We might have a habit of being curious and seeing things and patterns that aren’t really there. And it’s frustrating to watch it misfire.
But…maybe it’s worth it to come up with silly ideas on a fair number of occasions if that same tendency sometimes leads us to make valid discoveries that we wouldn’t otherwise have made. Sometimes even people who have wrong ideas run over important things.
There was this guy once who disregarded well-established (and correct) geophysical science with some cockamamie theory that he thought would make him rich. He tried to sell a bunch of people on funding his ideas, who mostly turned him down. Eventually, he managed to get funds and set out to prove his ideas. That experiment would have been suicidal for him — because his ideas were totally wrong, making the experiment lethal — if not for the great good fortune of, during the course of this experiment, making a (very important) real discovery that saved his life. He then tried — not very successfully — to claim that his new discovery actually showed that his ideas were correct.
He was a dreamer, and a bit of a nut, and he was wrong. His name was Christopher Columbus, and he had convinced himself that the circumference of the world was much smaller than was actually the case, and that if there was nothing but ocean to the west of Europe, one could safely reach Asia in a single trip of the sort that ships of the time could make. Instead, he discovered the New World.
There were a lot of other people who went looking down other weird rabbit holes with other weird ideas. They usually didn’t come up with anything worthwhile.
But…that discovery was worth a whole lot of poking around blind alleys.
So, hey, maybe a human tendency towards a bit of being a crank and running down crazy ideas is worthwhile, if it’s the price we pay to occasionally come up with something really amazing down a weird rabbit hole.
Humans are doomed to always be a bit silly, always seeking the answer to it all and mostly finding that it is 42.
“the real Law of Fives is realizing that everything can be related to the number five if you try hard enough.”
We might have a habit of being curious and seeing things and patterns that aren’t really there. And it’s frustrating to watch it misfire.
But…maybe it’s worth it to come up with silly ideas on a fair number of occasions if that same tendency sometimes leads us to make valid discoveries that we wouldn’t otherwise have made. Sometimes even people who have wrong ideas run over important things.
There was this guy once who disregarded well-established (and correct) geophysical science with some cockamamie theory that he thought would make him rich. He tried to sell a bunch of people on funding his ideas, who mostly turned him down. Eventually, he managed to get funds and set out to prove his ideas. That experiment would have been suicidal for him — because his ideas were totally wrong, making the experiment lethal — if not for the great good fortune of, during the course of this experiment, making a (very important) real discovery that saved his life. He then tried — not very successfully — to claim that his new discovery actually showed that his ideas were correct.
He was a dreamer, and a bit of a nut, and he was wrong. His name was Christopher Columbus, and he had convinced himself that the circumference of the world was much smaller than was actually the case, and that if there was nothing but ocean to the west of Europe, one could safely reach Asia in a single trip of the sort that ships of the time could make. Instead, he discovered the New World.
There were a lot of other people who went looking down other weird rabbit holes with other weird ideas. They usually didn’t come up with anything worthwhile.
But…that discovery was worth a whole lot of poking around blind alleys.
So, hey, maybe a human tendency towards a bit of being a crank and running down crazy ideas is worthwhile, if it’s the price we pay to occasionally come up with something really amazing down a weird rabbit hole.
WTF is this whitewashing AI shit doing here? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus#Criticism_and_defense