[HN Gopher] Rules for Weird Ideas
___________________________________________________________________
Rules for Weird Ideas
Author : mbwgh
Score : 55 points
Date : 2022-08-15 19:37 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dynomight.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (dynomight.net)
| bendbro wrote:
| > I've encountered some of this for claiming aspartame is likely
| harmless
|
| Disgusting goblin
|
| > but ultrasonic humidifiers might not be
|
| Enlightened patrician
| evancoop wrote:
| I suppose, if the definition of "weird" is loosely-related to
| "low probability of truth" or "wildly deviant from existing
| orthodoxy," the highest-upside ideas would seem to be "weird."
|
| In that vein, the question is how many "weird" ideas can your
| portfolio of time and money afford at any point?
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| Rule of brainstorming: Start with weird ideas to get to good
| ideas.
|
| At my company, when faced with tough problems, we encourage
| absurd, weird and hilarious ideas. Why? Because at minimum it
| takes the edge off high stakes problem solving. At best, it frees
| up creative thinking and generates good workable ideas.
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| That's my favorite thing to do. Then you plot all the ideas on
| a graph with the axes "Interesting" vs "Feasible"
| amelius wrote:
| Yes. This rule is often formulated as: you can't criticize
| other people's ideas in a brainstorm session.
| tabtab wrote:
| I keep proposing Dynamic Relational (DR) be implemented, but the
| idea is dismissed for vague or inconsistent reasons. The "NoSql"
| movement has dynamic products, but they are too different from
| existing RDBMS. DR only tweaks what's needed to get dynamism, but
| otherwise sticks to most RDBMS and SQL conventions to shrink the
| learning curve for existing RDBMS shops. You can have your
| dynamic cake and RDBMS cake at the same time. To me it's a no-
| brainer. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15352786 )
|
| Note: JSON column types in existing RDBMS treat JSON-derived
| columns as second-class citizens. In DR all columns are equal
| citizens.
| pedalpete wrote:
| In the design world this is known as MAYA, Most Advanced Yet
| Acceptable.
|
| I wrote a blog post about it here (https://soundmind.co/blog/is-
| your-product-too-weird)
|
| People need a frame of reference to start from, and something
| that they can build a foundation of understanding on.
| derbOac wrote:
| Athletics is full of good testcases for this: people develop
| _very_ strongly held beliefs about things that don 't hold up
| with empirical evidence, and can be very resistant to change.
| Many of the patterns discussed in the linked essay can be
| observed, as well as many biases (surely X would have been
| adopted by professional players if it worked / wouldn't have been
| adopted by professionals if it didn't work).
| photochemsyn wrote:
| On the subject of poisonous tomatoes: most of the tomato
| relatives and look-alikes of North America are quite poisonous,
| so the reluctance of the English immigrants to New England is
| perhaps understandable. Take a look, and ask if _Solanum
| carolinense_ is easy to distinguish from a green version of
| edible _Solanum lycopersicum_ :
|
| https://eattheplanet.org/solanum-poisonous-relatives-of-toma...
|
| Spaniards and Italians who imported the Mexico/Central American
| cultivar developed by native American cultivators had a different
| opinion, but the English weren't interest for several hundred
| years, say the historians:
|
| http://www.vegetablefacts.net/vegetable-history/history-of-t...
|
| Conclusion: what one culture views as weird, others might view as
| normal.
| amelius wrote:
| Also, tomatoes contain a lot of MSG, which in some parts of the
| internet is considered to be the most poisonous form of poison.
| bombcar wrote:
| You can also apply "Pascal's wager" to many weird ideas; if X is
| true, what does thinking X is false do to me? And versa vice?
|
| Most of the "big ticket" items have been found (don't drink
| molten lead, it's bad for you) so the marginal effects are going
| to be relatively low on all these things.
| karencarits wrote:
| "[Pascal's wager] posits that human beings wager with their
| lives that God either exists or does not. Pascal argues that a
| rational person should live as though God exists and seek to
| believe in God. If God does not exist, such a person will have
| only a finite loss (some pleasures, luxury, etc.), whereas if
| God does exist, he stands to receive infinite gains (as
| represented by eternity in Heaven) and avoid infinite losses
| (an eternity in Hell)"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| Another way of looking at is the "two way" and "one way" doors.
| Two ways doors are actions no matter how crazy, we can turn
| around and recover from, while one way doors are very
| hard/expensive/impossible to recover from.
| paulpauper wrote:
| It's called 'idiosyncrasy points'. If you have built up a
| reputation for quality work, then you are allowed to have some
| weird/crazy ideas. Most people do not have this privilege. The
| don't yet have the reputation.
|
| Social shaming is another problem...people can face serious
| irreparable social or workplace consequences for having bad
| ideas.
|
| Life is not like a Ted talk, where you can keep failing until you
| succeed. Sometimes you need to get it right fast. Survivorship
| bias means you only hear about the people whose weird ideas
| turned out correct and were vindicated.
| csours wrote:
| Another rule: You don't have to hear a weird idea as a fact, you
| can hear it on the basis of someone else's experience.
| user00012-ab wrote:
| is this post just some passive aggressive dig at getting
| vaccinated?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > But more broadly, she was following a good strategy: For most
| people, "just do what your doctor says" will give better
| results than, "take unsolicited medical advice from uppity
| relatives."
|
| So, no.
| yuan43 wrote:
| The weirdness of ideas can also behave cyclically.
|
| Consider nuclear power. Until this year, it was roundly condemned
| as an unworkable solution to CO2 reduction and energy supply. The
| waste problem hadn't been solved and never was going to be. The
| effects of an accident, no matter how unlikely, were not worth
| the risk.
|
| That largely came about because of Fukushima accident a decade
| earlier. Prior to that point nuclear power was tolerated, if not
| welcomed. After that accident, the idea became weird. Plants were
| decommissioned and plans to build new plants shelved.
|
| Oddly enough nothing about nuclear power itself changed at those
| two inflection points. Same principles of operation. Same reactor
| designs (mostly). Same risks. Same potential.
|
| What changed was people's minds - on a large scale.
| chrchang523 wrote:
| See also: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wkuDgmpxwbu2M2k3w/you-
| have-a...
|
| With no weirdness points, you duplicate others' work. With too
| many weirdness points, you're almost certainly wrong. The sweet
| spot for innovation is in between.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| good piece. there's too much openness and naivete and goodwill
| for wrong and weird ideas (somehow many people seem to be
| convinced the opposite is the case). When the Jehova's witnesses
| come knocking at your door you don't hold a theology seminar to
| disprove them, you just close the door again.
|
| > _" Skepticism of weird ideas is a kind of "immune system" to
| prevent us from believing in nonsense._"
|
| That's a useful way to frame things and I think we'd do well to
| go back to Dawkins original concept of 'memes'. Ideas don't
| spread by virtue of their truthfulness but by virtue of their
| fitness which is to say primarily their virality. (it's why
| hucksters with bad ideas _love_ debates and attention, even if
| they 're obviously wrong).
|
| with all the talk about need for open-mindedness and criticism of
| filter bubbles, a good filter is the best thing you can have in
| the modern world because that's nothing else than an immune
| system to a lot of not merely wrong, but predatory ideas.
| jschveibinz wrote:
| I enjoyed the article, but I'd like to push back on a few of the
| rules.
|
| Rule 1: Working at the population level can be like the story of
| sheep going over a cliff. This is not necessarily a biologically
| protective trait for the individual. Expedient yes, but not
| necessarily advantageous.
|
| Rule 2: Getting trusted information from other people requires
| that first one knows the provenance of the information. A cult is
| an example of "trusted information" within a group originating
| from one charismatic source. In this case the "weird idea" is
| actually normalized within the group.
|
| Rule 6: If one is to consider a fraction of weird ideas, then one
| has the capacity to consider all weird ideas. In fact, there is
| something to be gained from considering everything and using the
| knowledge gained in other ways.
|
| Rule X: if a weird idea looks like a horse, smells like a horse,
| and it whinnies like a horse, then it's probably not a zebra.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I enjoyed that!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-08-15 23:00 UTC)