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The Wright brothers didn't get off the ground by gluing wings to their arms, and Einstein didn't discover the theory of relativity in his study of alchemy. Entertaining silly or stupid ideas is risky, and for every Wright brother there's another 100 failed entrepreneurs who lost everything trying to make that dream a reality.

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Case in point: Lilienthal, who wrote the aerodynamics book that inspired much of the wing building of the Wrights, died when he crashed with one of his gliders.

Amazing book by the way, there was a cheap reprint published a few years ago.

That comes across as straw manning. The point is that all kinds of problems are seen as intractable to the cynic, not that every optimist has the correct approach to solve the problem.

It’s easy and weak to just throw up ones hands and say it’s too hard but I don’t want to live in a society where 100% of people take that approach.

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