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MattG comments on Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

7 Post author: polymathwannabe 11 August 2015 01:24PM

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Comment author: pianoforte611 11 August 2015 10:42:14PM *  13 points [-]

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)

Comment author: [deleted] 12 August 2015 02:18:14AM *  4 points [-]

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.

Comment author: pianoforte611 12 August 2015 04:07:49AM 8 points [-]

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.

Comment author: [deleted] 12 August 2015 03:24:12PM 2 points [-]

How about renaming it to "Brainstorming Thread"?