Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote of ideas one can’t see the value of, and teachers who don’t seem to understand their teachings, “Sounds like either a cult or a college.”
I dunno, at least for many technical fields and for some other endeavors too (like learning to communicate effectively in writing) one can see that many of the teachers can do some handy hard-to-fake real-world stuff, and that the students emerging through the pipeline tend to be able to do it too. When I was an undergraduate, the EEs in my residence hall traditionally maintained a little hand-made custom-programmed telephone PBX which ran from the two college official phone jacks in the lobby to a motley collection of old salvaged telephones in most of the other rooms. I, at least, was impressed. If you’re in an organization where the initiates routinely levitate out their windows to go to lunch, and levitate some more whenever they have trouble finding a convenient chair, is it a mystical cult because levitation or funny hats or even confusing explanations are involved, or might it be unusually successful pragmatic applied philosophy?
Once stretched to cover everything from incompetent posers to arrogant weird competent people (like Isaac Newton at the hypercompetent extreme, or various academics in a less extreme way), a concept like “cult” may not be all that valuable. Perhaps there is value in reminding us that part of the reason the posers can gull people with their behavior is that it’s not so uncommon for non-posers to act in some similar way. But there is also value in to reminding people that part of the reason speculative bubbles can happen is that price moves based on fundamentals can look similar enough to gull speculators into mistaking a bubble for one one. That doesn’t mean we should think of every big price move as a “bubble” (or as being bubble-ish, or whatever). We might say “every big price move wants to be a bubble,” but saying a market situation where the fundamentals don’t make sense “sounds like a bubble or an ordinary market” would seem to me to be missing a point.
One reason I dislike many precautionary arguments is that they seem to undervalue what we learn by doing things. Very often in science, when we have chased down a new phenomenon, we detect it by relatively small effects before the effects get big enough to be dangerous. For potentially dangerous phenomena, what we learn by exploring around the edges of the pit can easily be more valuable than the risk we faced of inadvertently landing in the pit in some early step before we knew it was there. Among other things, what we learn from poking around the edges of the pit may protect us from stuff there that we didn’t know about that was dangerous even if we didn’t poke around the pit. One of the consequences of decades of focus on the physics of radiation and radioisotopes is that we understand hazards like radon poisoning better than before. One of the consequences of all of our recombinant DNA experimentation is that we understand risks of nature’s own often-mindboggling recombinant DNA work much better than we did before.
The main examples that I can think of where the first thing you learn, when you tickle the tail enough to notice the tail exists, is that Tigers Exist And Completely Outclass You And Oops You Are Dead, involve (generalized) arms races of some sort. E.g., it was by blind luck that the Europeans started from the epidemiological cesspool side of the Atlantic. (Here the arms race is the microbiological/immunological one.) If history had been a little different, just discovering the possibility that diseases were wildly different on both sides could easily have coincided with losing 90+% of the European population. (And of course as it happened, the outcome was equally horrendous for the American population, but the American population wasn’t in a position to apply the precautionary principle to prevent that.) So should the Europeans have used a precautionary principle? I think not. Even in a family of alternate histories where the Europeans always start from the clean side, in many alternate subhistories of that family, it is still better for the Europeans to explore the Atlantic, learn early about the problem, and prepare ways to cope with it. Thus, even in this case where the tiger really is incredibly dangerous, the precautionary principle doesn’t look so good.