Novelty and Heresy | Hacker News Reader

Novelty and Heresy

paulgraham.com

288 pointsdavnicwil333 comments

> "Galileo and Darwin are famous examples of this phenomenon,"

Famous, yes, but there can also be incorrect assumptions in that. Galileo, for example. A lot of people assume his heliocentric model was correct and was only rejected because heliocentrism was considered heretical because it contradicted the ruling assumption of geocentrism. But the Vatican at the time was seriously considering a number of models including some heliocentric models. One of the reasons Galileo's model was rejected, was because it contradicted observations. Planets didn't quite move in the way he predicted, and that's because Galileo clung to the incorrect assumptions that orbits had to be circular.

Of course his core idea of heliocentrism was less wrong than geocentric models, but at the same time it's an example of how addressing one incorrect assumption can lead you into another incorrect assumption. And that also lead to a lot of resistance to your idea, even if the core of your idea is correct.

As for Darwin, a lot of people at the time already assumed that something like evolution had to be going on, and that many animals had common ancestors. They just didn't know how it worked. Even while Darwin was working on his theory, Alfred Russel Wallace was working on the exact same idea. So in that case, the idea was actually obvious to anyone paying attention, and Darwin happened to be the one to get there first. But if he hadn't published about it, Wallace would most likely have done so.

I believe Darwin shelved his findings for years specifically because he didn’t want the hassle of picking the fight he ended up picking, and only published when he found out that Wallace was about to do so himself.

Edit: As per Galileo not actually being persecuted because heliocentrism itself was heretical, Slate Star Codex actually addresses this argument somewhat: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-...

Darwin did not “shelf” his findings, in the sense of stopping work. He just spent decades gathering additional mountains of evidence because he was worried that opponents would spring up and he wanted to make sure everything was watertight.

Then despite his overwhelming evidence, exactly what he feared still happened (and still happens today)

I didn't mean to imply he stopped working on it entirely, but he definitely put off publishing as long as he could because he was (reasonably) worried about what would happen afterwards.

Welp, FWIW Newton did the same thing with Calculus.

The Leibniz independently invented many of these ideas, plus the notation we use to this day, and published first.

Didn't stop Newton for starting a war with Leibniz over whoddunit, though.

The best source which I've read that corrects the myths behind the Galileo affair was written by science-fiction author Michael F. Flynn.

The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown

https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-sma...

And here I was thinking it took so long because it was a bunch of Italians debating for 10 minutes between the morning cappuccino and lunch.

Galileo being right or wrong is not really pertinent for PG's argument. See this piece of his text appearing as a html comment: "When you suppress heresy, you silence not just your opponents but also everyone who contradicts you unintentionally. And because ideas are so interconnected, you're almost certainly silencing more people than you realize. "

Another reason why heliocentism was rejected is the lack of observable star parallax which it implies. No one had an idea stars could possibly be SO far away... and it took another 200 years to detect parallax and further 30 years to measure it first.

That too. Several objections to Galileo's model were based on real observations, which means science. There were sound scientific reasons to reject his model despite the fact that the core of it was a vast improvement. It's an interesting scientific contradiction.

Then they should have just published their own objections. This in no way justifies the persecution of Galileo, which was basically akin to the Soviet persecution of Sakharov -- like him he was under house arrest and forbidden to interact with the scientific community at large.

Sakharov wasn't persecuted for his scientific views. Just because he became an anti-Communist (and a pretty crazy one).

In a way the same is true for Galileo: he was only really prosecuted after writing a book in which he called the pope (who was up til that point friendly and open to his views) a fool.

Bad lesson from this (completely valid) analogy: by 1970s, Communism has become a full-blown religion, with it's pseudo-scientific roots being thoroughly debunked, but politicians resting on them stubbornly refusing to give way.

That's not even a bad lesson: it is possible to interpret Communism as a radical Christian sect, which, having done away with God altogether, tries to build Heaven on earth. This way, its core beliefs do make sense...or rather, they're internally consistent.

And what observations were these?

(And I wish you'd stop this nonsense of implying that Galileo had his own special heliocentric model. He didn't; he was advocating the model of Copernicus.)

"it took another 200 years to detect parallax"

However, the aberration of starlight was detected in the early 1700s. Although no one had thought to predict its appearance, people quickly realized it only made sense if the Earth was in motion, and was impossible to produce in a geocentric model.

(And, of course, heliocentric elliptical orbits of Kepler explained planetary motion much better than any geocentric system.)

Darwin also deserves the lion's share of the credit because his documentary evidence was absolutely overwhelming. It took him decades to amass it.

Darwin did excellent work in a number of areas and is a real hero. But I disagree with "the lion's share of the credit" because I don't think there's a finite quantity of "credit" that needs to be shared out.

There certainly is finite attention span.

Ok I know the Darwin stuff, but the Galileo stuff goes against the traditional story by quite a bit - given that going through google to find the truth nowadays is a chore, do you have some authoritative links?

That is goes against the traditional story is part of the point. Traditional stories are often wrong, even if they go against even older, wronger traditional stories.

I can't find the original articles I got this from, but googling a bit got me this very easy to read summary of events[0], albeit in very popular and informal language. But it corresponds with what I read elsewhere, and even goes into a bit more detail in a few places.

(Potential downside of this article in the eyes of some is that it was written by a Christian, who could be believed to have an agenda to defend the church. The previous articles I read were written by an atheist. I'll see if I can find them.)

(edit:) The author of the original articles has a pretty thorough and well-sourced answer on Quora[1].

I did find another good write-up[2].

[0] https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2011/09/the-...

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-misunderstood-histori...

[2] http://www.shawndove.com/history-science-and-religion-galile...

AFAIK it’s flatly wrong and the inquisition said it was heretical because it opposed what was in the Bible.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070930013053/http://astro.wcup...

The records are here. As far as I can see the only attack against the idea in the record is that it contradicts the Bible.

GP is taking into account the larger picture and discussion of Galileo's ideas. The Inquisition was sicced on Galileo and the justification was that his ideas contradicted the Bible. But the actual prosecution was also motivated by Galileo's obstreperousness. Guy was difficult and he challenged the Church's authority in weird ways (not always intentionally). In particular, he was seen to have attacked one of his main supporters, who happened to be the Pope.

Exactly. Galileo was originally on very good terms with the pope. Then the pope asked him to write a book comparing heliocentric and geocentric ideas from a neutral perspective. Galileo instead wrote a book ridiculing geocentrism, and had some things the pope said repeated by a character called "Simplico" ("Fool"). He insulted the pope, and that's where the trouble really started.

I don't think that's a defense of the church.

It is not. But it is also different story and different complaint about church.

Well to be honest if antivaxer asked a doctor to compare vaccines to essential oils you would probably do the same, or flat earther asked you to compare theory of flat earth vs cube earth vs geoid earth.

Although one could expect trouble when that patron was basically the most powerful person at that time.

The big difference in your comparison is that vaccines and the roundness of the Earth are very well established with overwhelming evidence supporting them. The heliocentric solar system was not well established at that time. That's what the whole discussion was about.

Copernicus' book had been published in 1543. Galileo was convicted of heresy in 1633. That would be like someone in 2043 being convicted of heresy for saying that DNA has a double helical structure.

Parallax, predicted by the heliocentric model, was only observed in 1806. Until then, its apparent absence was a strong argument against heliocentrism. (We just didn't know that stars are so far away.)

DNA structure is not a very good analogue because here we already had the X-ray image, and the question was to find a molecular structure that matched the data.

It is not about evidence, it is about sure you are about your argument, and as it was stated below - Galileo wasn't the first one to propose heliocentricism.

But at the time, without robust mathematical concepts of inertia, forces, etc there were some reasonable arguments against heliocentrism. Plus, Galileo ignored Kepler's elliptical orbits, which are closer to reality.

I think it's more fair to say that he contradicted their "interpretation" of the bible at the time. Even Catholic church doesn't maintain those old beliefs any more.

Psalm 104:5 (NIV):

> He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.

Ecclesiastes 1:5 (NIV):

> The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.

A literal interpretation of the bible has the earth standing still while the sun moves. Of course you can interpret any text any way you like, and if somebody wants to make a contrived argument that Moby Dick was really about a shark rather than a whale then there's nothing I can do to convince them otherwise, but the text seems quite clear.

True, but the catholic church did not base their worldview purely on a literal reading of the bible. This was the case for protestants ("sola scriptura"), but the catholic church often favored allegorical readings and did not consider the bible the only authority on truth.

> if somebody wants to make a contrived argument that Moby Dick was really about a shark rather than a whale then there's nothing I can do to convince them otherwise, but the text seems quite clear.

Some have even gone so far as to claim that the stuff in the book didn't actually happen but the book can be read as an allegory of something or other!

As the people you are arguing against are 16th century clergy, you can't really convince them of anything - they are long dead. The best one can do is try to understand how they were thinking.

Most protestants aren't a fan of an excessively literal interpretation either. Modern biblical literalism, where an overly literal interpretation trumps even common sense and observation, is a fairly recent invention (late 18th century, I think), and I, as a Christian, consider it the largest threat to Christianity today. And a heresy, I suppose; it doesn't do justice to what the bible is actually trying to tell us, and focuses only on superficial, nonsensical interpretations that often end up contradictory.

Yeah but that is a much more recent development. Biblical literalism was a countermovement against contemporary liberal theology.

So where did commenter come up with the idea that many religious folks were looking for different models of the universe at the time?

Why wouldn't they be? The Church has always been interested in being correct more than being dogmatically rigid. Took a lot to switch, but they had to change with the times somewhat lest people stop believing.

Can't remember the source, but the Vatican basically told Galileo that they were pretty convinced of heliocentrism, but if he could please stop shooting his mouth off until they got a transition plan in place, that'd be great.

He didn't, so they put him on lifetime house arrest to try to mitigate the damage he could do.

So he didn't get heresy'd for opposing the Church's position, but for undermining it's ability to assert influence and control.

> The Church has always been interested in being correct more than being dogmatically rigid

The Church has always been a community of individuals who publicly confess the same beliefs, while privately holding on to their own motivations.

Correct.

Now, replace "the church" with any centralized apparatus of power and you've described government.

Now, replace "government" with "human social organization," and you're more correct.

In government and business you can implement policy even if it doesn't align with your personal beliefs, it's called chain of command. No one cares if you're a true believer as long as the work gets done. How many churches will admit to functioning like that.

The Catholic Church from the year 0 to 1800 did lots of that. They had meetings to draft the Bible. What should be included. What should be excluded.

The cool Pope we have now is rolling back tons of rules because it's necessary for the survival of the institution, not because he necessarily thinks they're just. His opinion doesn't matter, only God's.

So like any community, family, couple, etc?

As we see from the parent here, plenty of other scientists were starting to come to the same opinion, many of them with patronage from the Church, but they had the sense about them to realize that they needed to be 100% certain before the Church would be okay with changing doctrine. And they weren't 100% certain yet.

High switching costs that Galileo couldn't fathom. A stereotypical head in the clouds scientist.

I read a series of articles by a historian about it. The common view most people have about the issue apparently comes from Voltaire and is riddled with misrepresentations in order to make some points Voltaire wanted to make.

History is often much more complicated than suits us.

An article about a research paper: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/the-truth-about-galileo-an...

Another link: http://origins.osu.edu/milestones/february-2016-400-years-ag...

Some related discussion here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JAAHjm4iZ2j5Exfo2/the-copern...

Assuming the presentation is reasonable, I am actually not convinced that mental habits that would have us agree quicker with Copernicus would actually make us right more often in general. I think often the first people to be right about something will be right for the wrong reasons. It's an interesting thing to chew on.

Galileo was told not to spread his theory because the Church knew that the general public would have a hard time understanding that Galileo's theory didn't contradict Church teachings even though it would seem to to the untrained mind, so they wanted to wait until they could figure out how to make sure that it didn't lead to mass confusion.

> But the Vatican at the time was seriously considering a number of models including some heliocentric models.

Could you point to publicly available source for this?

That would be difficult, since it isn't true. The Church had banned Copernicus's book and the general concept of heliocentrism in 1616, which was a full 16 years before they went after Galileo for promoting heliocentrism.

>The Church didn’t lift a finger against science. It just accidentally created a honeytrap that attracted and destroyed scientifically curious people.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-...

Funny both Galileo and Darwin are mentioned, since they are also mentioned on the same page in The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb page 167:

"Likewise we think that Galileo was a victim in the name of science; in fact, the church didn't take him too seriously. It seems, rather, that Galileo caused the uproar himself by ruffling a few feathers. At the end of the year in which Darwin and Wallace presented their papers on evolution by natural selection that changed the way we view the world, the president of the Linnean society, where the papers were presented, announced that the society saw "no striking discovery," nothing in particular that could revolutionize science. "

So Taleb makes the opposite claim that their ideas in their time weren't regarded as heresy as we now tend to believe.

I think we overestimate the dichotomy between those two things. It's pretty common to see people react to ideas with "that's either obviously true or heretically stupid, but it's definitely not accurate and groundbreaking."

Galileo got in trouble over insulting his patron, but heliocentric theory more broadly was peacefully ignored, except when it became too visible and was persecuted. And the Catholic Church has maintained the same position ever since: into the 1800s, it was alternately publishing and banning works which accepted heliocentric theory. Even in the 1990s, we saw Cardinal Ratzinger rationalizing the Church's position as more rational than Galileo's at the time, while John Paul II was talking about "the error of the theologians of the time", as though the matter had consisted of a standard disagreement between scholars, rather than a heresy trial and a formal ban on Galilean ideas. One view says he was a foolish heretic who got lucky, the other an accepted part of the academy; neither concedes that his work was both controversial and correct.

We see the same thing all over. Darwin was hesitant to publish because he knew the conflict he'd attract, but the Linnean society declared his work unremarkable even as sparked outrage in other quarters. Soviet science suppression is recent enough to be well-documented; we see for instance that cybernetics was a "bourgeois pseudo-science" until it was rehabilitated, at which point Kolman wrote a history in which suppressed thinkers like Glushkov were credited with inventing the science ahead of Westerners.

Taleb's historical point is interesting, but I think he's wrong to portray those as conflicting reactions. Jumping straight from mockery to acceptance is a common approach for an establishment that doesn't want to lose face.

Just look at HN comment threads: Any truth that's inconvenient for the majority in the respective thread will be brainlessly downvoted. Killing the messenger is just as popular here (where all the smartest know-it-alls convene) as it is there (where all the ignoramuses reside).

That's true of any large public community, almost by definition. It bothers me too, and I have to remind myself not to fret too much over things on HN that are true of humans in general: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

The only way you could get different phenomena is with a small, closed community that would therefore be able to have locally different properties. Just like you need a closed system if you want different entropy.

Actually, this has an interesting consequence along the lines of PG's essay: when a novel/heretical idea does begin to be seen as true, this will probably happen first in small communities, not large ones. Moreover the small community probably needs to be elite somehow, or it won't have the standing to deliver the bit flip (heretical -> serious) to the larger community.

> The only way you could get different phenomena is with a small, closed community that would therefore be able to have locally different properties.

I run a private discussion group about quantum mechanics. It consists of only a few dozen physicists, and the exact same dynamic happens there. I observed the same phenomenon in the 90s with an internal discussion group at JPL. It was anonymized in the hopes that this would encourage people to speak freely and honestly. The actual effect was that it turned into 4chan. It was quite shocking to me at the time. Being small and closed doesn't help.

My claim is that it's necessary, not sufficient. I definitely agree it's not the latter.

I respectfully disagree. I don't think being small and private is necessary to prevent unpopular opinions from being shouted down. But it is a very difficult problem because there are some kinds of opinions that IMO should be shouted down (flat-eartherism, holocaust denial). The tricky part is distinguishing those from crazy-sounding ideas that potentially have merit. It's a hard problem, but I believe it has solutions that don't rely on exclusivity.

There are several Reddit communities that seem to do a rather good job of maintaining order, via thoughtful rules and enforcement. Some of the undesirable behaviors mentioned in this thread could be added as new HN guidelines.

How effective this might be is one of those things you don't know until you try it.

Care to propose any specific guidelines?

Could you give me some examples?

Saying anything positive about online advertising is a ticket to downvotes.

Just turn on showdead in your settings. I also see very often comments that have died for no apparent reason (they are not inflammatory).

I find anything critisizing SV or YC company gets immediate downvotes, as do most critical of china, israel, and saudi arabia (or any company funded by them, lookin at you softbank). While there are more Indian, UK, and Canadian commenters who will actually argue, they seldom downvote. Oddly, most americans will go above and beyond to disparge their own nation more than any other (free speech is empowering!).

More people lately seem to downvote out of disagreement rather than to keep a thread in check. I thing requiring a comment to downvote would be a huge step forward in the quality of discourse.

This is not to pass judgement on any subset on the HN or general communities. Just apparent trends that have I have noticed. I could very well be victim to my own (american) bias.

> More people lately seem to downvote out of disagreement rather than to keep a thread in check.

Downvoting out of disagreement has always been endorsed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

You may disagree that it is a good choice, but it is not new phenomenon.

That typically means they're shadowbanned. I can usually figure out why by a quick look at their comment history. Even people who like to toss bombs throw the occasional dud.

Advocating for Nationalism is a typical example. Or restrictive immigration policies.

These seem to be considered by many to be synonymous with racism.

Try advocating for open borders, an end to Capitalism and the dissolution of the Nation State. This, too, is beyond the pale for the bulk of Hacker News readers.

Likely because the discussions around them are pretty vapid. Open borders and the dissolution of the nation state are at odds with having any kind of social safety net, preventing violent mobs from taking over, preventing the remaining world powers from taking over, etc.

Ending capitalism hasn’t worked anywhere, ever. What are the logistics of that even if it doesn’t involve violently forcing people to stop trading goods and services directly? Who sets prices, who sets salaries, who decides how ore from mines is used and how electricity is divided?

In all of the posts I’ve seen advocating for those things, none include anything resembling intellectual curiosity. It’s always just a quip in response to the revelation that some people have less than others.

"Discussions around them are pretty vapid," he said, before diving into the most well-worn cliches on the subject.

You could do some deeper reading. It's intellectually dishonest to eschew a subject for your own superficial understanding of it.

1. https://crimethinc.com/books/no-wall-they-can-build 2. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/187149.Open_Veins_of_Lat...

I have, and the two links you provided are perfect examples of the detached quips I’m speaking of. A whimsical rehash of Marxist ideas without any relevance to how it should work (you’ll notice this is how all Marxist books function) and a book about Mexican migrants that does nothing to address what replaces the positive features of a nation state in the context of fully open borders.

> a book about Mexican migrants

No, it's primarily about the people of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

Just one of many trivially falsifiable positions you hold.

Can you give some examples where those "truths" have been downvoted?

Unironically, my very comment above (as well as others in this thread, the topic of which is heresy!) is gathering downvotes as we speak, despite it being technically correct. Normally this would bother me, but this time I find it pleasing because it illustrates the point.

My intuition is suggesting to me that your inclusion of "truths" in quotation marks suggests you are primed to expect me to reply with some things that I believe to be true, but that are false. Obviously I am speculating, but I find thinking about the nature of communication in fine detail to be extremely interesting.

Also, pardon the delay in reply as I'm quite sure my account is flagged and rate-limited for participating in flame wars, or more specifically, holding incorrect beliefs in flame wars. I believe this latter point because it takes two to tango in a flame war, and if you pay attention when warnings are handed out for such offenses here on HN, you may notice a pattern of the person receiving the warning is the one who holds the heretical view, despite many people being participants. I say this mostly as just an interesting aside, but I believe it does to some degree fairly illustrate the possibility of bias that exists on HN, including at the moderation level. Since the degree to which my speculation is true is not knowable, casual dismissals must not be based on pure logic, but rather a mixture of conscious logic and subconscious heuristics. Sometimes what's so easy to see in others, is near impossible to see in ourselves - such is the nature of the human mind.

As for some examples of what I'm talking about:

Here is a person taking the definition of Fascism and applying it to Nationalism:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21504768

Here is a person who seems to believe they can both read minds and predict the future (but apparently can not defend the facts they have learned during those exercises):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21501182

Here is a person who believes that it is impossible to love one nation more than others. Knowing such a thing would also require mind reading abilities:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21501200

More mind reading, and the stating of opinions as if they were facts (this is very common):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21500900

I mean, on one hand this is just people being people, nothing to lose any sleep over. On the other hand, this isn't /r/politics - is it asking too much that we strive for a higher standard of thinking and discourse here on HN? And furthermore, it might be worth considering if this sort of behavior might be counter-productive to the speaker's goals in more way than one.

So I've read each of these threads. Seems like you were engaged in particularily divisive topics with those that have strongly held beliefs. For what it's worth, I found your thoughts to be the more reasonable stance.

Strongly held beliefs are perfectly fine. Presenting opinions (or information derived from reading of minds or the future) as fact, is not - in my personal opinion that is, my opinion is clearly not shared by all others on HN. Perhaps the ends do justify the means.

Anything seen to be advocating specifically for the benefit of white people is often seen as heresy around here, though there are pockets of positive sentiment.

Pointing out the environmental impact of having biological children is always unpopular here. A lot of HN-ers are pretty attached to the 'three kids and a white picket fence' lifescript.

Interestingly advocates of veganism (which has a similarly massive impact on your carbon footprint) are much more welcome, but I guess for most people the drive to reproduce is more inherent that the desire to eat meat.

If the solution to a hard problem is that obvious and people aren't doing it then it's not really a solution and/or you haven't correctly identified the problem.

Those comments are unpopular because most people can see they're just smug self righteous twitter tier mic drops.

> If the solution to a hard problem is that obvious and people aren't doing it then it's not really a solution and/or you haven't correctly identified the problem.

I don't see how this is compatible with the observed reality that individuals make choices that are not best for society (whether due to rational self-interest/incomplete information/behavioral factors).

I suppose you could say there's room for that under redefining the problem, like "The real problem is that people refuse to employ known solutions to those problems."

That salvages the argument, but deflates it as an argument against talking about the known solutions: discussing them is part of the solution to such a meta-problem, directly, by leading people to employing them; and indirectly, by leading to insight on why people aren't employing them yet.

The former is hazardous (and verylittlemeat spoke against it): people fight for their views on the internet, and it degrades discussion more than it reaches people. The latter has leverage and is potentially highly impactful (i.e. the kind of discussion I come here hoping to find).

Many of the opinions downvoted on HN fit the same mold. They're what I call "if you're an alcoholic just stop drinking" arguments.

They're totally reductive and really just serve to stroke the speakers ego or shame others rather than actually address the issue.

I agree; it's sort of an escape hatch. There's no problem I can't solve if you always give me "Redefine the problem" as one of the options!

Maybe I wasn't clear; I'm not talking about comments on random threads about climate change suggesting it could be solved easily if people just didn't have kids. I don't think it's unreasonable, though, to suggest not having biological children if someone asks how they could lower their carbon footprint.

I mostly don't downvote anti-having-children(?) comments (I just ignore them), but I think most of them are counter-productive because, as others say, the desire to have children is ingrained to a lot of people, so not having children is a really tough sell. In light of the climate emergency we're facing, it almost sounds like deliberately advertising a wildly unpopular plan, detracting from other actionable plans with much higher chances of being accepted.

And the (not always, but frequent) I'm-holier-than-thou-because-I-transcended-ape-instincts vibe doesn't help.

Suicide is also a good solution from a climate standpoint. If you're seriously considering life choices which directly impair your reproductive chances you already lost the game.

> Pointing out the environmental impact of having biological children is always unpopular here.

1) Because you're treating an idealized version of "the environment" as a terminal goal.

2) The people most likely to agree with your argument are precisely the ones who should be having more kids.

Who should be having more kids? And consequently, who should not?

I didn't say anything about how anyone should have fewer kids. However, intelligence and political attitudes are highly heritable, so when smart educated middle class people (regardless of race or country) decide not to have children so that they can do their small part to "save the planet", what they're actually doing is their own small part in helping ensure that the next generation is turned over to people who are less intelligent and don't share their political beliefs.

Maybe because children are somewhat ingrained in us a species. Also, just because an idea is unpopular doesn't mean it is good.

Yes - it's not surprising to me that few people are willing to consider adopting or living a 'childfree' lifestyle, only that the suggestion that doing so is an extremely effective way to reduce your carbon footprint is received so poorly.

I would suggest that whether an idea is good and whether it is popular are mostly orthogonal, but also that encouraging people who aren't certain they want kids to not do so is, from the perspective of someone concerned about climate change, a good idea.

Gender issues and workplace diversity.

"Gender issues" and "workplace diversity" are vague topics, not "truths" or even specific ideas we can discuss.

We all know what truths and specific ideas those terms encompass. Stating them brings a flurry of downvotes. Even pointing in their general direction gets downvoted.

People claiming that their ideas about those areas are "truths" can lead to a lot of downvotes, yes. Those people then claim that others are "suppressing the truth". They never seem to even consider the idea that their "truths" may in fact be mistaken.

Pretty much every comment on every subject comes down to someone claiming that their ideas are truths, though, and not every comment gets downvoted so much.

Not every wrong idea has a history of being contradicted so frequently, either.

Try posting Rushton and Jensen and see what happens.

I'll slightly disagree, and say that the optimum comment (in terms of receiving supportive comments and not being downvoted to oblivion) seems to be against the grain, but not pushing it too far.

I assume this is because those comments sometimes get people from both ends of the "debate" supporting them, or at least not voting them down.

Downvoting is the correct reaction to heresy. For every Darwin or Galileo there are many thousands of kooks. Downvoting doesn't silence people -- you can still see them at the bottom of the page in grey or worst case by turning showdead on.

or worst case by turning showdead on.

This isn’t true anymore. Accounts get locked, not merely whisked to the shadow realm.

> Downvoting is the correct reaction to heresy.

Even if it's correct?

I feel like I must be misunderstanding you.

> Downvoting doesn't silence people

It can get you flagged by the mods for "starting flamewars", which limits your ability to post.

If I understand brianlarsen correctly, the point is that if you downvote 10,000 heresies, one will be correct[1]. The others will just be cranks. And the one heresy that will be correct... well, this is HN, not the Royal Society. If the correct heretic is depending on not being downvoted on HN to get the word of the newly-discovered truth out, that's probably not an optimal publication strategy.

[1] All numbers made up on the spot.

> If I understand brianlarsen correctly, the point is that if you downvote 10,000 heresies, one will be correct[1]. The others will just be cranks.

> [1] All numbers made up on the spot.

This is the (or a) problem, at least as I see it.

I'm not proposing that we entertain all sorts of crazy ideas, but I don't think it should be controversial that HN adopts a culture of not saying things that are not true. An example of this is the habitual posting of opinions (often axiomatic beliefs, but not always) in a manner that makes them appear as fact.

Reducing the frequency of this would indeed require some effort, but HN is unwilling to even include it in the guidelines. I find that interesting and more than a little ironic considering PG's essay on the matter.

that's by design - popularity is not a good judge however. A better system would be to provide upvote/downvote buttons to only a small, random subset of users in each topic.

or maybe a firing line approach: everyone has upvote/downvote buttons but not everyone's work

How would that improve the situation?

- discourage brigading

- discourage mob behavior

- prevent particularly biased individuals from skewing every discussion

- adds stochastic variety to the biases of the group

I don't see how approximate popularity is better than popularity for the first three factors. It would achieve the 4th in individual threads, but amplifying randomly-selected niche viewpoints in different threads adds up to the same biases across threads (unless the selection of blessed users is thread-independent, in which case the community has a randomly-selected group of first-class citizens).

Is this where someone brings up the Dropbox comment again?

That's a natural consequence of the human condition, coupled with a libertarian outlook when creating moderation tools. A downvote can never be presumed to mean "this is objectively wrong", always "this is subjectively objectionable"

A good exercise in knowing thyself, examining your own prejudices and improving the world around you because of that critical introspection. Unfortunately, this process must be repeated near-constantly to bring about perfection, and few people have the time for that (or are willing to make the time for that)

If PG actually meant a single word of his essay, he'd fire Dan Gackle and he'd radically change how HN moderation works.

But, as per usual, Paul Graham is full of shit. He is interested in challenging other people, but he is absolutely and totally unwilling to be challenged in any material way.

And heaven forbid you challenge any aspect of one of his most highly valued portfolio companies... lol... you'll be banned right out of this place.

because Paul Graham absolutely LOVES declaring some things heres and he LOVES to suppress speech.

He just wants to be the one who declares what is heretical and what is not.

This squares with my experience.

In 2007 I had a social conversation with a well known and successful operator / VC in the valley about new ideas. Having just gone through negotiations for a raise at my corporate job, the information asymmetry between corporations and employees about salaries was huge.

So my thinking was that it was only a matter of time until salary information became more open. He was adamant that it would never happen. Sharing salary information between employees was heresy. Mind you, I was also 30 and he was in his 50s.

12 years later Glassdoor, levels.fyi, etc are all things.

For whatever reason - he hadn’t gone through a salary negotiation in a long time, generational culture, etc - this was a major blind spot for him.

But sharing salary information is still heresy, it's attempted in secret across opaque unverifiable websites that companies themselves like to game.

People can break this dynamic by just going ahead and sharing their salaries: https://jefftk.com/money

At least in the US, employers aren't allowed to keep you from disclosing your compensation.

Nice idea. I've been sharing my salary history via email for some time now to help equalize it - this just takes it public.

BTW, I would probably suggest qualifying the income by location to set the context. SV pay isn't always, e.g., Boise, ID pay.

Added!

The world has come a long way in the last 12 years and it seems (to me at least) that salary date is trending towards openness.

Thanks, didn't know about levels.fyi.

Corporations now have strict salary bands for almost all roles. Good and bad. Good because it keeps everything equal. Bad because super high performers find it harder to get outsized rewards.

It sounds like bonuses and stock grants would be the obvious workaround -- or are those also covered by the salary band limits?

The problem is that this outlook is often used as an argument in favor of some heretical position, instead of just being a defense against outright rejection. What is often forgotten (aside from the excellent points brought up by mcv) is that Galileo and Darwin were each among the very top experts in their respective fields, and many of those who rejected them most forcefully were laymen. That was the biggest difference between them and their detractors -- they were experts facing off many laymen and amateurs -- not their heresy. These days laymen often challenge experts and see themselves as Galileo just because their opinion is heretical, rather than because they've studied a subject more rigorously than others. Rigor and scholarship must precede heresy.

Another pitfall that's common nowadays is that many ideas that are presented as heroic heresy are just yesterday's rejected dogma. When dogma is rejected when a more rigorous heresy shows up, it doesn't lend more credibility to the rejected dogma, which is now heretical. In other words, these are people who claim Galileo's heretical status by arguing for geocentrism, which is today's heresy. Ironically, these days it is mostly reactionaries rehashing old dogmas that proudly describe themselves as heretics.

Paul Graham, Eric Ries, Steve Blank, Sam Altman, and many others have promoted their share of ideas that entrepreneurial and VC communities have latched onto as sacrosanct. Take, for instance, the notion of "minimum viable product". Do the absolute minimum of work to validate an idea because that way you didn't spend years of your life creating something that there was no market for. If you didn't go to market after 3 months of development, you're doing it wrong. If you didn't seek sage advice from a panel of... "experts"... trying to convince you why you should give up 10% of your life's work for $100,000, you're doing it wrong. If you take a principled approach to your work and do what is right rather than what is popular, you're doing it wrong. Ship as quickly as possible. Go fast. We need Velocity©! You don't need to do anything right, just focus on appearances. Generally speaking, whatever you're thinking and doing is wrong. They know what is best.

Herein lies the great dead zone of missed opportunities, rejected by venture capitalists and entrepreneurship thinkers who worked too hard to advance ideas that aren't universally applicable and in many cases are simply wrong.

PG et al: break from convention and challenge your theories about what makes projects successful

Francis Cornford in 1908: "Every public action, which is not customary, either is wrong, or, if it is right, is a dangerous precedent. It follows that nothing should ever be done for the first time."

+1 for referencing Microcosmographia Academica!

https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/iau/cornford/cornford...

The idea of heresy as a path to being right shows up many times in Graham's work, but he adheres so closely to software heterodoxy throughout his essays.

- Programming language of choice being a huge deal - Taking it as obvious that the supernatural is fiction - Assuming smartness is a crucial ingredient for success

I could probably come up with more, but that'll do for now.

Did you mean, "adheres so closely to software orthodoxy?" I only ask because it's hard to see how one could "adhere" to heterodoxy and your use of the word "but" suggests you're setting up a contrast with heresy.

Apparently I did.

I had a functioning vocabulary once, but it seems to have failed hard with the advent of small children.

You have to be heretical correctly.

At which point it was the correctness that mattered, not the heresy.

No, you can't beat the averages with things that are correct but mainstream. You need both.

Just keep in mind that if your thinking is heresy you either have a way to show results quickly or a huge marketing budget. Being right today doesn't mean people will listen. With so much noise on the web credibility is a huge driver for customer acquisition. If your solution doesn't clearly show results and requires a pitch be ready to spend a lot of time building up your case and selling it. For instance, insects are a good idea for animal feed, right? Well you still need a lot of marketing to convince animal farmers to adopt them, the easier thing for them to do is just keep doing what they are doing today.

That rings true. Somewhat unrelated, but nonetheless important IMHO, is the new trend I see on networks like LinkedIn around culture fit, trust and performance. In a group where trust, a highly subjective concept to begin with, intervenes with heresy the focus on trust over performance can severely hinder innovation and be counterproductive.

Which might explain why certain companies attract certain people.

Being right has /never/ been enough to convince people. Changing peoples minds has to have enough of an improvement to overcome switching costs /and/ any anchoring biases.

Yes but today you compete with everybody else. If you are in a crowded space, i.e. analytics, your ideas will have to compete with ideas of many other bigger players with bugger marketing budgets. You also more or less advertise in the same place where they advertise.

I like a lot how G. B. Shaw phrased this insight: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

However, from the perspective of the reasonable man, things look differently: Only a small minority of 'unreasonable men' actually manage to change the world. So it is rational to be doubtful if someone's novel idea contradicts widely shared assumptions.

It's linked at the end, but http://paulgraham.com/say.html (2004) is, IMHO, much stronger version of the same argument.

That's PG's most important piece. By occasionally publishing short references to it (like TFA), he re-surfaces it for people who haven't seen it before or haven't thought about it for a long time.

When I was a child it seemed that society could distinguish moral judgments from epistemological ones. Now it seems that epistemology is the only remaining hiding place for judgmental moralists. Fake news!

I wonder what conditions would be necessary for a culture that is more tolerant of heretical ideas, compared to the present environment, in order to be more conductive to new discoveries?

You don't think we're at the most open and accepting time in history?

No one gets beheaded for heresy, real or imaginary, anymore, except in Saudi Barbaria.

And on Twitter. But you can pretty easily avoid both places.

(Curiously, the people who will behead you on Twitter are the same ones who are most opposed to the dogma of Saudi Barbaria, but they're onboard with how to punish dissidents)

I think we peaked 15 years ago. Today I have to worry about what I say lest I be branded a bigot and fired from my job. It's very stifling.

I think at least in the US, maybe 10-15 years ago was much more open and accepting of dissenting ideas.

I am intrigued by this technology which allows people to remotely remove the actual heads of their enemies over the internet, but maybe I skipped that in the Twitter release notes.

> It's called swatting

Dark but true :( Again, mostly geographically limited to the United States of Barberica?

It's called swatting

> Saudi Barbaria

What do you hope to achieve with petty quips like this?

I hope to call a spade a spade. They throw homosexuals off of rooftops on a regular basis, for being homosexuals.

They're actively bombing Yemen.

They chopped a journalist up last year, and had an episode of "will it blend" with the bits. Then mixed it him with bleach and poured him down the drain.

Let's not sugar coat it.

You're doing the literal opposite of calling a spade a spade. You're calling a spade a shitpade because it fell over and hit your foot. I'm unqualified to judge your opinion on Saudi Arabia but making up an insult Stallman style only makes you sound childish to anybody who doesn't already agree with you.

> You're calling a spade a shitpade because it fell over and hit your foot.

That's a mischaracterisation. He's calling a spade a shitspade because it systematically violates basic human rights.

As well because it is a shitspade.

Let me reiterate, they chopped a man into tiny bits, and flushed him into the sewers of Constantinople.

And then said "yeah, well, whoopsies ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

The 40s-50s in the USA had an amazing number of absolutely astounding ideas, which are still seminal in their fields. Much of the effects went public in the 60s-70s and completely shook the prior society in nearly every area.

My thesis is thus: a society with a lack of desperation, along with a prior encounter with extreme difficulty allows the mental freedom to find radical ideas and explore them without concern.

If we agree that new ideas are a threat to a culture ( after all, from evolutionary perspective, it survived until now by not entertaining that particular idea ), then society either should consider banning new ideas in an attempt to force stability or allow for limited beta testing of new ideas. Successful social experiments are integrated. The rest are pushed to the outskirts.

Disclaimer. I didn't have my coffee yet.

Economic downturn and lots of desperate people who are ready to believe in anything to restore their hope.

Just look at Russia in the 90s. Many people gave their last money to shamans, psychic healers, palm readers, astrologists. Some of these charlatans became national stars and household names with own TV shows in prime time.

to not be too political but as can be seen in a modern day of the massive spread of misinformation, there is a fine line between productive and genuine hearsay that fringes on the edge of paradigm shift discovery.

A great example to elude to the society you are trying to get out would be to look at the scientific community. While the outputs of all science has indeed made quality of life exponentially better and there is less widespread suffering due to natural events i.e. hunger, disease, etc... there is a certain golden standard most educated individuals hold to their ideas that work in confined black boxes.

Take for example electronics. It is a mutual notion that if certain physical formulas were discovered to be inaccurate, the devices that implement the formulas would fail. As if writing down on a piece of paper a new workable formalization will somehow send a pulse to my device that makes it stop working. Maybe it is the discovery of some fault that has an indiscernible fault. It would make sense then, that the probability to experience the fault would be nil for a long time and after n time cases would start to become more widespread. Let’s say after 50 failures the failure probability increases rapidly on a global scale. One can imagine the discovery of the fault would be close in time to the discovery of the formula which describes the fault. There would have been no clear clue or idealization of the fault unless an experimental condition had occurred. Perhaps this idea is what professors in physics talk about when they say if physics is wrong our devices would stop working.

Okay so I digress, all in all it seems the mindset to hold ones opinions of scientific matters as law is extreme. Often, people are too scared of being proven wrong? A conducive society would be one that doesn’t even attempt to make more physics off the ‘observation’ of black holes because the scientists would know how intense of a calculation it is and would considered a probability that they are way off the mark. Look at a puddle in the concrete during a rainy night. Do you see the street lights and cars reflect in the puddle? You have zero clue what the objects are, especially if you have never experienced or saw one of those objects. Let’s say in another case you have seen a car and a street light, in the puddle aren’t they just two blobs you cannot distinguish from one another, besides maybe their color? These blobs tell you absolutely nothing about Jill who is running late picking up her kid from soccer practice and runs the red light or the other blob, and crashes into another blob(this third blob probably couldn’t be seen at this point due to incoming from a different axis) which then causes jills kid to grow up without a mother and have sever traumatic psychology to overcome. Sure I can calculate some speeds at which the light blobs are moving but I have no clue that light has a whole different experience in Jills life. Light allows plants to grow which then gives Jill the substance to be alive. The blobs of light do not tell me how heavy the car is maybe only some idea because I have seen a car and can maybe make a comparison due to the size of the blob. There are millions of things going on that the extrapolated blob would never be able to tell me, especially again, the car that hit Jill that was not even picked up. All of a sudden jills blob doesn’t exist anymore, and if we only monitored the puddle there would be no shot in accurately identifying what the fuck happened to Jill.

So why do I compare this to black holes and say scientist shouldn’t spend all this time developing black hole theory? I only say it from the limited resource earth we live on. Unfortunately people play a game of economics of time, and we don’t just have unlimited resources to throw at every idea. If we did I would say there are benefits in developing the technology to view black holes. As if to say the technology is A) developed specifically view black holes and B) have zero other application. It is in fact clear a and b are false, but for arguments sake they are kind of irrelevant as the technologies developed could have been found elsewhere, and maybe on a quicker path or, the path could’ve ended shortly after and transformed into a different line of research. The mass amount of assumptions needed to be made to view black holes is ridiculous. Look at the trillions of celestial bodies that stand in the way of the light to come to earth for scientists to say the hole in light coming from this area of the universe is clear as day to be from a black hole, alibit more complicated since some other technologies like gravitational waves are used as well. What about a space age civilization that can terraform space itself? Why is a black hole more likely? Also our measurements of black holes and light not escaping the epoch fail to mention ideas like what does Greg black hole eat to be alive, and how is what Greg is fed made, what about the mindset Greg has before he crashes into black hole bob?

Too many assumptions are made by all parties involved and until one day humans can figure out a platform to do skeptical work without paralyzing development, these assumptions will be widespread and the society you describe will be impossible to envision.

Like I said a million times, there’s a lot of complexity to the argument I just described where some assumptions about process are ignored. The equivocation to black holes could have been supplanted by another widespread area of research which could have made my argument stronger, alas whenever I ponder doing science in a box black holes are their infinitude of complexity comes to mind.

> black holes

Black holes were treated as mere hypotheses, for many years. Then astronomers started finding things that seemed to behave exactly the way black holes were supposed to behave. Eventually it becomes more reasonable just to say "black hole" instead of "one of those things that behaves exactly like general relativity says black holes should".

I don't think your reflections-in-puddles analogy leads to the conclusions you think it does. It's more like this: We see all these shimmery vague reflections in puddles; we look as carefully as we can at a colossal number of puddles and set the smartest people we can find to work understanding what the puddle-reflections mean. Over hundreds of years, they figure out a lot about these reflections; they find subtle ways to use the reflections to stop people being hit by cars (or, sometimes, to make them get hit by cars; it turns out that this is a thing some governments are willing to spend a lot on). Some of the things we see in these reflections are still mysterious. Reflectionologists say "we should study them more and understand them better". You say "bah, they're fuzzy reflections and probably no one will ever be able to figure anything out from them" -- ignoring the zillions of things that have already been figured out from studying the reflections, many of which have had tremendous practical applications.

I added information about how it is useful. What I was saying is how in the study of the puddle you will never find the real, in the example given, human, experience. One is only to find an extrapolated system of movement none of which describes the motivation for the puddle reflection of Jill to move quick, only the cause of her quick movement. Some correlation may be found but we must remember correlation does not imply causation. No part of the image can show Jills son waiting after soccer practice in the rain because Jill forgot to pick him up which led to her rushing which led to the car accident to begin with.

I did however agree that there are many benefits from the pursuit, I guess I was trying to attest to the limitations of a finite resource driven society.

> Take for example electronics. [...]

No one thinks or says that finding an error in physics would make devices fail. What people say is (1) that in some cases if X were wrong then all these things would never have worked in the first place and (2) that in some cases if you try to design things using wrong science then the things you design won't work well.

Well while I agree and describe to some effect, more derived though, my physics professor said a couple of times of physics was wrong devices would fail. It is implying it wouldn’t have worked to begin with, I was taking the step forward that maybe it would until a fault tolerance level was reached.

Fault tolerance level is reached all the time. Devices and network solutions fail pretty regularly, all sorts of crazy bugs, both programmatic and hardware based. Not saying the underlying physics IS wrong, but I am sure there is a degree of accuracy which diverges and causes the edge cases. For example my network coverage goes out for no reason. The way the radio waves propagate to the cell tower is inefficient, maybe there’s some hidden science that can do it better. BELIEVE ME I would say impossibility level is like %99.999999 but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible.

So you're just saying: if the laws are just slightly wrong then devices built according to the wrong laws may fail but only very rarely and it may take us a while to notice? And therefore we can't say "these physical theories must be right because otherwise we'd see things failing" because the failures might be very rare?

Sure, that's correct, but no one[1] actually claims that present-day physics is known to be exactly right. For the excellent reason that present-day physics is known not to be exactly right. (Because our best theory of large-scale phenomena is general relativity, and our best theory of small-scale phenomena is quantum field theory, and if there's a way to combine those into a single theory that doesn't contradict itself then no one's found it yet.)

[1] Obviously any time you say "no one says X" you're likely to be wrong, because for any crazy thing there will be some people who say it. But no one who actually knows much about science is going to claim that present-day physics is exactly right, unless they're deliberately oversimplifying.

Exactly... nothing further for me to contribute! Thank you for listening!

Found the heretic! PG will now give you a million billion dollars.

I'm working on a heresy: a cryptocurrency with constant inflation. Most people in crypto dismiss the idea of inflation. It has been tried before. This time, I come up with a reward schedule to bootstrap inflation. And my crypto has inflation as its narrative. Inflation is its main feature.

People think I start another scam to replace Bitcoin. I actually think my project is not competing with Bitcoin. Galileo didn't advocate heliocentrism to bring down the church. He just supported the idea. The funny thing about heresy is most of them are somewhat trivial to see. People will think it's too trivial. Someone must have tried/proposed it before. Galileo's and Darwin's cases were also like this.

My project may fail. But the interesting thing about heresy is someone will try again at some point in the future. So I'm not too hung up about having to succeed.

Check out my project. :)

https://bitflate.org/post/2019/04/14/bitflate-cryptocurrency...

Besides longer blocktimes (2.5 minutes v.s. 1 minute), a higher inflation rate (7% v.s. ~4.5%), and a different hashing algorithm (SHA-256 v.s. Scrypt), how does Bitflate compare with Dogecoin? What aspects of Dogecoin made you decide to start your own project instead of working with an existing community that revolves around an inflationary cryprocurrency? I don't hold any Dogecoins, nor have I ever been a part of that community, they just seem like the primary example of an inflationary cryptocurrency to me and I'm trying to understand what makes your project different than the incumbent in that space, or if there's enough distinction that you don't see yourself as even being in competition with Dogecoin.

Thanks. Dogecoin has a constant tail emission. As supply grows, the rate of new coin inflation shrinks. Dogecoin community rejects the idea that they have a compound (percentage) inflation.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/1wuhyj/info_clear...

Dogecoin is a good example of how hard it is to depart from its own narrative, basically, commit a heresy.

Bitflate has a percentage point of 7% inflation. We're going to stick with it for the sake of this experiment. Given what I read, I think it'd be hard to convince Dogecoin to really do percentage point inflation. I'm nobody. Dogecoin community won't bother listening to me. In addition, my project starts out with inflation in the plan. It has reward halving until inflation stops at 7%. The reward schedule looks like this:

0: 50 (supply: 10 million)

1: 25 (supply: 15 million)

2: 12.5

3: 6.25 (end of halving)

4: 6.56 (start of inflation 7%)

5: 7.02

6: 7.51

7: 8.04

8: 8.60

9: 9.20

10: 9.85 (supply: 31 million)

Dogecoin narrative is fun/meme/tip coin. Bitflate narrative is inflation coin. I think narrative is important. Once set, it'll be hard to change. It's possible other communities will switch to inflation. I would consider it a success for our effort. :)

Thank you for your explanation. I'd seen your supply chart, but I somehow never caught that Dogecoin is only trying to inflate in terms of absolute number of coins. I guess I assumed they had a system that was roughly equivalent to some percentage inflation. Given this difference your experiment does seem interesting to me, and I wish you the best of luck!

As a side note, I dunno what to think about inflation v.s. deflation. My best guess is that those are different assets, we want both, and long blocktimes are more tolerable in deflationary stores of value than they are in inflationary currencies.

Thanks! I think Bitflate can become a coin for transaction use case. It departs from the Store of Value narrative. Follow us on Twitter for updates. :)

Side note: Almost everything by Paul Graham gets upvoted fairly quickly. Has anyone insights into what the key ingredients for this are?

In a manner speaking it is annoying to see (his not so profound) essay upvoted. Like people said he is the founder of he founded YC, so he has a fan following of the commoner naive programmer crowd. He certainly is an intelligent chap ( and very ordinary by some some measures) but by no means profound. In fact this subject of heresy is quite banal to me or anyone who has spent sufficient time observing society ( including the scientific community).

I have always wondered what his objective was when writing these essays.

(I always have an objective, when I write, which is not narcissism, or seeking approval/support/vindication).

I'm pretty sure PG entertains quite a few interesting heresies that he's simply not willing to share publicly because of the backlash. Instead, he nudges people to find them on their own.

>Instead, he nudges people to find them on their own.

A.k.a driving sense into the (intellectual) peasants :). I hope he succeeds. My observation though is that crows are never whiter by washing.

There is a whole essay by him about this class of ideas, "Things you can't say."

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

That's been my take for a while. Idly curious what they are, but I'd rather not be extra-horrified at whatever they are.

Whether something is "profound" is extremely subjective, and rooted in someone's personal experiences. Banal to you is not the same as banal to everyone.

But to (playfully) turn it around on you, what was your objective in writing your comment? To display that you already know this and are thusly above the "naieve" upvoters of "banality"? Is that not "seeking approval/support/vindication?" :-)

>Whether something is "profound" is extremely subjective, and rooted in someone's personal experiences. Banal to you is not the same as banal to everyone.

Subjective - I can agree that to _some_ extent. But there is a somewhat non subjective element to it also. Most of PGs essays are banal. He's actually a banal guy. ( though I still rate him very intelligent, and an astute businessman, and that is something not to be scoffed at). Contrast that to another well know figure in the tech world: Peter Thiel, who I personally feel is extremely well read, extremely reflective, quite articulate etc. Most people will either agree that he is far more of an original thinker that PG. Either that, or they do not understand him(PT), or they think he(PT) is nuts.

If you are an atheist, you will know what I'm talking about if you ever ever argued with religious people who will give their blanket dismissive opinion about the theory of evolution, without having made the slightest of attempts to understand it. It is not that they just have a subjectively different opinion on the subject, it is outright ignorance. Speaking about the theory of evolution I'm aware of one guy who i saw in a you tube video online who is indeed a critic/skeptic of the Darwinian theory of evolution, and has some arguments with substance to back it up. I will have no problem listening to him, but the former category are people who I do not even think is worth my time arguing with.

I don't really see how you can simply assume that there's some sort of absolute standard for "banality". Would this article be banal to a 10 year old? A 20 year old? How many super surprising things might seem banal to an 80 year old? I'm 34 and I didn't think it was banal at all. A lot of PG's essays seem obvious to me now, but I can tell you what originally brought me to this site is that PG's thought's were not obvious to me at all when I was 18, and they had a huge influence on me. Perhaps I'm banal? Wouldn't be the worst thing in the world I suppose, although I don't think people that know me would generally describe me that way. If you were to think I'm banal, it's probably because you have thought about things I'm saying more than I myself have, but that doesn't mean my statements would be banal to people who haven't thought about things I want to say.

>I'm 34 and I didn't think it was banal at all.

Fair enough, for someone who is 34. Just make sure to read/listen/see ( if you can ) the works of people who are may have made astute observations of human nature a very long time back, even generations back. I'm talking about the likes of Aristotle, or a Carl Sagan, or a George Orwell, or a Woody Allen ( a comedian) etc. They all offer significantly more insight into human nature much more than PG can.

Ofcourse your limit might be PG at your age. And nothing wrong with that. I too will be banal by some standards. We all got to fine tune to our level of stupidly to the 'thought' leaders we are think are our heroes.

May I also suggest, that you are taking things a little too personally? You are internalizing something which IMHO, you shouldn't. A thick skin helps.

To answer your other question:

>Would this article be banal to a 10 year old? A 20 year old? How many super surprising things might seem banal to an 80 year old?

This would be quite banal to a well read 'smart' 20 year old. ( 10 year old - extremely unlikely)

> But to (playfully) turn it around on you, what was your objective in writing your comment? To display that you already know this and are thusly above the "naieve" upvoters of "banality"? Is that not "seeking approval/support/vindication?" :-)

It is a very important question. ( and I would have answered it even if you had asked it in any other manner without being 'playful') ). You can see what I have put on my HN profile and also here: https://realminority.wordpress.com/about/

You see, approval/verbal support/vindication etc. are normal human emotions that most of have, but I personally make a conscious effort to minimize. Independent thinkers don't look for social approvals. I'd like to think of myself as a (relatively ofcourse) independent thinker. I have an nearly inactive account at Facebook and similar site, and spend almost never spend anytime on these sites.

If you look at my recent post history, I have started posting some presumably contentious posts, generally seeking similar minded people for long term alliances. The alliances will have to result in tangible material/health/survival benefits. I know for a fact that I'm not a wordsmith, so in isolation those post may convey an inaccurate image of me among those with whom there could be potential alliances. With these similar minded people, it indeed does matter to me what they think of me, from a long term perspective. I do want to convey a larger personality than what can be inferred from my contentious posts. So this reasoning is at the logical level not at the emotional level.

(ofcourse if you get into thinking along likes of evolutionary biology you will realize that all need to seek social approval was indeed ultimately intended for tangible benefits like survival, but often these emotions can be far removed from ground reality, as it happens with social media).

To summarize - there is an intended audience for my reply to you too. ( though I'm not sure if you may be one of them)

That's a fair reason to post things, I guess, although fairly meta. My point is just that, just because this post may be common knowledge to you does not mean that it's common knowledge to most people (especially considering the number of upvotes). I see this thought pattern all the time on forums: "I know this, so clearly everyone must". If it was obvious then it wouldn't be getting upvotes.

>My point is just that, just because this post may be common knowledge to you does not mean that it's common knowledge to most people (especially considering the number of upvotes)

I know that, and the term banality should should not be confused with commonality with the the general populace. There is a relationship ofcourse between the two.

( I blame myself for being inaccurate, not a gifted writer ...)

> "I know this, so clearly everyone must"

The opposite actually is true for me.

You see, news that splashes at you is still annoyance( like the ads). It becomes hard to filter out noise from usefulness. It's an ongoing battle. Of course you might ask, as to why I even click a post like this. There is good reason for that - among the hysterical fanboys, there is often the occasional critic who is of value to me.

Disclaimer: I think his essays are strong.

There’s a lot of selection bias in his upvoting: a large number of people know/knew about HN because they liked PG’s writing.

I agree there's likely some selection bias as you mentioned. I think the strength of his writing is the biggest factor though.

His writing style is strong for sure but the concepts and observations are fairly trivial. I suspect it says something about the kind of ideas and discourse which are thought of as novel in tech culture.

I upvoted you to counter some idiot(s) who down voted you...

I think his essays are models of clarity and conciseness. But I agree about the content.

Hacker news is basically his website.

Be a famous computer scientist who co-founded Y Combinator and created this very site?

The cult of over-analyzing it all and coming out as being right in the end. Also, dreams of membership in the club of not-just-knowing-everything-but-knowing-everything-better.

He founded YC

he writes well. this may not be the best, but his essays are usually clearly written, to the point, nonjudgemental, right amount of brevity etc.

It's his site?

The flip side of the coin is protecting truth or useful ideas from ultimately less true or useful ideas. Or just simply avoiding the overhead of exhaustively vetting every idea without regard for its apparent merit. It's just like genetics: mutation can be valuable and is ultimately the way that anything evolves, but any given mutation is much much more likely to be problematic than valuable. There's a fine balance in identifying the ideal level of mutation for the long-term health of an ecosystem. Similarly, there's a balance in finding the right degree of resistance to novel ideas. Maximum support for heresy is probably not the equilibrium point.

I don’t think we should feel the need to comprehensively entertain every idea that is different and sounds silly.

For a healthy ideas ecosystem: If you hear a new and silly idea, and you don’t have the time or energy or interest to look into it properly, the best thing to do for everyone’s sake is to ignore it.

Either address an idea properly, or ignore it. Don’t write a 140-character snarky dismissal of it, don’t attack the personal characteristics of the person holding it, and certainly don’t seek to censor or “cancel” them.

True and useful ideas can take care of themselves. It’s mostly false and useless ideas that need to be protected from heresy.

I think when it comes to evaluating true novelty we underestimate how much our language does our thinking for us. Which is another reason why novel ideas hide from us so well. To put them into articulated forms that can be carried through time effectively (even to communicate them to later versions of ourselves) we have to bend the meanings of the words we're using in novel ways. Not easy to do but essential to an idea's survival.

Happens to me every time. Every major product I've built from the ground up was first greeted as heresy by those already in that particular industry, and then later copied by the same people.

By now I'm used to it, and use it as a gauge of how sneaky I'll have to be in marketing it.

Ok here's one, a website that shows things you posted that have been removed from Reddit [1]. Ask HN: heretical or not? This is the only tool AFAIK that shows removed content for a given account.

[1] https://revddit.com

Maybe we need a special place where we can discuss highly unpopular and 'heretical' ideas that strongly contradict perceived wisdom or popular opinion. Any ideas?

I'd like to see a once per month thread on HN that allows it, with rate limiting removed from accounts that have been flagged for participating in flame wars, and a policy of "try to speak only in truthful terms". I think some interesting conversations that aren't otherwise possible might result.

To put it in other fancy words: when challenging paradigms, expect resistance. If you want to non-obvious („contrarian“ in SV speak), look for paradigms and question them.

History and philosophy of sciences have studied this phenomenon a lot. Read Thomas Kuhn's "The structure of Scientific revolutions".

Reading the comments its obvious that this hits a nerve with many people, exactly as the essay argues :) Our conceptual world is just that, conceptual, and is open to interpretation and change, and is fundamentally open ended. And at our current societal development we really really do not like that. We want to know how things are, and poking holes in how things are, is not popular (yet)

I do not think people will call something novel that (actually) works heresy.

Example?

What's something with resistance that was discovered in the past 20 years?

If it works, people will see that, even without a working model.

Other than silly examples like calling the Wii a Wii I can't name anything. And arguably the Wii wasn't a 'discover something new'. (I also don't count one comment about DB) Is Wikipedia an example?

Why now?

PG has written about this before. My thinking is that the tech stagnation has lately become evident even to the most disbelieving ones. And perhaps even SV is starting to think it's time to go ahead with the less safe ideas. That's just the idea i get from my reading of Twitters, i m not even in the US :)

I dislike this essay’s use of the concept of heresey. Heresy had force back in the day when religious orders had hegemonic control over society. That’s no longer the case today. I know that’s not what PG means by his use of the term, but there’s no reflection in this peice about the metaphorical use of the concept.

Furthermore, the argument is fundamentally flawed. What consitutes heresy is entirely contingent upon the prevailing societal order’s judgements. Let’s put aside the problematic use of heresey for a second and deal with PG’s actual argument—which is that it’s good to go after ideas that the majority of society either doesn’t recognize or sees as anathema. This quality alone doesn’t prove the marker of a good idea. For all the « heretical » ideas like Darwin’s and Galilleo’s that proved lifechanging, there are a horde that were useless of harmful.

The value in these thinker’s ideas has almost nothing to do with their heretical nature, which is a politico-religious quality—that these ideas are felt as « life-altering » in history may have something to do with their heretical nature (since they necessarily flew in the face of the prevailihg order of the day) but their fame and historical import does not actually have anything to do with their theoretic rigor, scientific value, or general usefulness.

I don’t really see the point of this essay other than to say « think outside the box » in a quite clunky way by arguing from history and making some dubious claims (e.g. the essay seems to suggest that chasing heresies is an operable method to make novel discoveries while neither of the examples it uses are evidence of this methodology—while the discoveries may have been heretical, its unlikely Darwin or Galileo chased the discoveries on account of their heretical status).

Wikipedia defines the word as "any belief or theory that is strongly at variance with established beliefs or customs, in particular the accepted beliefs of a church or religious organization".

You're presumably using a different definition, or else neither of your arguments make sense. Maybe you should say what you think the word means?

Fair enough. But it’s also fair to quote the sentence you cited in its etirety instead of chopping it off at the comma:

« Heresy is any belief or theory that is strongly at variance with established beliefs or customs, in particular the accepted beliefs of a church or religious organization.«

A better word for a belief that disagrees with general sentiment without having religious conotations is iconoclasm which unlike heresy, has the religious meaning as its secondary definition.( heresy’s religious sense is still the primary definition according to oxford).

Though I must say I’m not surprised the differentiation between such words is coming to ruin given our general laziness in regard to language, the decay of religious systems, and a broad ignorance of etymology and history. It won’t be surprising to me if the word totally loses its religious elment in a few years.

Sorry for the salt. Have to presenr this one for the future so I can check my prediction.

What are some examples of ideas today that are considered heretical but may have value to them?

Everything about automobiles and their required infrastructure was a huge mistake and should be undone.

Modern behavioral genetic research as described, for example, in Robert Plomin's "Blueprint", seems to make some people uncomfortable. I suppose it could qualify as "heresy" as it challenges a number of widely held beliefs.

Hoo boy, it’s a trap. That’s the thing about heretical ideas, I can get downvoted and possibly banned from the site from even gesturing in their general direction.

But okay, here goes. Here are some areas where there’s a very large “dead zone” of ideas which surrounds some bad ideas but which may also encompass some good ones too:

1. Intrinsic statistical racial differences or other ideas labelled as racist

2. Intrinsic statistical sexual differences or other ideas labelled as sexist

3. Maybe some aspects of the Holocaust have been exaggerated?

4. (Increasingly) Climate change skepticism

I wish to stress, once again, that all of these heretical regions certainly contain a bunch of bad ideas at their core; but the size of the fenced-off region in each case is so large that it makes you wonder whether some good ideas have been fenced off too.

Yeah, those were some of the ideas I thought about but I found it difficult to find the kind of value PG mentioned from them in the midst of the bad ideas.

Thanks though! I also find myself hesitating to comment or post here to avoid getting downvoted. I would've thought HN would be the most tolerant among online communities of controversial or even obviously wrong ideas.

This post serves as a good illustration of why pursuing heretical ideas per se isn't such a great idea. For every lone genius there are a hundred genocidal racists.

most of libertarianism

Homeopathy: see "Water Memory Due to Chains of Nano-Pearls" (https://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=...)

Someone asks for heretical ideas. Someone else replies honestly. Honest reply is downvoted, hard.

Regardless of the merit, or not, of that idea... this whole process perfectly demonstrates the article's point.

The question was "What are some examples of ideas today that are considered heretical but may have value to them?" There's no conceivable value in homeopathy, so it's non-responsive to the question that was asked.

You are just a member of the people who consider homeopathy and water memory as an heresy. You claim that there is no value to it, but this might be wrong and the article given in reference support this possibility.

An aspect that Paul Graham did not address in his essay is the difficulty one can face to communicate about something in a domain considered an heresy. The probability to find something new in such domain is greater than the average, but the recognition is much more difficult to gain than average.

Thanks! It was an interesting read regardless of the understandable controversy of the topic. Sorry to see you were downvoted. Anyone else?

Not sure what Grahams views are on economics, but I have certainly read/heard business people trumpet heretical ideas with praise before, having specifically in mind those heresies that conform to their particular world view. Graham uses two scientists as examples that have long been situated uncontroversially in the scientific world as canonical. Scientists are often used as examples of this kind of "revolutionary thinking" lauded by people in this world. I am curious how Graham would respond to the heresy of Marx's critique of capital to challenge the idea that capitalism is the best and historically final form of economics. Marx is just one example here of a thinker that is heretical without being "innovative" in the archetypical sense of Einstein or an inventor. I am generally curious if when someone promotes heresy, they already have in mind the kind of heresies that already fit into their dogmas. Graham may be more broad minded than this, but this kind of view does get thrown around enough to look like a trope.

Novelty he talks about is one thing, but economics is a policy driven political system, not rooted in science and hence forced on people and supported with propaganda. The difference is between fighting opinions of powerless people and fighting powerful governments that have full force of propaganda behind them and all kinds of censorship, silencing techniques that affect spread of information everywhere.

how was Marx not innovative? Also, today it feels that Marx is the orthodoxy and the heretics are those who reject him

If Marx feels like orthodoxy you either haven't read a significant amount of Marx or you haven't been paying attention to who controls the capital in society. I say this as somebody who does not identify as a Marxist, but used to.

are we talking about now or the past? Marx is mainstream economic thought today, not some heresy. Back then, marx was certainly 'heretic', but i dont think there was talk of the end of history.

The "end of history" bit is Hegel, really. I could see Marx being considered Orthodox in some History and English departments, but his viewpoint is definitely a minority among Economists, and society is not broadly structured in a way that reflects his thinking. The social nets we see today come nowhere near a from-each/to-each narrative. The workers do not own the means of production. Wealth is more concentrated than ever.

e.g. the most prominent US democratic candidates openly support ideas that are more marxist than anything else. They represent a lot of people, it's not some small heresy

That party is currently in the minority, but more importantly their policies do not reflect Marxism. Their last Presidential nominee and last President both supported capitalism. You can point to some figures that pay lip-service to socialism, like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, but even then the details of their policies are a mixed-market capitalism with a bigger socialist band-aide than we currently have. Marx was suggesting that people would identify as a groupman and act as if everybody mutually possessed everything. Obama (who was widely accused of being a communist) forced people to purchase healthcare from private corporations or face a government-imposed fine. These things are wildly different. While I wouldn't argue that the Soviet Union was ever really embodying Marxism either, the idea was certainly orthodox. If the Democrats widely identified as Marxists despite not actually implementing Marxist policies, I'd give you that Marxism was orthodox in their party (and simply call them hyprocrits in addition). This is not the case. They both widely denounce Marxism and don't implement Marxist policies. We can't call every welfare program Marxism unless we're willing to retroactively label Emperor Trajan a Marxist; Marxism is more specific than welfare.

Marx didn't challenge capitalism though,he said it wasn't the endgame, just the late-midgame.

WALL-E is our future, and WALL-E is perfect Marxist communism.

The opposite is also true: the interestingness and explosiveness of a novel idea is a function of its hereticity. We all create interesting business opportinities indirectly, by resisting to change.

The timing of the publishing of this seems coincidentally aligned with YC's very recent backout of a Chinese outpost.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/21/y-combinator-abruptly-shut...

I read this as a coded way for Paul Graham to express his distaste for those opposing the YC China expansion.

Wonder what inspired him to put out two essays in short order after having been silent since early 2017...

Gotta wonder if this was inspired by the Cybertruck announcement and the polarization that has followed.

When did PG redesign the site?

2006? That's the last obvious change I see in WayBack Machine (addition of the blue side buttons).

Oh I see now. The mobile version loaded differently this time. There’s a shopping cart in the upper righthand corner for some reason. The desktop version is the same.

> "Galileo and Darwin are famous examples of this phenomenon, but it's probably always an ingredient in the resistance to new ideas."

The problem with this logic is that for every Galileo and Darwin, there are thousands of crackpots out there. Every month or so I see some news about engines that run on water as fuel.

As Walter Kotschnig said: "Let us keep our minds open, by all means, as long as that means keeping our sense of perspective and seeking an understanding of the forces which mould the world. But don’t keep your minds so open that your brains fall out!"

The problem is, it's not obvious a priori which ideas are crackpot and which ideas are hidden gems. (The infamous comparison being Newton's passion for theology and alchemy in addition to calculus and physics; it's not obvious he would have made his accomplishments in the latter, without being the kind of person willing to invest time in the former.)

I think the right strategy is to acknowledge that such pursuits are proverbial moon-shots, setting expectations and risk tolerance accordingly. Most innovations fail, and that's okay; "the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas".

Reading this I can't help but think about my mother, justifying all her shady pseudoscience beliefs by mentioning that brilliant and innovant scientists were treated with disdain during their own times, just as pseudoscience is. Heresies then turn into antivaxxers, electrosensitivity, homeopathy and so on.

This might work for business opportunities, but please leave science out of that.

Carl Sagan put it best:

"But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

But nobody laughs at the Time Cube.

Bozo the clown had decent product market fit and great personal branding, so of that list, he would be the most valuable for YC acolytes to study.

Most of these ideas are scoffed at, but people will make honest attempts to debunk them and keep the argument in terms of true and false. With heresy, it’s different; ideas are more likely regarded as dangerous or evil, and people are silenced rather than debunked. Lysenkoists[1] don’t get into debates with geneticists; they just throw them into the gulag.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

Anti-vaxxers and promoters of quack therapy over efficacious medical treatment for serious conditions are frequently called out as dangerous and evil. And many attempt to convince themselves or others that this proves they are latter day heretics being silenced by a medical establishment intent on self preservation.

And I don’t actually think that’s a useful way of responding to them because it reinforces that feeling. But there are also debunkings. The most anti-creationist people in the world set up a website (talkorigins.org) that catalogues every creationist argument alongside point-by-point rebuttals. I’ve seen similar websites for moon landing denial. People aren’t always nice about it, but for a long time the dominant counternarrative was, “here is a point by point explanation of how everything you’re claiming is wrong” which sometimes escalated to “you are an idiot”.

Actual dangerous heretics can’t be treated that way because their beliefs are reasonable enough to withstand scrutiny, so usually they just end up getting misrepresented and silenced instead. When we adopt the same strategy with kooks, we just make the kooks look more reasonable IMO.

In fact I don’t think the example of anti-vaxxers goes far enough. The worst kooks in the world, who are almost universally terrible people, are Holocaust deniers. And yeah, I think it’s perfectly fine to rhetorically slap literal Holocaust deniers in the face and tell them they are horrible people. But it’s even better to rhetorically slap them in the face with reams of evidence proving that the Holocaust happened. And to some extent we do that. People aren’t covering up the vast amount of primary source material on the concentration camps, the SS, etc. There is no stigma on actual research on the subject. And, as awful as he may be, nobody is throwing David Irving into a gulag.

Nobody is throwing Irving in a gulag, but he did spend a year in a comparatively nice Austrian prison. And I think the kind of responses to 'heresy' PG is talking about is more along the lines of mild censure, opprobrium and deplatforming/firing anyway. Anti-vaxxers et al get plenty of that, more so than serious discussions or replication attempts in the scientific literature.

Institutions which pounce on 'heresy' might be doing so because they're insecure and that insecurity might be driven by fear they're mistaken, but sometimes their reasons to fear the other side winning the rhetorical argument are good ones. The result of self-styled heretic Andrew Wakefield appears to be a measurable increase in childhood measles [and no decline in autism...]. And going back to PG's original argument which was more about the fruits of 'heresy' rather than pluralism, what the nature of that risk is might be something to consider before going beyond questioning authority to promote 'heresy' against a particular cherished idea.

And certainly it'd be good to avoid the confirmation bias that people actually being angered by what you're doing is a sign you're looking in the right places.

I'm pretty sure every vaccine goes through clinical trials to prove both safety and efficacy. The mere act of doing that debunks anti-vaxxers just as the mere act of publishing history about the Holocaust debunks Holocaust deniers. In that sense, anti-vaxxers get all the serious discussions they could ever realistically want.

Or hey--maybe they don't. Maybe there are some procedural mistakes going on and those clinical trials don't reliably replicate or something. But we all know vaccines still work. What should we do--try and fix our clinical trials, or just get those annoying anti-vaxxers to shut up? I say we improve the clinical trials.

Let's talk about another kooky idea: that OJ Simpson didn't actually murder his ex-wife and her friend, and that the LAPD planted all of the evidence because they are so racist that they decided to irrationally hate one of America's most beloved actors and professional athletes. You know what immediately happened after a jury of twelve people in Southern California seemed to actually buy this ridiculous conspiracy theory? By and large, the consequence was that American law enforcement radically improved their handling of evidence. It turns out that sometimes, even if you listen to people who are wrong and believe things that are completely crazy, you go out of your way to improve your own epistemic hygiene just to debunk them.

The thing is, this is a very hard subject to discuss without actually saying some of the possibly-true heresies that are being suppressed, because then the discussion just becomes a discussion of the alleged heresy. You can point out anti-vaxxers and I can agree that anti-vaxxers are wrong and that actual harm results from people believing anti-vaxxer arguments, but if I countered by suggesting a heretical belief that I believe to be true and to be wrongfully suppressed, I've put myself in a bad position personally and completely changed the subject.

So let's use the same historical example I've been using. Anti-vax is wrong, terrible pseudoscience. Lysenkoism was also wrong, terrible pseudoscience. If you have a civic tradition where not even pseudoscientists can be silenced, thrown into gulags, or executed, you run the risk that anti-vaxxers will convince people of pseudoscience and then people will die of measles because they listened to pseudoscientists. If you have a civic tradition that you should just silence people and throw them into gulags for promoting pseudoscience, you run the risk that Lysenko will become director of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences, falsely designate actual genetics as "pseudoscience", and promote pseudoscience while all of the legitimate scientists get silenced, thrown into gulags, or executed. To make matters worse, Lysenkoism won't work, you won't grow enough food, people will starve to death, and the only people who actually know how to fix it will be either dead, in gulags, or either silenced or intimidated from speaking up.

In other words, you're making the assumption that might literally makes right--that the truth will always be on the same side as power and that there is no way that kooks will ever hijack your anti-kook system. Are you really willing to take that risk? I'm not, which is why I'm willing to err on the side of celebrating heresy and contrarianism and allowing a free exchange of ideas. It's not a perfect system, but I think allowing the free exchange of ideas will, in aggregate and in the long run, systemically favor truthful claims over false claims far more than implicitly trusting anyone with the power to decide by force what's true and what's false.

> In other words, you're making the assumption that might literally makes right--that the truth will always be on the same side as power and that there is no way that kooks will ever hijack your anti-kook system. Are you really willing to take that risk?

No I'm not, in fact my previous post explicitly acknowledged that some institutions suppress heresies precisely because they're insecure about the possibility their critics might be right.

What I am doing is criticising the equally crass argument that if someone wants to suppress something enough, it's probably an indication there's some merit to it...

> What I am doing is criticising the equally crass argument that if someone wants to suppress something enough, it's probably an indication there's some merit to it...

Which is not the argument that I'm making, at least not quite. I'm discussing the interaction between suppression and counterargument. If an idea is suppressed in the absence of any convincing counterargument, that combination of factors can be heavily suggestive of merit.

> Heresies then turn into antivaxxers

I do not hold the belief that vaccines are not beneficial, or that they necessarily cause autism, but it isn't difficult to find examples of conversations where if you disagree with the narrative in the slightest, you are presumed to be a full on disbeliever and treated accordingly.

The climate change debate is similar in this regard.

People think they are speaking completely in accordance with science, but they are often mistaken.

Please note that I'm not necessarily implying this behavior is terribly harmful, but I often wonder if there may be some hidden harm, but not in the way one might think. When the narrative that is derived from "the science" is partially untruthful, and this is pointed out in conspiracy circles, to what degree might this be motivating people to not believe, or at least be suspicious of, the overall story?

To me, this seems like a very good question, especially considering our lack of success in completely persuading the masses. However, whenever I mention it, what little reaction it receives is negative (see: "you are presumed to be....").

As the saying goes, honestly is the best policy. I wonder how applicable that may be in these cases.

I am with you on this comment.

I feel like mentioning famous scientist does not help the case at all. I mean PG is talking about coming up with ideas to sell to VC or private equity firms... There is nothing as grand as scientific progress here... just randos trying to get rich.

I'm afraid you've deeply misunderstood PG if you think that's what he cares about or is writing about here. What he cares about is great work: doing it, understanding what it is, looking at the history of it.

> I mean PG is talking about coming up with ideas to sell to VC or private equity firms... There is nothing as grand as scientific progress here... just randos trying to get rich.

What on earth gives you that idea?

I beg to differ. This is exactly spot on for science too. You gave homeopathy as an example. Here is an article that explain water memory, the underlying principle of homeopathy: ["Water Memory Due to Chains of Nano-Pearls"](https://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=...)

Water memory is pseudoscience.

Yes yes, sadly I'm well aware of water memory already.

Definitely an area not explored much. Any research into homeopathy is seen either with scoff or pity.

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/DNA_sequence_reconstituted_from_Wate...

Some heresies:

- React is bad and bloated.

- Startup industry is exploiting idealistic young people, as slaves of VC/venture partner "bet placers" with the promises of often unrealizable rewards, by promoting startup mythology, as lab rats most of whom will end up failed experiments.

- China is not bad and should be supported, and the West can learn much from it, if the West could set aside its insecurity and pomp and see clearly.

There is a difference between being heretical and being impolite, insulting or deliberately provocative. It is not only what you say but also how you say it.

This being said, how do you expect to receive anything but backlash with a conditional clause like in your last sentence ("if the West could set aside its insecurity and pomp and see clearly."). That's not heresy, it's deliberate edgy-ness.

Beside that I believe that 'the West' could learn some things from China because I believe that it is not all bad. Claiming that China is not bad in light of the China Cables is pretty bold, though.

...deliberate edgy-ness...

Strong disagree, from this Westerner. There is ample evidence of both insecurity and pomp anywhere one looks, in USA and in popular Western media.

Maybe you're just jealous then. So go to China, don't blame me.

Burn him

He he. Well, at least the heresies were actual heresies. They were so effective that a whole subthread starting with a guy who asked me to say what I think is good about China, had to be detached because it descended into trolling and China bashing. Surprise, surprised. I think we've identified a pretty good heresy.

The problem is heresies stop people seeing beyond them. So they don't see the useful new ideas, because they are blinded by the "2 minutes hate" the heresy triggers.

Can you expand on what types of things you think we should be learning from China?

I assume you were just being curious, but digressions into offtopic nationalistic arguments is definitely not what we need more of.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21627850 and marked it off-topic.

Sure I could but then you'd just point out exactly why that looks wrong to you, since that seems to be what you'd like to do, so what would be the point?

It only works when you're actually ready to listen. That's not my problem. You get ready to learn on your own time. If you're resisting there's no point trying to put it in front of you so you see, since you'll just pretend you don't see. Cherished mistaken assumptions protection and all. Okay?

I was not asking from a standpoint of trying to tell you that you're wrong. I was asking because it seems like a good example to take away from the article but I'm not sure what specifically you were thinking.

Sure I could but then you'd just point out exactly why that looks wrong to you

Which is perfectly fine because just because you have an opinion does not make it objectively true. In return, you can freely critize the opinion of others. Being ready to listen does not imply to thoughtlessly accept all and everything.

I also think that heresies should to be vetted carefully to filter out what's wrong and let remain only what's actually true.

It’s easy to say things like that when you live in a bubble of hypereducated successful people and you are being myopic concentrating on your own field.

There is no shortage of heresy in modern culture: astrology, homeopathy, creationism, dianetics, quantum mysticism, anti-aging creams and essential oils, torsion fields, moon landing conspiracy, the Bermuda Triangle, feng shui and yoga woo (at least in the form they are practiced in the West), conversion therapy, graphology, anti-vax, neuro-linguistic programming, phrenology, aryanism, etc.

I think Gavin Belsen is an apt caricature of this mindset turned up to 11, a successful Silicone Valley entrepreneur with megalomaniac tendencies and his own exotic, mystic and Eastern spiritual guru.

Yes, some people may cry wolf every time a new idea is presented, but oftentimes they are right and the new idea is indeed heresy and maybe even dangerous.

None of that stuff is heresy. Most of it is crackpottery and kookish, but crackpots and kooks tend to get debunked rather than shouted down. With heretics there’s usually no attempt at good faith counterargument at all.

Oh, sure, when you agree with something controversial, it is just society being irrational. But when you disagree with something, it is obviously because it is crackpottery.

Don’t you think people who are against these “heresies” have exactly the same view?

Heresy comes from the Greek word for "choose" and it always means to pick-and-choose what to believe, against reason.

There are two faults of faith: doubt, or rejecting belief when there's a good reason for it; and superstition, or having faith when there's no good reason for it. (Similarly, the two faults of hope are despair and presumption.)

Heresy means picking one of those sides of faith. Superstitions are heresies because there are no good reasons to believe in things like anti-vax, horoscopes, tarot cards, knocking on wood, and anti-aging-cream.

Doubts are heresies because there are good and established reasons to believe in things like the moon landing, the Big Bang theory, and evolution.

Do you not live in a bubble of hypereducated successful people? If not, why not? Wouldn't it be more interesting and fun to live in one?

The Bay Area has a large one, but any city with a university has a smart bubble.

I live in New Orleans. We call you “a gifted program”.

that's not heresy, those are pure reactionism.

I wonder if this could be applied to anti vaccination crowd.

The corollary is that your heresy needs to ultimately have an empirical basis which can explain the phenomenon in question better than the existing dogma.

Or to the flat earth society

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