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Comment by hansvm | Hacker News Reader

Sidestepping your question, open-mindedness comes with its own costs. Properly analyzing an idea takes time away from other things you could be doing, and some ideas are so outlandish that your life will almost certainly be better by simply making the choice to spend as little time as possible flirting with such absurdities (except insofar as you might enjoy toying with "what-if" questions as an end unto itself). Are you practicing open-mindedness...everywhere?

It wasn't that long ago that some crackpot tried to convince me that the modern atmosphere had damaged my lungs, so to replace the oxygen I was missing I needed to buy hydrogen peroxide injections. The claim as a whole either needs to have major structural flaws or overturn sizable portions of modern chemistry and physics to have a chance at plausibility, and my biases strongly suggest that instead somebody was trying to skirt legal oversight in order to con me.

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Good point. I'd say that for any new information, there does need to be an initial 'smell test' threshold. When confronted with something so outlandish, I typically switch to making a judgment about the person and how their thought processes work. I.e., ask them to explain the basis of their claim and look for overt logical fallacies, which we all get better at identifying over time.

It's also got to be a matter of sufficient consequence to be worth the time.

Bayes has you covered, if your priors rank something as exceptionally likely or unlikely, then you probably shouldn't pay much attention to new information (especially when it's from some random person and carries a high likelihood of being misleading).

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, etc.

There are things that aren’t likely enough or important enough for the individual to commit resources to explore intellectually. But these things may be likely enough or important enough for society as a whole for some small group or even individual to explore and report back on.

That is why it is important to support your local crackpot. Much as staid English society always valued their eccentrics. The more ultrarational the person, the more important for that person to spend quality time at the fringes.

> Properly analyzing an idea takes time away from other things you could be doing, and some ideas are so outlandish that your life will almost certainly be better by simply making the choice to spend as little time as possible flirting with such absurdities (except insofar as you might enjoy toying with "what-if" questions as an end unto itself).

There's also the claim that someone is being "close-minded", when they reject an idea they have soundly researched and therefore need not waste any more time on. As Harlan Ellison so eloquently put it: "I'd gotten all the literature I could handle on the subject from a certain Thomas Aquinas" in regards to the god hypothesis. More often than not, "close-minded" is a conversation stopper, designed to deflect from the accuser's very own ignorance and credulity.

Same thing goes for creationism, AGW denial, anti-vaxx, anti-mask, the QAnon cult, trickle-down economics, etc.

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