Controversy
Humans have a huge flaw, a bug in their operating system. We are hardwired with a feature that isn’t serving us anymore. It is to look for consistency and social proof in things. We’re in a period of high technological, cultural, and scientific growth. Our hard-wiring is slowing us down from adopting new ideas.
Which new ideas, you ask? The controversial ones.
Ideas such as earth being round, flipping the food pyramid, evolution, capitalism. All of these ideas were extremely controversial at their time. Slowly but surely more people accepted them. These ideas eventually became the norm.
When you look into history, most of the accumulated knowledge turns out to be either false, misleading, or outdated. Some examples are bloodletting, Lysenkoism, creationism, and communism.
The majority of past knowledge is replaced by something better, something closer to truth. Which was a controversial idea at that time. It probably generated a huge backlash and resistance. But eventually, the old idea died, and the new one became the norm.
We use the principle of social proof to determine what is correct by finding out what other people think is correct. We don’t try to experiment and verify every idea, we don’t have the time to! When a new idea challenges what we know, we get defensive, because all our knowledge that others have told us is possibly going to be shattered to pieces. And the rate of knowledge shattering to pieces has been in rapid acceleration in this past century. Thanks to globalism and the internet.
Science is the study of truth, but there is no final truth. There is only the accepted Bayesian theorem. This just means our best guess at the time, which we are unable to falsify yet. The door of science is always open to new truths. But science advances one funeral at a time. Arguably, society does as well. But with this rapid acceleration of knowledge, we need to kill outdated models fast instead of waiting for people to die. We need to be able to verify new ideas without requiring social proof.
How to simply verify new ideas that are going to kill the old ones?
When you hear someone say something so controversial that it goes against all your past knowledge, there are four possibilities;
1. They’re trolling
2. They’re an idiot
3. They’re profiting
4. They’re right
We don’t need a dozen scientists experimenting on something for a decade to establish that an idea is true. We never cared for consensus or science to come up with a definite answer anyway. Test the first three possibilities above and make sure you’re listening to a reasonable and smart person without a profit scheme. If that’s true, chances are the controversial knowledge is probably true. [1]
If the idea is testable and falsifiable, you can run your own experiment. But how many people actually ran a simulation of capitalism vs socialism before choosing one?
The goal is to get into a new truth early on, which the world will take a decade to catch up to. This provides a good job or investment opportunity. Maybe a way to live a happier life for an additional decade. This is a competitive advantage, in life, school, business, everything. Use it.
My eyes light up and my interest peaks whenever I see something controversial. Because they might just be right. If I capture the right idea before everyone else, well that’s how you get ahead today.
Tell me, what are some controversial ideas I should be looking into?
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Notes
[1] Maybe not the final truth, but probably truer than the previously accepted theory.
Thanks to Onur Solmaz for reading drafts of this.
