It's just Parkinson
Quora question:

Who are some people who the world thought were crazy, but were right all along?

Answers cite Wegener's idea of continental drift, saying "Revolutionary ideas are rarely accepted".

I hadn't stopped to think about it before. This answer is mostly backwards. Not entirely.

Drift is the opposite of crazy and revolutionary. It's OBVIOUS. Anyone can see it. Wegener was dismissed because geologists wanted NON-OBVIOUS theories.

Most of the time common sense is dismissed. The obvious is dismissed. Crazy and revolutionary and murderous ideas are REQUIRED.

A similar change in a closely related subject is Schiaparelli's OBSERVATION of rivers on Mars. For hundreds of years official science laughed at the claim. We KNOW that Mars doesn't have water, so it can't have rivers. How do we KNOW Mars doesn't have water? Because we KNOW that Schiaparelli was wrong.

A similar pattern happened in speech, with "competing" theories about the function of the larynx. The old idea was OBVIOUS, and the old idea was right. The larynx is like an oboe or saxophone. A column of air resonates, allowing a double reed to open and close with the variations of pressure. Bell described it clearly.

But this wasn't good enough for the scientists. They assumed that the larynx produced vibrations by direct muscular action, like a tapping finger.

The latter was OBVIOUSLY wrong, and you don't need fancy instruments to see why it was wrong. The larynx vibrates from 60 to 600 cycles in singing, and 150 to 300 cycles in normal speech. You can't even reach 20 cycles with a tapping finger, and 600 is OBVIOUSLY impossible. Muscles just don't move that fast.

Despite its OBVIOUS wrongness, the textbooks and teachers in the '70s were still treating both theories as competing and equally likely.

= = = = =

I'm tempted to cite Michelet on the psychopathic innovators yet again, but this problem is much simpler and more crassly Parkinsonian.

There's no profit in proving the obvious.

Proving a crazy idea takes HARD WORK and UNLIMITED WORK. The best part of proving a crazy idea is that you CAN'T GET THERE. So the budgets and authority must INCREASE FOREVER. It's a self-feeding pump.



= = = = =

Semi-relevant: Another Quora question mentions this quote:

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.

I hadn't heard this before. Concise and comprehensive. Parkinson in one sentence. Google credits it to Ernest Benn, a British political writer contemporary with Parkinson.

Labels: Answered better than asked, Parkinson, SES

  ¶ 10:19 PM