# Anyone on the knowledge frontier is a bit of a crackpot  * From [[bushPiecesAction1970]] Two men are sprinting across an urban flat rooftop side by side. Epic music pounding in the background. They reach the edge of the roof and both push off in a daring leap to the next rooftop beyond the alleyway. The first man lands on the next roof, tucking into a roll and continuing to run. The second man slams into the wall on the other side of the alley and falls to his death in a pile of garbage. One is a badass and one is a moron. As they jumped you cannot tell the difference between them. Newton articulated the laws of gravity and optics … as a side project from doing alchemy. [[Outlier ideas tend to come from people who are outliers in other ways]]. It’s not just that it’s hard to tell the difference between the crackpots and the people who are onto something when you’re at the knowledge frontier, it’s that *they are the same people.* In part, the ambiguity between a genius and a crackpot is because each can ‘see’ things that we cannot. Researchers doing something in a truly different paradigm perceive a very different ‘outcome distribution’ (in the [[Knightian Uncertainty]] sense) from their work than even other people in their field. Crackpots are the same way. [[Uncertainty always involves risk but risk does not always involve uncertainty]]. ### Related * [[Alphagamma]] * [[You need to break rules to create new paradigms]] * [[Weird art things epitomize the need for all parts of high variance]] * [[Power laws in people quality matter more in high-variance activities]] <!-- #evergreen --> [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Anyone+on+the+knowledge+frontier+is+a+bit+of+a+crackpot) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Anyone+on+the+knowledge+frontier+is+a+bit+of+a+crackpot)