Comment by lalalandland
8 hours ago
For every von Neumann you probably have thousands if not millions of crack pots with ideas not worth wasting time on. So I understand the scepticism
8 hours ago
For every von Neumann you probably have thousands if not millions of crack pots with ideas not worth wasting time on. So I understand the scepticism
If people are assigned a "gatekeeping" position, they should at least be expected to be able to tell great minds from crack pots. (As opposed to just blindly applying a statistical filter)
Otherwise why not just replace them with a script (or these days, an AI)
Isn’t history replete with examples of great minds who were received as crackpots until, after careers’ worth of labor to validate them, some of their crazy ideas turned out to be correct?
In this context "gatekeeper" is often defined as broadly as "any individual academic or researcher receiving a cold email".
E.g., economics.
I've literally never met a person who didn't consider themselves economically knowledgeable.
It's like an analog to the fact that almost all people consider themselves funny.
Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has. -- Descartes
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