In a perfect world, we could patiently hear everyone out and then judge their ideas on their merits, without taking fallible shortcuts. In this particular world, we don't have time for that. There are too many ideas to be judged.

I'm reminded of a theme in Carl Sagan's novel Contact, where it turns out the human race contains so many lunatics proclaiming all manners of blatantly preposterous things that when the protagonist has a genuine encounter with extraterrestrial life, but returns without irrefutable evidence, nobody believes what should be the most important event in human history has really taken place. Too many shitheads have been crying wolf.

It's a sad state of affairs that we even need to view each other with this much scepticism. What a wonderful world this would be if we wouldn't need our occasionally misfiring heuristics to filter out all the noise.