Thanks for expanding. That second paragraph is the "meat and potatoes" I was wishing for, while only cautioning that style doesn't necessarily falsify.

Yes I agree. My mind goes back to the Bob Cringely plane documentary recently posted upon the occasion of his sad passing,[0] as a prime example of how someone can elevate radical thinking too far. The Contrarianism Is The Product, essentially, which can be great as a tech writer, but it's lousy for an airplane PM.

You brought the meat! Thanks

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49950029 (missed opportunity for an Ozzy reference, but I didn't watch it all so maybe there's a "Crazy Plane" song later)

This thread is dead, but my point was about radical alternatives to academic fads. These are stickier than most fads -- they typically last a generation to a lifespan, because the only thing that kills them is the death of their believers. And they are always wrong, and absurdly wrong, and destructively wrong. Any alternatives to them are either light paraphrases of them, or else radical; and the radical ones are mostly crank. But the only way to make actual progress is to find the rare radical hypothesis that is not crank, and the only practicable way to do that is to generate more radical hypotheses. (The impracticable approach is to wait for a genius. People have starved to death doing that.)