[aside: I’d drop the first paragraph. I very nearly stopped reading and downvoted based on the fact that you expected me to. ]
You’d perhaps be surprised just how commonly even rare or unusual ideas occur. We’re nearing 9 billion concurrent humans, at least half of them can generate ideas, and probably at least 1% can generate plausibly-good ideas. That said, idea-space is BIG (cue Douglas Adams quote), so it’s believable that this one is the exception. But that also explains why most ideas from crackpots, many from hobbyists, and some from experts are garbage. Ideas are also, as you say, expensive to validate, so a lot just get lost until re-discovered by someone who can make use of them.
I don’t think you have any easy path but to either sit on it or publish it. Or invest enough (if you can) to become a hobbyist-expert yourself, in order to actually evaluate it, and to identify and gain trust with the people who can make a proper evaluation. That’s not an option for most people, though.
My prior is that the VAST majority of non-obvious ideas are harmless, and I’m constitutionally unable to keep quiet about things I think are interesting, so I’d just post it here (as shortform if it’s really raw) and see if it gets any traction.
Do I really come of as such a complete idiot that these things wouldn’t be obvious and already accounted for? I have a billion ideas, some of which I’ve been sitting on for decades hoping for my health to get better. I’m already a “hobbyist-expert” and have spent most of my life on these questions, but I due to chronic illness and not being a one-in-a-million genius I probably won’t ever be able to work professionally.
I wouldn’t have posted this here if it wasn’t literally a billions-of-live-on-the-line situation, and another week of waiting and trying to express it better might mean disaster. Doing this this way is extremely painful and humiliating to me, but I have tried everything else and I can’t see any way to avoid it that’s ethically defensible. I am extremely disappointed and frightened by your uncharitable reading and my every instinct is screaming at me to delete the post but I can’t. People like you are why this took weeks and almost didn’t get posted, causing severe harm and risk, and your behavior is extremely irresponsible and dangerous.
Your prior about non-obvious ideas being harmless has huge amounts of evidence against it, both this site’s history and the fact all experts and important organization seem to take the risk quite seriously. And I can see several ways my idea in particular could cause significant harm, even if they are on the whole unlikely.
[aside: I’d drop the first paragraph. I very nearly stopped reading and downvoted based on the fact that you expected me to. ]
You’d perhaps be surprised just how commonly even rare or unusual ideas occur. We’re nearing 9 billion concurrent humans, at least half of them can generate ideas, and probably at least 1% can generate plausibly-good ideas. That said, idea-space is BIG (cue Douglas Adams quote), so it’s believable that this one is the exception. But that also explains why most ideas from crackpots, many from hobbyists, and some from experts are garbage. Ideas are also, as you say, expensive to validate, so a lot just get lost until re-discovered by someone who can make use of them.
I don’t think you have any easy path but to either sit on it or publish it. Or invest enough (if you can) to become a hobbyist-expert yourself, in order to actually evaluate it, and to identify and gain trust with the people who can make a proper evaluation. That’s not an option for most people, though.
My prior is that the VAST majority of non-obvious ideas are harmless, and I’m constitutionally unable to keep quiet about things I think are interesting, so I’d just post it here (as shortform if it’s really raw) and see if it gets any traction.
Do I really come of as such a complete idiot that these things wouldn’t be obvious and already accounted for? I have a billion ideas, some of which I’ve been sitting on for decades hoping for my health to get better. I’m already a “hobbyist-expert” and have spent most of my life on these questions, but I due to chronic illness and not being a one-in-a-million genius I probably won’t ever be able to work professionally.
I wouldn’t have posted this here if it wasn’t literally a billions-of-live-on-the-line situation, and another week of waiting and trying to express it better might mean disaster. Doing this this way is extremely painful and humiliating to me, but I have tried everything else and I can’t see any way to avoid it that’s ethically defensible. I am extremely disappointed and frightened by your uncharitable reading and my every instinct is screaming at me to delete the post but I can’t. People like you are why this took weeks and almost didn’t get posted, causing severe harm and risk, and your behavior is extremely irresponsible and dangerous.
Your prior about non-obvious ideas being harmless has huge amounts of evidence against it, both this site’s history and the fact all experts and important organization seem to take the risk quite seriously. And I can see several ways my idea in particular could cause significant harm, even if they are on the whole unlikely.