Every few months I read a science headline that sounds like nonsense.
Time is not fundamental. Space is emergent. Reality is information. Consciousness is quantum something-or-other. Usually the right response is to keep walking.
Usually.
The problem is that some true things also sound fake before you understand the layer they operate on. Temperature feels like a direct property of the world. It is not. It is a summary of particle motion. Pressure is similar. Useful enough to build engines around, real enough to kill you, and still not fundamental in the way it first appears.
This makes "that sounds ridiculous" a weak filter. It catches plenty of nonsense, but it also catches ideas that are merely operating at the wrong scale for intuition.
So I try to do a small exercise before dismissing a strange idea: can I restate it in a way its supporters would accept? Not in a generous parody. Not in the weakest form I can defeat in ten seconds. The actual claim.
If I cannot do that, I am probably not criticizing the idea yet. I am criticizing the smell of the idea.
After that, be ruthless. What does it predict? What would make it less likely? Does it explain anything better than the duller alternatives? Is it just a metaphor wearing a lab coat?
Most strange ideas fail there, which is fine. But the order matters. Understand, then dismiss. It is only one extra step, and it catches a surprising amount of bad thinking in both directions.
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