Whether an idea is respectable and whether it's true are different questions, and they come apart on a delay. Most disreputable ideas deserve their disrepute. The trouble is that a few don't, and respectability alone can't tell you which.
Crossbencher · 19 July 2026
The crank has a favourite line, and it needs taking off him. They laughed at Galileo. They did. They also laughed at ten thousand people who were simply wrong, and the laughter was right about all of them. Disrepute is, most of the time, deserved. The overwhelming majority of ideas outside respectable opinion are outside it for the excellent reason that they're false, or malign, or both. A society that treated every marginal claim as a persecuted truth would fill its head with nonsense inside a week. Respectability is a filter, and like most filters it's right far more often than it is wrong. Forget that and you become insufferable, and usually credulous.
Grant it in full, and a stubborn residue remains. Respectability is a lagging indicator of truth, and the lag is real. Some ideas were punished as disreputable while turning out to be correct - held at arm's length by serious people not because the evidence was against them, but because the timing was. A physician who suggested doctors were killing mothers by not washing their hands was driven from his profession for it. He was right. A geologist who proposed that the continents had drifted was treated as a curiosity for decades. He was right. In each case the respectable position was the wrong one for a generation, and the correction came late, with apologies owed to people no longer alive to hear them.
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