Hrm. Okay, I see your point, I think. I think there's some benefit in devoting a small portion of your efforts to pursuing outlying hypotheses. Probably proportional to the chance of them being true, I guess, depending on how divisible the resources are. If by "stupid", Doctorow means "basic", he might be talking about overlooked issues everyone assumed had already been addressed. But I guess probabilistically that's the same thing - its unlikely after a certain amount of effort that basic issues haven't been addressed, so its an outlying hypothesis, and should again get approximately as much attention as its likelihood of being true, depending on resources and how neatly they can be divided up. And maybe let the unlikely things bubble up in importance if the previously-thought-more-likely things shrink due to apparently conflicting evidence... A glaring example to me seems the abrahamic god's nonexplanatory abilities going unquestioned for as long as they did. Like, treating god as a box to throw unexplained things in and then hiding god behind "mysteriousness" begs the question of why there's a god clouded in mysteriousness hanging around.