Let us start with "social circularity". If Alice copies Bob and Bob copies Carol and Carol copies Alice, who should David copy? If he wants to fit in he needs to pick one. If he winds up stranded on a desert island, he would do well to remember that the knowledge was ungrounded, it was only ever about what other people thought and to the extent that it appears to be about practical matters is likely wrong or even dangerous.

For contrast, imagine that Edward does some experiments in his laboratory before coming to a conclusion. Fiona copies Edward. George copies Fiona. Now who should David copy? Probably Edward. Copying Fiona carries the risk of an communication error, and copying George takes that risk twice. There are many important matters that we have not personally researched. Much of our knowledge comes to us by propagating through social networks. Loops are a worry.

When I say unstable I use Rayleigh-Taylor instability as a metaphor. Put a saucepan of water on the stove. Soon the dense cold water is underlayed by a layer of less dense warm water. Whoops! That is the wrong way up. Soon convection cells will form, with the less dense warm water rising in one place and the more dense cold water sinking in another.

The instability of the situation guarantees the formation of convection cells, but despite this certainty, some details are lacking. We do not know the position of the cells. Well, actually the physics tends to produce particular sizes and there are constraints on how they can fit in the saucepan. We have very little chance of guessing which way they will roll. The idea I want to foreground is the partial predictably of Rayleigh-Taylor instability. We understand it, but it also functions like the roll of a die. If we try to find reasons for the particular placement of the convections cells we will sometimes succeed, but in general we are chasing an illusion. The reason often goes no deeper than the fact that they have to form somewhere.

Now to think about the social dynamics of silliness. One glances at an idea, and it may be obvious that other people will reject it as silly. That pretty much kills ones interest. You should never question conventional wisdom. Maybe the idea makes your brain itch, and you think about it. This could go two ways. You might decide that the idea really is silly. You are happy to be part of the consensus that condemns it. Alternatively, you might decide that the idea OK in itself, it is the social climate that damns it.

Here comes the strange twist. When Alice copies Bob, does Alice copies Bob's actual views? Unlikely. Alice copies the simplified public version. If Bob has decided that an idea, considered in isolation, has merit, but is a non-starter because every-one else thinks that it is silly, then Alice copies the executive summary: This idea is silly. You can see how this might end up. Alice, Bob, and Carol have all given the idea some consideration, and are individually willing to take it further, but no-one does because "every-one else" thinks it is silly.

This strange twist is important. It plays the role of the hot flame under the saucepan, providing the energy that drives the dynamical system. Without it, the consensus that an idea was silly would rot away as individuals occasionally considered an idea, found it had merit, and dropped out of the consensus.

Obviously there are ideas that are inherently silly, corresponding to chimneys in my Rayleigh-Taylor instability metaphor: there are reasons why the fluid is rising at that particular place. We are not interested in rescuing ideas that are silly in this sense. We are interested in rescuing ideas that, considered in isolation, are reasonable, but have become caught in a social circularity due to the instability of social life not the defects of the idea.

The usual idea here is to understand something about the idea, something about its presentation or framing, not its essence, that causes it to be regarded as silly. Then the flaw in the idea can be fixed. I see this as a wild goose chase. Social mechanisms have amplified random fluctuations. There is no reason as such.

I think I know where I got my idea from: Duncan J. Watts. The paper

M. J. Salganik, P. S. Dodds, and D. J. Watts. Experimental study of inequality and unpredictability in an artificial cultural market. Science, 311, 854-856 (2006).

got a lot of coverage a couple of years ago.

Hit songs, books, and movies are many times more successful than average, suggesting that "the best" alternatives are qualitatively different from "the rest"; yet experts routinely fail to predict which products will succeed. We investigated this paradox experimentally, by creating an artificial "music market" in which 14,341 participants downloaded previously unknown songs either with or without knowledge of previous participants' choices. Increasing the strength of social influence increased both inequality and unpredictability of success. Success was also only partly determined by quality: The best songs rarely did poorly, and the worst rarely did well, but any other result was possible.

I'm just applying these ideas to try to understand "silliness", and offer the strange twist as the mechanism by which reasonable ideas get trapped in the "silly" ghetto.

So far, so bad. Good ideas get trapped in the "silly" ghetto. Is there any cure for this problem? What I've written is discouraging in that it suggests that this "just happens". There is no defect in the idea or its presentation that could have prevented it.

A different perspective is provided by Sapir-Whorf meets coding theory. God, that is densely written. If I unpacked into two thousand words with examples, somebody might be able to understand it. In this particular context I can boil it down. There are two things we might want to say about a silly idea.

1. This idea is silly.
2. This idea is reasonable, when considered in isolation, but is a non-starter because it is widely considered to be silly. So I'm not going to spend time on it, but count me out of the consensus that it is silly; I'm willing to give it serious consideration if you are.

The silliness ghetto exists because of a missing word. If there were a word to express the second thing one might want to say it would be communicated much more often.