The thing I am trying to point at here is that attention to Bob’s bad ideas is also necessarily attention to the good ideas Bob uses in idea generation. Therefore I think the total cost in wasted attention is much lower, which speaks to why we should be less concerned about evaluating them and to why Bob should not sweat his status.
I would go further and say it is strange to me that an idea being obviously wrong from a reliable source should be more likely to be dismissed than one that is subtly wrong. Bob is smart and usually correct—further attention to a mostly-correct idea of his is unlikely to improve it. By contrast I think an obviously wrong idea is a big red flag that something has obviously gone wrong.
I may be missing something obvious, but I’m having a hard time imagining how to distinguish in practice between a policy against providing attention to bad ideas, and a policy against providing attention to idea-generating ideas. This seems self-defeating.
The thing I am trying to point at here is that attention to Bob’s bad ideas is also necessarily attention to the good ideas Bob uses in idea generation. Therefore I think the total cost in wasted attention is much lower, which speaks to why we should be less concerned about evaluating them and to why Bob should not sweat his status.
I would go further and say it is strange to me that an idea being obviously wrong from a reliable source should be more likely to be dismissed than one that is subtly wrong. Bob is smart and usually correct—further attention to a mostly-correct idea of his is unlikely to improve it. By contrast I think an obviously wrong idea is a big red flag that something has obviously gone wrong.
I may be missing something obvious, but I’m having a hard time imagining how to distinguish in practice between a policy against providing attention to bad ideas, and a policy against providing attention to idea-generating ideas. This seems self-defeating.