创新与异端
很喜欢Paul Graham最近的这篇essay，言简意赅，翻译了一下，以飨诸君。“与众不同”虽然绝大概率不产生任何结果，但也有可能是巨大革新的种子，因此打压异端尽管绝大概率只是打掉了一些没什么用的想法，但却阻绝了创新的可能。
如果你发现了新的东西，很有可能你会被指责为异端。
要想发现新的东西，你必须在好的、但又非显而易见的想法上下功夫；如果一个想法显然是好的，其他人很可能已经在研究它了。一个不那么显而易见的好想法，通常隐藏在人们非常依赖的某些错误假设的阴影之中。但当你开始着手于这样一个想法，你发现的任何东西，都会倾向于推翻掩盖想法的错误假设。如此，你就会受到很多依附于这个错误假设的人的压力。伽利略和达尔文就是这种现象的著名案例，然而这种压力可能永远是抵制新思想的一部分。
所以，一个组织或社会如果有着扑灭异端的文化，那就特别危险。当你压制异端时，你不只是阻止人们反驳你所要保护的错误假设。你还压制了任何间接暗示这个假设是错误的想法。
每一个被珍视的错误假设，周围都有一个未开发的思想死角。而越是荒谬的假设，它所造成的死角就越大。
不过，这种现象也有积极的一面。如果你要寻找新的想法，有一种方法就是寻找异端。当你这样看问题的时候，围绕着错误的假设，那些令人沮丧的大死角，就会变成令人兴奋的新思想大矿脉。
Translated from Novelty and Heresy by Paul Graham
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. When you look at the question this way, the depressingly large dead zones around mistaken assumptions become excitingly large mines of new ideas.
