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.
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!”