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olalonde comments on Rationality Quotes May 2012 - Less Wrong
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Forgive my stupidity, but I'm not sure I get this one. Should I read it as "[...] it's probably for the same reasons you haven't done it yourself."?
I think it just means "you should do it", which is only sometimes the appropriate response.
Both sound quite appropriate; it seems likely that in the process of attempting to do some crazy awesome thing, you will run into the exact reasons why nobody has done it before; either you'll find out why it wasn't actually a good idea, or you'll do something awesome.
But there must be better ways to find out the reasons not to do it. Just doing it instead is a tremendous waste of time.
Talking to the sorts of people who would or should have tried already might be one avenue.
That's obviously true, yeah. But if it's cool enough that you'd consider doing it, and you actually, as the quote implies, cannot understand why nobody has attempted it despite having done initial research, then you may be better off preparing to try it yourself rather than doing more research to try and find someone else who didn't quite do it before. Not all avenues of research are fruitful, and it might actually be better to go ahead and try than to expend a bunch of effort trying to dig up someone else's failure.