Can you explain your reasoning in more detail as to why it’s “valid” to be wary of a new medicine, but it’s not “valid” to be wary of a new idea?
Keep in mind that reversed stupidity is not intelligence. That some people are stupidly afraid of new ideas doesn’t automatically make it intelligence not to be afraid of them.
People perceive exposure to a bad medicine as being much harder to correct than exposure to a bad idea. It feels like you can always “just stop beleiving” if you decided something was false, even though this has been empericially been demonstrated to be much more difficult than it feels like it should be.
Further, there’s an unspoken assumption (at least for ideas-in-general) that other people will automatically ignore the 99% of the ideaspace that contains uniformly awful or irrelevant suggestions, like recomending that you increase tire pressure in your car to make it more likely to rain and other obviously wrong ideas like that. Medicine doesn’t get this benefit of the doubt, as humans don’t naturally prune their search space when it comes to complex and technical fields like medicine. It’s outside our ancestoral environment, so we’re not equiped to be able to automatically discard “obviously” bad drug ideas just from reading the chemical makeup of the medicine in question. Only with extensive evidence will a laymen even begin to entertain the idea that ingesting an unfamiliar drug would be benefical to them.
The vast majority of untested chemicals-that-would-be-medicine are harmful or at least discomfiting. The vast majority of untested words-that-would-be-ideas are nonsense or at best banal.
(That is, part of knowing it’s medicine vs knowing it’s an idea is our prior for “this is harmful”, and the relevant properties of ideas, medicine, human bodies, and human minds play a part here.)
I didn’t say that being wary (i.e. being careful of it) wasn’t valid (and of course it is perfectly valid). I said that being frightened (i.e. not going near it) wasn’t valid.
So I think we were just using those words slightly differently.
-John Cage
Retracted: More I think about it, the less this quote makes sense.
It makes quite a bit of sense.
I know, but aren’t there valid rational reasons to be frightened of new ideas as well? It’s like neophilia.
Maybe, but it isn’t valid to be frightened of an idea purely because it is new.
Isn’t it valid to be somewhat frightened of a new medicine purely because it’s yet untested on humans?
You have additional information about the idea; you are frightened of it because it is new and it is a medicine.
Can you explain your reasoning in more detail as to why it’s “valid” to be wary of a new medicine, but it’s not “valid” to be wary of a new idea?
Keep in mind that reversed stupidity is not intelligence. That some people are stupidly afraid of new ideas doesn’t automatically make it intelligence not to be afraid of them.
There’s two components to it, really:
People perceive exposure to a bad medicine as being much harder to correct than exposure to a bad idea. It feels like you can always “just stop beleiving” if you decided something was false, even though this has been empericially been demonstrated to be much more difficult than it feels like it should be.
Further, there’s an unspoken assumption (at least for ideas-in-general) that other people will automatically ignore the 99% of the ideaspace that contains uniformly awful or irrelevant suggestions, like recomending that you increase tire pressure in your car to make it more likely to rain and other obviously wrong ideas like that. Medicine doesn’t get this benefit of the doubt, as humans don’t naturally prune their search space when it comes to complex and technical fields like medicine. It’s outside our ancestoral environment, so we’re not equiped to be able to automatically discard “obviously” bad drug ideas just from reading the chemical makeup of the medicine in question. Only with extensive evidence will a laymen even begin to entertain the idea that ingesting an unfamiliar drug would be benefical to them.
The vast majority of untested chemicals-that-would-be-medicine are harmful or at least discomfiting. The vast majority of untested words-that-would-be-ideas are nonsense or at best banal.
(That is, part of knowing it’s medicine vs knowing it’s an idea is our prior for “this is harmful”, and the relevant properties of ideas, medicine, human bodies, and human minds play a part here.)
I didn’t say that being wary (i.e. being careful of it) wasn’t valid (and of course it is perfectly valid). I said that being frightened (i.e. not going near it) wasn’t valid.
So I think we were just using those words slightly differently.
Should you be frightened of an idea purely because it is old?
No.