Beware Interesting Ideas

I have a hunch that may or may not be true. If someone mentions an idea to you, the more interesting it sounds, the less likely it is to be true. By ‘idea’, I sort of just mean any fact/theory that someone brings up in conversation that could be either true or false. There’s a fairly simple explanation of why I think my hunch is likely to be right. For an idea to be worth mentioning in conversation (or to be worth sharing on Twitter), it probably can’t be both uninteresting and untrue. A boring, false idea is unlikely to be the kind of thing someone brings up in conversation with you - there’s no reason for it to get brought up. If an idea is either interesting or true, there is a reason to mention it - true ideas are sometimes useful, and interesting ideas are, well, interesting. This is the same reason that among university students, IQ is negatively correlated with work ethic - you can’t get into university if you’re both stupid and lazy, but might well be able to get in if you’re …