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It's not American attitude, it's just people being people.

As a reminder, even Einstein was dismissed as an incompetent quack by his colleagues in Germany when he unveiled relativity, so lack of respect for one another has always been a thing for our species.

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To be fair most of "revolutionary" ideas are quackery so it's a good heuristic.

It's a good heuristic if you just want to be right more often, but if you want to find new good ideas then it'll rule out every single one of them.

This implies new ideas have to be revolutionary ? It's usually possible to progress in the existing direction. Science advances one funeral at a time and all that jazz.

With such a heuristic, if you seek food, and most of your environment is not food, so you dismiss your entire environment as not food, and refuse to seek, you die :)

Ironically they portray Einstein as sort of out of touch with contemporary quantum physics in the movie and explain that as the reason he wasn't part of the Manhattan a project.

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