There are a whole class of ideas that one can pretty much reject out of hand because of their association with “nearby” ideas, such that “examine” means “reduce to previously solved equation”.
Give an idea “Steven” that, once examined proves to be hooey, someone can come along and say “This is Fred. It is just like Steven, except that we skip the reformulation step”.
If “Steven” is based on pure hooey then “Fred” has a significant likelihood of being complete hooey as well.
As a rough example, we are very, very sure that ptolemaic system is pretty much hooey. Very, very clever hooey, but still hooey. However in today’s world’ if some comes to us with the idea of a heliocentric system, well, it’s better* than the ptolemaic system but still hooey.
The wise man values his time and triages new ideas such that he has the time and energy to work on those that do not have the quality of “pure hooey”.
If you knew nothing about vaccines, but you knew that homeopathy was hooey, and someone told you about vaccines, you might consider them “nearby” to homeopathy — combating a disease by administering a tiny amount of a disease-causing agent — and thus dismiss them as hooey.
(Also, just so ya know — “hooey” is Russian for “cock”, pretty much.)
I don’t think this is a good heuristic. I would call it a fallacy; I don’t know if it has an official name, but in my head I’ve been calling it “syntactic similarity implies semantic similarity” (this being the fallacy). Ideas that sound similar don’t necessarily map to close points in ideaspace.
There’s been some LW discussion, e.g. Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale, about the specific application of this fallacy to ideas that sound similar to obviously absurd ideas.
“You can accept, reject, or examine and test any new idea that comes to you. The wise man chooses the third way.”—Tom Willhite
The wise man must have an awful lot of time on his hands, or else not come across many new ideas…
If you’re here, you’ve got time.
Yes, but probably also a lot more ideas.
ETA: (Wow that sounds very intentionally ‘yay us!’ applause light-y. Let here be defined as any of a number of internet sites. )
There are a whole class of ideas that one can pretty much reject out of hand because of their association with “nearby” ideas, such that “examine” means “reduce to previously solved equation”.
Give an idea “Steven” that, once examined proves to be hooey, someone can come along and say “This is Fred. It is just like Steven, except that we skip the reformulation step”.
If “Steven” is based on pure hooey then “Fred” has a significant likelihood of being complete hooey as well.
As a rough example, we are very, very sure that ptolemaic system is pretty much hooey. Very, very clever hooey, but still hooey. However in today’s world’ if some comes to us with the idea of a heliocentric system, well, it’s better* than the ptolemaic system but still hooey.
The wise man values his time and triages new ideas such that he has the time and energy to work on those that do not have the quality of “pure hooey”.
If you knew nothing about vaccines, but you knew that homeopathy was hooey, and someone told you about vaccines, you might consider them “nearby” to homeopathy — combating a disease by administering a tiny amount of a disease-causing agent — and thus dismiss them as hooey.
(Also, just so ya know — “hooey” is Russian for “cock”, pretty much.)
I don’t think this is a good heuristic. I would call it a fallacy; I don’t know if it has an official name, but in my head I’ve been calling it “syntactic similarity implies semantic similarity” (this being the fallacy). Ideas that sound similar don’t necessarily map to close points in ideaspace.
There’s been some LW discussion, e.g. Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale, about the specific application of this fallacy to ideas that sound similar to obviously absurd ideas.