I don’t see this as a valid criticism, if it intended to be a dismissal. The addendum “beware this temptation” is worth highlighting. While this is a point worth making, the response “but someone would have noticed” is shorthand for “if your point was correct, others would likely believe it as well, and I do not see a subset of individuals who also are pointing this out.”
Let’s say there are ideas that are internally inconsistent or rational or good (and are thus not propounded) and ideas that are internally consistent or irrational or bad. Each idea comes as a draw from a bin of ideas, with some proportion that are good and some that are bad.
Further, each person has an imperfect signal on whether or not an idea is good or not. Finally, we only see ideas that people believe are good, setting the stage for sample selection.
Therefore, when someone is propounding an idea, the fact that you have not heard of it before makes it more likely to have been censored—that is, more likely to have been judged a bad idea internally and thus never suggested. I suggest as a bayesian update that, given you have never heard the idea before, it is more likely to be internally inconsistent/irrational/bad than if you hear it constantly, the idea having passed many people’s internal consistency checks.
Yes—this is exactly the point I was about to make. Another way of putting it is that an argument from authority is not going to cut mustard in a dialog (i.e. in a scientific paper, you will be laughed at if your evidence for a theory is another scientist’s say so) but as a personal heuristic it can work extremely well. While people sometimes “don’t notice” the 900 pound gorilla in the room (the Catholic sex abuse scandal being a nice example), 99% of the things that I hear this argument used for turn out to be total tosh (e.g. Santill’s Roswell Alien Autopsy film, Rhine’s ESP experiments). As Feynman probably didn’t say, “Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out”.
I don’t see this as a valid criticism, if it intended to be a dismissal. The addendum “beware this temptation” is worth highlighting. While this is a point worth making, the response “but someone would have noticed” is shorthand for “if your point was correct, others would likely believe it as well, and I do not see a subset of individuals who also are pointing this out.”
Let’s say there are ideas that are internally inconsistent or rational or good (and are thus not propounded) and ideas that are internally consistent or irrational or bad. Each idea comes as a draw from a bin of ideas, with some proportion that are good and some that are bad.
Further, each person has an imperfect signal on whether or not an idea is good or not. Finally, we only see ideas that people believe are good, setting the stage for sample selection.
Therefore, when someone is propounding an idea, the fact that you have not heard of it before makes it more likely to have been censored—that is, more likely to have been judged a bad idea internally and thus never suggested. I suggest as a bayesian update that, given you have never heard the idea before, it is more likely to be internally inconsistent/irrational/bad than if you hear it constantly, the idea having passed many people’s internal consistency checks.
Yes—this is exactly the point I was about to make. Another way of putting it is that an argument from authority is not going to cut mustard in a dialog (i.e. in a scientific paper, you will be laughed at if your evidence for a theory is another scientist’s say so) but as a personal heuristic it can work extremely well. While people sometimes “don’t notice” the 900 pound gorilla in the room (the Catholic sex abuse scandal being a nice example), 99% of the things that I hear this argument used for turn out to be total tosh (e.g. Santill’s Roswell Alien Autopsy film, Rhine’s ESP experiments). As Feynman probably didn’t say, “Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out”.