This might work for business opportunities, but please leave science out of that.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
But I'm not convinced that the suppression is correlated with whether the idea is remotely worth exploring or not, still less that it's positively correlated with it being a good thing. And I think that's where 'is there a good reason why people researching into this are ostracised comes into question, which is where there's a less obvious case of a risk to society from heliocentrism than sympathetic takes on Naziism
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 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.
What on earth gives you that idea?
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/DNA_sequence_reconstituted_from_Wate...