November 2019  
  
If you discover something new, there's a significant chance you'll be accused
of some form of heresy.  
  
To discover new things, you have to work on ideas that are good but non-
obvious; if an idea is obviously good, other people are probably already
working on it. One common way for a good idea to be non-obvious is for it to
be hidden in the shadow of some mistaken assumption that people are very
attached to. But anything you discover from working on such an idea will tend
to contradict the mistaken assumption that was concealing it. And you will
thus get a lot of heat from people attached to the mistaken assumption.
Galileo and Darwin are famous examples of this phenomenon, but it's probably
always an ingredient in the resistance to new ideas.  
  
So it's particularly dangerous for an organization or society to have a
culture of pouncing on heresy. When you suppress heresies, you don't just
prevent people from contradicting the mistaken assumption you're trying to
protect. You also suppress any idea that implies indirectly that it's false.  
  
Every cherished mistaken assumption has a dead zone of unexplored ideas around
it. And the more preposterous the assumption, the bigger the dead zone it
creates.  
  
There is a positive side to this phenomenon though. If you're looking for new
ideas, one way to find them is by [_looking for heresies_](say.html). When you
look at the question this way, the depressingly large dead zones around
mistaken assumptions become excitingly large mines of new ideas.  
  
  
  
  
  

