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Different hypotheses differ in strength. While a butterfly idea is a sort of hypothesis, it specifically denotes a particularly weak one with the most minimal amount of support. I like the term because it allows you to express the magnitude together with the fact that it is a hypothesis with minimal effort. Of course the people you work with need to be familiar with this vernacular, but that’s doable.

I'm not so sure. Where a hypothesis is vulnerable to evidence, a butterfly idea seems vulnerable to emotion:

> I’ve been on the butterfly crushing end of this myself- I’m thinking of a particular case last year where my friend brought up an idea that, if true, would require costly action on my part. I started arguing with the idea, they snapped at me to stop ruining their dreams. I chilled out, we had a long discussion about their goals, how they interpreted some evidence, and why they thought a particular action might further said goals, etc.

That doesn’t seem quite right: people still try to quash hypotheses. The difference seems to be that butterfly ideas are not quite at the “try to quash it!” stage just yet.