Here's a problem I'm trying to solve: I'm one of millions - maybe even hundreds of millions of people who think they have a novel idea. Say for arguments sake that I have a novel idea about how to solve quantum gravity. Outside academia testing an idea, no matter how novel, is effectively impossible.
There’s a subset of people who genuinely want to disprove our ideas, get them out of our minds, while to be fair others are convinced they’re right, no matter what the evidence suggests - the earth is flat.
One of the issues is that academics don't differentiate between these 2 subsets and are also understandably focused on their work. They have problems to solve and need to stay on task.
So, with my own idea about quantum gravity - I did what I could. I asked ChatGPT to tell me why my idea can’t work. I Googled, dug around, and even skimmed academic papers. I could not find a similar idea, I could not disprove it. Part of the reason could be that as a non-academic, I don’t know how to do a systematic literature review. But... I gave it a crack, I’ve gotten as far as I could and hit an inevitable dead end. Reaching out to academics has also been a dead end—they often don’t reply, and when they do, they say they receive hundreds of such requests and don’t have the time.
Approaching them with novel ideas, especially when you lack a science background, is almost futile. The advice is usually: “If your idea is so great, learn the field, study, and test it yourself.” But for many people, that’s simply not practical, not a reality. I, for one, am not in a position to spend years studying theoretical physics. And particularly to disprove a hypothesis.
And - I’m not deluded; I don’t expect my idea to have merit. I just want to understand why it doesn’t work or can't work. Yes, there’s a minuscule hope it has some sliver of merit but if someone gave me a solid reason why it’s flawed, I’d drop it instantly and get on with my life.
I think there’s a missing piece in how we handle novel ideas outside of academia. Traditionally, academia has been quite closed off, but the world has changed. We can now learn about quantum mechanics on YouTube, can easily access lectures from top physicists, and access papers and books easily. The output of academia has become more open, but the input side remains firmly shut.
Take quantum gravity: it’s one of the great mysteries, and even though physicists have made a little progress they are still effectively stuck. If you listen to some leading voices like Sabine Hossenfelder Acedemia is stuck, doing the same things over and over again - is there a space for novel ideas from the outside?
Today's society is more knowledgeable than ever before, and among the noise, there could be something valuable.
The question is: how do we find the specks of gold and the odd diamond in a sea of rubbish? Most ideas—mine, yours, even Einstein’s —are inevitably rubbish - although Einstein had a solid stack of incredible ideas - I'm anticipating he had lots of duds that were readily discarded.
So the problem is picking out the best ideas from an almost infinate mountain of rubbish. A tiny fraction of good ideas could add up to something significant.
I suspect that Academics might have to accept that filtering novel ideas from the general unpublished population is worth considering. We need a way to distill the nearly infinite quantity of ideas into a manageable set: the ones worth looking at, the ones worth testing, and the ones that, while improbable, still deserve some thought.
And, crucially, we need a system that leads people to help themselves to explain why some ideas aren’t worth pursuing.
Enter AI and machine learning. I Imagine a system where ideas are submitted, filtered for novelty and quality, and then assessed in a systematic way. I’m not sure how exactly, but there must be a way to evaluate the novelty of ideas. Otherwise, we risk ignoring a knowledgeable, creative population and a mountain of potential.
Otherwise we risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
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