I’ve been exploring a concept for a wiki recently. The idea would be that people contribute fringe theories and present the best evidence for that theory, perhaps by contrasting it with mainstream interpretations of the data. Some examples of pages on the wiki could include,
CellBioGuy’s theory that the paleocene-eocene thermal maximum was caused by an industrial civilization of birds living in Antarctica.
Robin Hanson’s theory that a panspermia sibling to Earth hosts an ancient advanced alien civilization, whose world government experienced complex system rot in the process of developing an Earth-monitoring system, resulting in bizarre UFO encounters with them that we sometimes hear about on Earth.
The theory from various cryonicists, following Eric Drexler, that future nanotechnology will be sufficient to repair damage from vitrification and subsequent cryopreservation.
Robin Gardiner’s theory that the ship called “The Titanic” was in fact the ship Olympic, and was purposely sunk as part of an elaborate insurance scam.
Scott Alexander’s pseudo-religious theory that “There is an all-powerful, all-knowing logically necessary entity spawning all possible worlds and identical to the moral law.”
The purpose would not be to make a determination to whether each theory was true or false, but rather just present the evidence.
Naturally, I’m more interested in theories that (1) have some sort of technical argument favoring it (regardless of credibility), (2) aren’t merely moral or political theses in disguise, and (3) aren’t already covered in sufficient detail in other places (unlike the JFK conspiracy theory). Wikipedia is a terrible place to do this, given their rules disallowing original research. Of course, without such constraints, there is a large risk that a Fringe Theories Wiki would attract bad editors, so some strict editing rules would still probably be required on the site.
I’d be interested in such a wiki—I assume that there are a number of true beliefs which mainstream thought currently dismisses as false/weird/absurd, and I’d like to have one place where I can go and look for ideas where the mainstream may be wrong.
That said, jimrandomh is absolutely right that epistemic hygiene is going to be important. Another way to put it: we want stuff like CellBioGuy’s theory about the PETM global climate-change being caused by a previous civilisation, which is interesting and not physically impossible (although I’m not convinced by the argument), we don’t want physics crackpots telling us about perpetual motion machines.
Possible solution: link the wiki to LessWrong accounts and require a minimum LessWrong karma score in order to edit. Plus an invite option for people with interesting ideas who don’t meet the minimum karma score.
Interest in consumption isn’t really meaningful interest. The thing that matters is whether people are interested in contributing.
I would be more interested in people arranging adversarial collaborations on it. A big problem with raw presentations of fringe theories is that then you have to go through all of the arguments in detail. Having people on both sides of the issue who are well-acquainted with the evidence point out the most important core disagreements would be better.
Good idea!
Also, if you (or someone else) arranges some site collecting adversarial collaborations, then please contact me, as there’s some topics I can contribute with. Most notably, I’ve studied transsexuality a lot and am very familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of some controversial theories on the topic.
I probably would mostly still use LessWrong for the wiki for my writings.
But as a reader, I would probably read at least the summary of each article, and probably the full text of each potentially actionable-for-me articles.
But I’d say finding the writers is harder than finding the readers
Another idea would be to have a “fringe” tag on LessWrong. But, actually, I think I would choose a more connotationally neutral term, like “speculative”. Although, still, that’s a changing and subjective category, so not sure I would do that.
Another idea would be to just curate fringe articles (like you’ve done in the description of this question). Maybe ask a question “What are articles on interesting fringe ideas?” on LessWrong.
You could also have a yearly prize of like 100$ to submit articles on fringe ideas. This might be a more cost-effective way to achieve your goal.