You make excellent points. The growth of knowledge is ultimately a process of creativity alternating with criticism and I agree with you that idea generation is under appreciated. Outlandish ideas are met with ridicule most of the time.
This passage from Quantum Computing Since Democritus by Scott Aaronson captures this so well:
[I have changed my attitudes towards] the arguments of John Searle and Roger Penrose against “strong artificial intelligence.” I still think Searle and Penrose are wrong on crucial points, Searle more so than Penrose. But on rereading my 2006 arguments for why they were wrong, I found myself wincing at the semi-flippant tone, at my eagerness to laugh at these celebrated scholars tying themselves into logical pretzels in quixotic, obviously doomed attempts to defend human specialness. In effect, I was lazily relying on the fact that everyone in the room already agreed with me – that to these (mostly) physics and computer science graduate students, it was simply self-evident that the human brain is nothing other than a “hot, wet Turing machine,” and weird that I would even waste the class’s time with such a settled question. Since then, I think I’ve come to a better appreciation of the immense difficulty of these issues – and in particular, of the need to offer arguments that engage people with different philosophical starting-points than one’s own.
I think we need to strike a balance between the veracity of ideas and tolerance of their outlandishness. This topic has always fascinated me but I don’t know of a concrete criterion for effective hypothesis generation. The simplicity criterion of Occam’s Razor is ok but it is not the be-all end-all.
You make excellent points. The growth of knowledge is ultimately a process of creativity alternating with criticism and I agree with you that idea generation is under appreciated. Outlandish ideas are met with ridicule most of the time.
This passage from Quantum Computing Since Democritus by Scott Aaronson captures this so well:
I think we need to strike a balance between the veracity of ideas and tolerance of their outlandishness. This topic has always fascinated me but I don’t know of a concrete criterion for effective hypothesis generation. The simplicity criterion of Occam’s Razor is ok but it is not the be-all end-all.