This doesn’t seem to be reversing stupidity so much as taking into account potential biases.
There is however a very closely related idea which might have more validity- if a lot people have a lot of motivation for finding evidence for a claim and they’ve found very little then I should conclude that the evidence probably doesn’t exist. The analogy here would be that if I had never heard of the Australia-Zulu claim and didn’t think any group had a reason to believe it I wouldn’t assign it as low a probability as I would for the claim where people have spent years trying to find every scrap of evidence that could possibly support the position.
This doesn’t seem to be reversing stupidity so much as taking into account potential biases.
There is however a very closely related idea which might have more validity- if a lot people have a lot of motivation for finding evidence for a claim and they’ve found very little then I should conclude that the evidence probably doesn’t exist. The analogy here would be that if I had never heard of the Australia-Zulu claim and didn’t think any group had a reason to believe it I wouldn’t assign it as low a probability as I would for the claim where people have spent years trying to find every scrap of evidence that could possibly support the position.