Contriving

There's a class of crackpots with theories that, on the surface, seem to describe reality.

These people are stunningly smart and subtly un-rigorous in their theories.  And the problem with that is that it's easy to see the smartness and difficult to suss out the un-rigorousness.

And the problem with that is that the next big idea will come from someone who is stunningly smart and stunningly rigorous (or lucky) with their idea.  Because it's difficult, relative to recognizing someones intelligence, to recognize a wrong idea from a right idea, it's difficult to sieve the good ideas from the bad.

This post inspired by a recent discussion about Terrence McKenna's novelty theory.

Google+: Reshared 1 times
Google+: View post on Google+