新颖与异端
新颖与异端
2019年11月
如果你发现了新事物，很有可能会被指责为某种形式的异端。
要发现新事物，你必须研究那些好但不明显的想法；如果一个想法明显很好，其他人可能已经在研究它了。好想法不明显的一个常见方式是它隐藏在人们非常依恋的错误假设的阴影中。但是，你从研究这样的想法中发现的任何东西都会倾向于掩盖它的错误假设。因此，你会从那些执着于错误假设的人那里得到很多压力。伽利略和达尔文是这种现象的著名例子，但这可能总是抵抗新思想的因素。
因此，组织或社会拥有扑灭异端的文化是特别危险的。当你压制异端时，你不仅仅是防止人们反驳你试图保护的错误假设。你还压制了任何间接暗示它是错误的想法。每个珍视的错误假设周围都有一个未探索想法的死区。假设越是荒谬，它创造的死区就越大。
然而，这种现象也有积极的一面。如果你在寻找新想法，找到它们的一种方法就是寻找异端。当你从这种方式看问题时，错误假设周围令人沮丧的大死区变成了令人兴奋的新想法大矿。
Novelty and Heresy
November 2019
If you discover something new, there’s a significant chance you’ll be accused of some form of heresy.
To discover new things, you have to work on ideas that are good but non-obvious; if an idea is obviously good, other people are probably already working on it. One common way for a good idea to be non-obvious is for it to be hidden in the shadow of some mistaken assumption that people are very attached to. But anything you discover from working on such an idea will tend to contradict the mistaken assumption that was concealing it. And you will thus get a lot of heat from people attached to the mistaken assumption. Galileo and Darwin are famous examples of this phenomenon, but it’s probably always an ingredient in the resistance to new ideas.
So it’s particularly dangerous for an organization or society to have a culture of pouncing on heresy. When you suppress heresies, you don’t just prevent people from contradicting the mistaken assumption you’re trying to protect. You also suppress any idea that implies indirectly that it’s false. Every cherished mistaken assumption has a dead zone of unexplored ideas around it. And the more preposterous the assumption, the bigger the dead zone it creates.
There is a positive side to this phenomenon though. If you’re looking for new ideas, one way to find them is by looking for heresies. When you look at the question this way, the depressingly large dead zones around mistaken assumptions become excitingly large mines of new ideas.