[Uehreka]

I feel like I often see this line of argument on the internet: “Every scientific revolution was unforeseen by the mainstream of its time, you don’t want to miss the next one do you?”

But until someone proposes a predictive metric for evaluating which of these “non-mainstream ideas” are good and which are bad, I don’t think this is a fruitful area of inquiry. And that’ll be a tall order, since many of the available methods for determining truth are the very things keeping these ideas out of mainstream scientific journals. And cultural metrics like “It pisses off the establishment, so it must be right!” apply equally to both correct and incorrect non-mainstream ideas.