Modern medical practice was a fringe view two hundred years ago.
My point is if you hide the fringe then you either get left behind or prevent others from moving forward.
Modern medical practice was a fringe view two hundred years ago.
My point is if you hide the fringe then you either get left behind or prevent others from moving forward.
I think this is really only an “issue” when it comes to politics and culture wars
Ultimately they’re OK with both because the politics justify it.
It’s so obvious that as formal religion has weakened that informal religion has taken over. It’s not a bible, it’s a screen, you have faith, you think what it tells you, there are priests, you can wear the wrong thing, you do what makes you accepted in your tribe. If you didn’t see it during covid, then you extra double have a religion.
All these people that mock religion - and have no idea they have their own is almost entertaining if it wasn’t so destructive. It’s wired into humans, we know it is, and then pretend it isn’t to our detriment.
Most useful stuff comes from the leading edge. Occasionally from the fringe, but the SNR there is terrible. Either way though, by the time you want it written up in an encyclopedia it's been sorted out if it's useful for something.
If you just write up everything, you'll be drowning in half-baked ideas and crackpot theories, the net damage to the value of the place far outweighs any positives.
Do you feel like there are a shortage of places to discuss ideas that don’t have much traction?
I think this is far less true in other arenas, which is why I'm not talking about politics or culture here. Although there is probably some merit in anarchy there too. It'd be naive of us to assume our current understanding of government is complete. Imagine being a Monarchist in the 1700s and thinking there was no more perfect form of government!
I think it’s incredibly valuable to be able to apply it to politics enough to understand what is normal and feels natural to us (liberalism, capitalism, technology) was not always so.
People here may be familiar with the exploration–exploitation tradeoff (which, by the way, has a Wikipedia article that could use some significant expansion by some people who are familiar). It is rightly pointed out here that there are areas where it is appropriate for there to be less discovery and greater focus on exploiting or validating existing knowledge, and of course, vice versa. One may propose also the possibility that there be multiple points on the spectrum that one could take even in the same field, for example, preliminary results may be shared as preprints before peer-review, yet even after review, post-publication review and replication are essential for robustness.
Still, it may seem odd that exploration, original research, is expressly prohibited on Wikipedia. But should we be without any such restriction, Wikipedia is written by Randy in Boise.