The downside is that most "crazy" thinking produces crazy results.

Take Thanos: with one snap of the fingers he destroys 50% of the intelligent beings in the universe and ends all of the problems associated with overpopulation, right?

But, to quote a story I heard somewhere, if you have a coke bottle in a landfill growing bacteria, who double in population in 30 minutes, such that the number of bacteria will overwhelm the available resources at 12:00 noon, when is the bottle half-full? 11:30. At 11:00 they look around and 3/4th of the bottle is free. If they find another identical bottle next to them, that prevents the crash...until 12:30.

Thanos is a complete idiot.

On the other hand, sure, the majority may be completely wrong, but if you ignore them, your solution probably isn't going anywhere.