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.)