Even the highly original thinkers we praise in the arts and sciences—those who succeeded in opening up new territory—were, in almost all the rest of their views, conventional. When they applied their original thinking outside of the domain we remember them for, they almost always failed, and we usually do them the honour of brushing those views aside (you need to know a fair bit about Isaac Newton to know he spent almost as much time on Biblical prophecy as he did on mathematics and physics, or about Linus Pauling’s ideas about cancer treatments).
Even if Linus Pauling’s ideas about cancer treatments were wrong, they were still ‘original thinking’. A lot of thinking who have highly valuable original ideas are also original in other areas of their lives whether or not those ideas are valuable.
I’m not sure that there are a lot of people who can do valuable original thinking without doing some original thinking that isn’t valuable as well.
Even if Linus Pauling’s ideas about cancer treatments were wrong, they were still ‘original thinking’. A lot of thinking who have highly valuable original ideas are also original in other areas of their lives whether or not those ideas are valuable.
I’m not sure that there are a lot of people who can do valuable original thinking without doing some original thinking that isn’t valuable as well.
Definitely. Scott Alexander writes eloquently about this in “Rule Thinkers In, Not Out” (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u8GMcpEN9Z6aQiCvp/rule-thinkers-in-not-out) - in exchange for accuracy by a thinker in some domain, you have to put up with a lot of variance, bias, or both.