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JoshuaZ comments on What is bunk? - Less Wrong
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There isn't as much of a free rider problem as you make there out to be. Different people can divide their time to different subjects to investigate. Thus, we all benefit from the collective effort to investigate.
Investigating unlikely claims is also healthy in general because it helps us hone our reasoning capabilities so people investigating them may get some direct benefit.
I'm not sure I like the category of "bunk"; it seems overly broad and not clearly defined. Your definition "there are claims so cracked that they aren't worth investigating" is not a great one since different claims have different degrees of impact on how we'd need to realign our worldview. Also, some claims may be "bunk" in one form but not in others. To use your example of Austrian economics, there might be some truth in the claims about self-organization of market forces but the deliberate attempt to avoid empirical or statistical investigation (with some members of the Austrian school more or less explicitly saying that their system is not falsifiable) renders much of Austrian economics not even wrong.
It may be more helpful to ask: When should we take minority views seriously? What should we do when the area of study in which the matter falls is not one of our expertise?
You're right, it is mostly a question of minority views, but I'll defend my use of "bunk" a little bit.
Not every bunk view is a minority view; the majority of Americans believe in ghosts, for example. What makes me initially estimate it unlikely that ghosts exist is not that it's a minority opinion (it's not) but that it contradicts the entire framework I have for understanding the physical world. I start off, therefore, with a really low prior for ghosts. So low, in fact, that it's potentially not worth the effort of further investigation.
In the case of ghosts it doesn't take very much effort to investigate enough to toss out the claim; ghosts are an easy case. Other topics, though, take a lot of effort to investigate, and my initial low prior isn't based on much evidence. Misclassifying them as bunk can be costly. But classifying nothing as bunk would break the bank, in attention and effort terms. Bunk is anything which, for whatever reason (being a minority view, requiring large realignment of our worldview, etc) is too unlikely to be worth checking.
And the problem of bunk is this: if it isn't even worth it to do a preliminary check, how do you know how unlikely it is?
What I worry about is that, given that investigation takes effort, and given that we decide whether or not to investigate based on prior estimation of how likely a claim is, there are potentially claims that we're disbelieving for no good reason. Perhaps individuals with limited time and energy are doomed to disbelieve some claims for no good reason.