alt Hacker NewsIt's easy to give up existing concepts. It's called being a crackpot and you can find thousands of papers doing that online.
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Yes. But crackpots are still vital.
Let me put it this way. Once upon a time people didn't know about solar eclipse. But then a day came when a certain somebody was instantly promoted to a Lead Staff Senior Astronomer, just because they predicted to the hour that the sun is going to disappear.
Well, but think about the field just one day before that:
- maybe 10 theories that said "it's just a reformulation/refactoring, nothing to see here, all business as usual, no new predictions, very safe for the author",
- maybe 100 crackpot theories. Undoubtedly, unashamedly crackpot, with wild predictions all over. Of which 99% were in fact pure trash, so, retrospectively, people were rightfully considering them trash. Yet 1 was the key to progress.
I'm not sure the crackpot is what we're talking about here. We're talking about something tht violates the prevailing opinion in a way that can be verified, and results a change in what we know to be true. The crackpot is mostly the result of a very aspirational world view, and usually under the hood has bias and error that is often quite obvious.