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pianoforte611 comments on Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I dislike these threads. They encourage and reward ill thought out contrarian (often straight up crackpot) ideas. Correcting them is a large cost, in part because convincing an audience doesn't require arguing things that are true, it merely requires arguing things that take more time to refute than to assert. I'd rather not get tangled up in object level for this reason by citing real examples but here is an example of the kind of idea I would expect to see here.
Made up crazy idea (that I expect some people here would endorse):
"Get rid of research ethics boards, they prevent useful research from being done that would benefit society out of an ill founded fear of us becoming the Nazis"
This sort of argument ignores the history behind why research ethics boards exist, and is usually asserted by people who are ignorant of the actual guidelines that research ethics boards abide by. It's also usually asserted without knowledge of the actual abuses of patient trust that were committed before research ethics guidelines were established), which include withholding known treatments and doing liver toxicity study in children without telling them (quite an extensive one in which biopsies were taken, and upon recovery, liver toxicity was re-induced leading to damage lasting at least a month).
(Of course, it took me much longer to write that response than to make the initial claim)
I don't think the only purpose of this forum is to make well thought out good ideas and then refute if they are in fact well thought out good ideas.
Sometimes it's great to have a thread we're we use crazier less refined ideas to help with brainstorming or as the creative seed of a better idea.
I am in strong support of unrefined ideas, brainstorming and revision. Thinking about more, its not the undefinedness. There is a certain class of ideas that personally frustrate me - they are ideas that are deliberately edgy and extreme, and usually involve violating some common Western value.
I'd say in this thread, there about half top level comments which are genuinely unrefined uncertain but interesting ideas. The rest, maybe less than half are edgy contrarian ideas. Although looking back to the last Crazy Ideas thread, over 90% seem like genuinely experimental ideas. Maybe I should just wait for a few more iterations.
How about renaming it to "Brainstorming Thread"?
I agree that the crazy idea thread could benefit from some more focus. I think the poster of the thread could add a topic or specific constraints. I planned to do so but as polymathwannabe posted the thread this month (thank you polymathwannabe!) this didn't happen. I think it is fully OK to get this thread started with some more unrestricted crazy ideas and later add focus.
Possible constraints:
choose a field (physics, politics, math, engineering...)
choose a idea maturity level (spontaneous, long though about, discussed with other people, ...)
in/out of ones field of expertise
level of detail required
@pianoforte611: Could such constraints fix your objections?
After thinking about it some more, I don't think the problem is that large. This thread will probably continued to be used as a soapbox for a few edgy contrarian ideas, but most of the comments are interesting ideas that I would have never have thought of.
Why not just criticize the actual crazy ideas?
It usually takes a lot more time to do and a larger inferential distance to bridge. Also the existence of this thread itself encourages and creates positive reinforcement for low quality contrarian ideas.
Edit: Oh are you asking why I criticized a made up idea instead of one in this thread? I didn't want to get dragged into the object level, and I didn't want to seem like I was picking on someone, I just wanted to illustrate why it takes longer to respond to an idea than to generate it. The idea I criticized is similar to comments I've read here and on the Facebook page.