The problem is that the visionary ideas ahead of their time are indistinguishable from the crank ones: they are way outside the (scientific) Overton window and so are automatically misinterpreted and dismissed. Some of those that pan out centuries later were the germ theory of disease, soft inheritance, the idea that brain hosts the mind, etc. There are probably a few prophetic ideas published and ridiculed fairly recently, whose power will only become apparent decades or centuries from now.
This is a very outside view on these ideas. I think from the inside there’s a lot that often separates obviously bogus ideas from possibly real ones. Ideas that might pan out are generally plausible now given the evidence available, even if they cannot be proved, whereas bogus, crank ideas generally ignore what we know to claim something contradictory. This can get a bit tricky because ideas of what people consider “known” can be a little fluid, but the distinction I’m trying to draw here is between ideas that may contradict existing models but agree with what we observe and ideas that disagree with what we observe (regardless of whether they contradict existing models), the former being plausible, ahead-of-their-time ideas that might later be proven true, and the latter being clearly bogus.
(Of course sometimes, as in the case of not observing star parallax without sufficiently powerful instruments, even our observations are a limiting factor, but this does at least allow us to make specific predictions that we should expect to see something if we had more powerful instruments, and would lead us to conclude against a promising idea if we got really good observations that generated disqualifying evidence.)
Ideas that might pan out are generally plausible now given the evidence available, even if they cannot be proved, whereas bogus, crank ideas generally ignore what we know to claim something contradictory.
I think this is an important point to recognize. If an idea agrees with observation but makes predictions that can’t currently be tested, it should be given more consideration than an idea which contradicts existing observations.
The problem is that the visionary ideas ahead of their time are indistinguishable from the crank ones
Expressed very succinctly, thank you.
I suppose what I’m really wondering is whether there’s some feature which can be perceived in the structure of the idea and its ramifications which indicate that it is on the right track, which would distinguish it from crank. Clearly there’s nothing obvious or someone would have found it by now and made a bunch of correct predictions a long time ago. Still, it makes me wonder if there’s something remaining to be found there.
I have a physics degree and ran the Freenode #physics channel for a few years, and so had to deal with a lot of crackpots. It’s easy to tell the obvious nonsense (it raises a lot of standard red flags, like proclaiming a well tested model wrong) but within a well informed professional community ideas ahead of their time are very hard to tell apart from the chaff. Is Tipler’s Omega point nonsense? Is AI fooming nonsense? Is Tegmark’s multiverse nonsense? Is string theory? If you read Not Even Wrong, you can get some idea how hard it is to tell promising ideas apart from the rest.
The problem is that the visionary ideas ahead of their time are indistinguishable from the crank ones: they are way outside the (scientific) Overton window and so are automatically misinterpreted and dismissed. Some of those that pan out centuries later were the germ theory of disease, soft inheritance, the idea that brain hosts the mind, etc. There are probably a few prophetic ideas published and ridiculed fairly recently, whose power will only become apparent decades or centuries from now.
This is a very outside view on these ideas. I think from the inside there’s a lot that often separates obviously bogus ideas from possibly real ones. Ideas that might pan out are generally plausible now given the evidence available, even if they cannot be proved, whereas bogus, crank ideas generally ignore what we know to claim something contradictory. This can get a bit tricky because ideas of what people consider “known” can be a little fluid, but the distinction I’m trying to draw here is between ideas that may contradict existing models but agree with what we observe and ideas that disagree with what we observe (regardless of whether they contradict existing models), the former being plausible, ahead-of-their-time ideas that might later be proven true, and the latter being clearly bogus.
(Of course sometimes, as in the case of not observing star parallax without sufficiently powerful instruments, even our observations are a limiting factor, but this does at least allow us to make specific predictions that we should expect to see something if we had more powerful instruments, and would lead us to conclude against a promising idea if we got really good observations that generated disqualifying evidence.)
I think this is an important point to recognize. If an idea agrees with observation but makes predictions that can’t currently be tested, it should be given more consideration than an idea which contradicts existing observations.
Expressed very succinctly, thank you.
I suppose what I’m really wondering is whether there’s some feature which can be perceived in the structure of the idea and its ramifications which indicate that it is on the right track, which would distinguish it from crank. Clearly there’s nothing obvious or someone would have found it by now and made a bunch of correct predictions a long time ago. Still, it makes me wonder if there’s something remaining to be found there.
I have a physics degree and ran the Freenode #physics channel for a few years, and so had to deal with a lot of crackpots. It’s easy to tell the obvious nonsense (it raises a lot of standard red flags, like proclaiming a well tested model wrong) but within a well informed professional community ideas ahead of their time are very hard to tell apart from the chaff. Is Tipler’s Omega point nonsense? Is AI fooming nonsense? Is Tegmark’s multiverse nonsense? Is string theory? If you read Not Even Wrong, you can get some idea how hard it is to tell promising ideas apart from the rest.
Some things are dismissed as crank because of assumptions people make. Like “there’s no way stars could be that far away!”