before they reach the stage
of proposing them publicly, they've already subjected them to
an excessively strict filter. [2]
The wise response to such an idea is not to make statements,
but to ask questions, because there's a real mystery here. Why
has this smart and reasonable person proposed an idea that
seems so wrong? Are they mistaken, or are you? One of you has
to be. If you're the one who's mistaken, that would be good to
know, because it means there's a hole in your model of the
world. But even if they're mistaken, it should be interesting
to learn why. A trap that an expert falls into is one you have
to worry about too.
This all seems pretty obvious. And yet there are clearly a lot
of people who don't share my fear of dismissing new ideas. Why
do they do it? Why risk looking like a jerk now and a fool
later, instead of just reserving judgement?
One reason they do it is envy. If you propose a radical new
idea and it succeeds, your reputation (and perhaps also your
wealth) will increase proportionally. Some people would be
envious if that happened, and this potential envy propagates
back into a conviction that you must be wrong.
Another reason people dismiss new ideas is that it's an easy
way to seem sophisticated. When a new idea first emerges, it
usually seems pretty feeble. It's a mere hatchling. Received
wisdom is a full-grown eagle by comparison. So it's easy to
launch a devastating attack on a new idea, and anyone who does
will seem clever to those who don't understand this asymmetry.
This phenonemon is exacerbated by the difference between how
those working on new ideas and those attacking them are
rewarded. The rewards for working on new ideas are weighted by
the value of the outcome. So it's worth working on something
that only has a 10% chance of succeeding if it would make
things more than 10x better. Whereas the rewards for attacking
new ideas are roughly constant; such attacks seem roughly
equally clever regardless of the target.
People will also attack new ideas when they have a vested
interest in the old ones. It's not surprising, for example,
that some of Darwin's harshest critics were churchmen. People
build whole careers on some ideas. When someone claims they're
false or obsolete, they feel threatened.
The lowest form of dismissal is mere factionalism: to
automatically dismiss any idea associated with the opposing
faction. The lowest form of all is to dismiss an idea because
of who proposed it.
But the main thing that leads reasonable people to dismiss new
ideas is the same thing that holds people back from proposing
them: the sheer pervasiveness of the current paradigm. It
doesn't just affect the way we think; it is the Lego blocks we
build thoughts out of. Popping out of the current paradigm is
something only a few people can do. And even they usually have
to suppress their intuitions at first, like a pilot flying
through cloud who has to trust his instruments over his sense
of balance. [3]
Paradigms don't just define our present thinking. They also
vacuum up the trail of crumbs that led to them, making our
standards for new ideas impossibly high. The current paradigm
seems so perfect to us, its offspring, that we imagine it must
have been accepted completely as soon as it was discovered.
Whatever the church thought of the heliocentric model,
astronomers must have been convinced as soon as Copernicus
proposed it. Far, in fact, from it. Copernicus published the
heliocentric model in 1532, but it wasn't till the mid
seventeenth century that the balance of scientific opinion
shifted in its favor. [4]
Few understand how feeble new ideas look when they first
appear. So if you want to have new ideas yourself, one of the
most valuable things you can do is to learn what they look
like when they're born. Read about how new ideas happened, and
try to get yourself into the heads of people at the time. How
did things look to them, when the new idea was only
half-finished, and even the person who had it was only
half-convinced it was right?
But you don't have to stop at history. You can observe big new
ideas being born all around you right now. Just look for a
reasonable domain expert proposing something that sounds
wrong.
If you're nice, as well as wise, you won't merely resist
attacking such people, but encourage them. Having new ideas is
a lonely business. Only those who've tried it know how lonely.
These people need your help. And if you help them, you'll
probably learn something in the process.
Notes
[1] I'm not claiming this principle extends much beyond math,
engineering, and the hard sciences. In politics, for example,
crazy-sounding ideas generally are as bad as they sound.
Though arguably this is not an exception, because the people
who propose them are not in fact domain experts; politicians
are domain experts in political tactics, like how to get
elected and how to get legislation passed, but not in the
world that policy acts upon. Perhaps no one could be.
[2] This sense of "paradigm" was defined by Thomas Kuhn in his
Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but I also recommend his
Copernican Revolution, where you can see him at work
developing the idea.
[3] This is one reason people with a touch of Asperger's may
have an advantage in discovering new ideas. They're always
flying on instruments.
[4] Hall, Rupert. From Galileo to Newton. Collins, 1963. This
book is particularly good at getting into contemporaries'
heads.
Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Suhail Doshi,
Daniel Gackle, and Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of
this.
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