Stop Ridiculing Ideas | Hacker News Reader

Stop Ridiculing Ideas

jamescun.com

21 pointsjamescun19 comments

I've learned over the years that no amount of criticism, ridicule, feedback, input, commentary or lauding should kill an idea. Its all positive if you take it that way. Every statement made about your idea should be taken onboard and evaluated and used as fuel for improving your notion. Some feedback is shit and some ridicule is useful - if you love your idea, its up to you to figure out which is which and how you can use it to propel your plan forward.

I love it when I run into someone who has nothing but negativity or ridicule for my plan. At least it means I've come up with something worth reacting to. The worst is when I hear nothing. Crickets hurt :-)

It's my observation that industry in general and technology in particular is dominated by a kind of group think that makes certain 'ideas' unassailable once they've reach a certain level of critical mass from the crunchocracy, irrespective of their objective merits.

Roughly: I think most organisations would be better served with a culture that encourages less inhibition, less self censorship and more encouragement of brainstorming ideas, and a much more rigorous critical, analytical investigation of ideas before accepting them.

Yes and no. While mocking shouldn't be encouraged, there's value in criticizing an idea; finding good answers to the problems raised by critics is indispensable.

The important thing is that you should approach it with a constructive mindset, picking it apart without disregarding it outright.

He did say 'stop ridiculing' and not 'stop criticizing'.

It's impossible to have a discussion on perpetual motion or cold fusion because people who don't even understand the basics will jump in and start mocking everyone. These are extreme examples, but the same thing happens to any idea that someone thinks is impossible, naive, or bad.

(I'm not saying I think they are possible. I'm saying it should be possible to have a discussion about them... Because I'm also not saying they're impossible.)

Perpetual motion is physically impossible. It fully deserves ridicule. Cold fusion will stop being ridiculed once there's a reproducible experiment.

Pseudoscience deserves absolutely no respect. Quite the opposite. The same goes for any variety of bullshit.

Taking ideas seriously is the only way to test them. If scientists hadn't once upon a time took the idea of perpetual motion machines and ESP, etc. very seriously, we could not be so certain today that they are not true.

Instead of mocking someone who espouses one of these notions (which I have never found to be an effective method of convincing them that the notion is false), I wonder if encouraging them to take it more seriously (e.g., look up experiments, actually run them, etc.) would be much better t convincing them its wrong.

Perpetual motion doesn't need testing, and never did. It is a gross violation of thermodynamics, all of the science that has gone into that is sufficient. The so called inventors of cold fusion machines should make perhaps even the slightest attempt to not look like skuzzballs and actually demonstrate their work, then ask for reproductions.

You are aware that ESP still remains a subject of research?

Some recent meta-analyses:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=746UdU4... Ganzfeld experiments http://www.lfr.org/LFR/csl/library/HonortonFerrari.pdf Random number generators http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2006-08436-001

The recent feeling the future experiments: http://caps.ucsf.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/be... - original article http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/100/3/426/ - reply by Wagenmachers et al http://dbem.ws/ResponsetoWagenmakers.pdf -reply to the comment by Bem and Utts (a statistician who's researched widely into psi). http://www.ruudwetzels.com/articles/ClarificationsForBemUtts... - another reply from Wagenmacher

Original articles (most of them better run) showing the same results as Bem et al http://scientificexploration.org/journal/jse_18_2_radin.pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.169... - more commentary on this potential retrocausal influence.

Now, these should be added to the 100 years plus research into all of this. Either all of the scientists involved in this research were deluded or lying, or there exist parts of the human mind that may influence the world outside themselves. Now, I suspect that these effects are quite small, but they are nonetheless interesting.

Again, I note that this is extremely controversial, but arguing that ESP has been conclusively demonstrated not to exist (which would, in any case, be impossible) it might be worthwhile to figure out what the hell is going on with these experiments.

There was also a meta analysis on the sense of being stared at which has never been refuted, link below. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1348/00071260477395244...

I actually ran an experiment on this (for my undergrad thesis) but didn't demonstrate significance (my first harsh intitiation into the importance of statistical power).

On your more general point about testing ideas, no matter how crazy they seem, I totally agree, and i am saddened by the closed minded approach to many subjects displayed by scientists. I do understand though, the incentives are all wrong for this kind of unexpected research.

When I was running the aforementioned experiments, I was told by most of my lecturers that I should never publish or write about this, as it would lead to me never getting a job, which is a really sad state of affairs for a science.

This is exactly the kind of thinking that he's talking about... No idea deserves ridicule, only an open mind and constructive criticism - after all, cold fusion and other things would have a better chance at becoming a reproducible experiment if people wouldn't mock everyone who comes up with a new idea in the field, no matter how ridiculous it sounds.

Well... people don't deserve ridicule and they deserve respect.

As much as I preach "all feedback is positive feedback", I don't think that means we should stop treating people like human beings. Its just generally bad form.

"Ridiculing people" isn't "not treating people like human beings".

perhaps not, but it is generally rude and disrespectful. YMMV.

He did say 'stop ridiculing' and not 'stop criticizing'

Yes, but in the example he gave when he pointed out that even himself falls for that, he says "instead of complimenting it or saying what I liked about the idea, my first comments were massive flaws I saw in the idea and how it could all fail."

This shouldn't be confused with ridiculing.

Ridiculing serves as an information overload protection, it shuts the inventor up and prevents ones brain to explore the idea in more depth.

One has to respect that people don't want to be bombarded with information. They have a life, too.

It's not just a British cultural problem - everyone everywhere in the world ridicules people and things they don't understand, don't want to admit may be true, or just don't have time to think about.

If you would create something like the Silicon Valley in the UK and bring the brightest minds and hard working people from all over the world, you'd also get better odds at success for ideas that seem ridiculous.

I think the problem is more general and it's not the culture. It's just much easier to find arguments for how the idea could fail rather than ones supporting it or proving it might work.

It reminds me of the awesome "failure" scene in Meet the Robinsons. We should ask what experiments have been run on the idea, what has been proven or disproven.

Most people criticise out of envy. They don't want to think that somebody else has a better idea than them, by pointing out flaws they assert their own ego.

I don't think this is categorically true. Critical responses to ideas are also a cultural thing (think: Americans tend to be over-the-top positive, Eastern Europeans tend to be bluntly negative).

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