Thread by @palladiummag

You, a "Scientist": I have carefully worked within established frameworks to advance our knowledge slightly. More research is needed.

Sir Isaac Newton, noted weirdo: here, I used math to describe gravity to prove my own weird metaphysical heresy. Brb studying secret bible codes.

All intellectual progress is driven by weirdos with obscure grievances against normal society who are wrong 90% of the time, but uniquely right 10% of the time.

This is very difficult for relatively normal and respectable people to understand. If we admitted that those weirdos we exclude are actually the instruments of progress, our class position is threatened! So we creatively identify ourselves with past heretics, but not current ones

This is doubly hard because we judge people in our industrialized society by adherence to standards, and legible reliable output. This keeps out the pure junk, but also cuts much of the genius. You can't get tenure with 90% garbage, 10% unique insight.

This is all not to say we can just let people run around being wrong 90% of the time and still get taken seriously. It's too dangerous.

But maybe it's only too dangerous because we are missing some key social technology...

Related: technological progress comes more from throwing few-strings-attached money at smart people to work on anything that sounds plausible than it does from any kind of reliable bureaucratic process of incremental development.

Something that may also be related: many of the great geniuses were particularly into esoteric sources of knowledge. Traditions of wisdom that never made it into the mainstream, but did remain accessible. See eg Newton with alchemy, hermetica, etc.

Should we strive to be 90% wrong, 10% uniquely insightful?