Ideas ahead of their time

This is a very outside view on these ideas. I think from the inside there's a lot that often separates obviously bogus ideas from possibly real ones. Ideas that might pan out are generally plausible now given the evidence available, even if they cannot be proved, whereas bogus, crank ideas generally ignore what we know to claim something contradictory. This can get a bit tricky because ideas of what people consider "known" can be a little fluid, but the distinction I'm trying to draw here is between ideas that may contradict existing models but agree with what we observe and ideas that disagree with what we observe (regardless of whether they contradict existing models), the former being plausible, ahead-of-their-time ideas that might later be proven true, and the latter being clearly bogus.

(Of course sometimes, as in the case of not observing star parallax without sufficiently powerful instruments, even our observations are a limiting factor, but this does at least allow us to make specific predictions that we should expect to see something if we had more powerful instruments, and would lead us to conclude against a promising idea if we got really good observations that generated disqualifying evidence.)

The problem is that the visionary ideas ahead of their time are indistinguishable from the crank ones

Expressed very succinctly, thank you.

I suppose what I'm really wondering is whether there's some feature which can be perceived in the structure of the idea and its ramifications which indicate that it is on the right track, which would distinguish it from crank. Clearly there's nothing obvious or someone would have found it by now and made a bunch of correct predictions a long time ago. Still, it makes me wonder if there's something remaining to be found there.

To start with, the idea as it's expressed is wrong. The objects on the sky that we call planets are proper planets and not stars or moons.

I disagree, but perhaps I was not clear enough in my description of the idea. In particular I was not using the modern definitions of sun, star, moon, and planet. The ancient definition of "planet" was an object that wanders across the sky. Also, by "moon" I was trying to mean a body which shines by reflected light rather than producing light of its own like the sun does.

I do like your suggestion to look at mathematics for how to deal with statements whose truth is unknown.

That's an interesting point of view. It makes me wonder if there's a useful definition of consciousness along the same vein as the "negative entropy" definition of life (meaning something is alive if it reverses entropy in its local environment).

I don't think I would, unless the comment stream comes up with some really great things. It's a fine prompt for thinking outside the box, but it completely misses the mark on the way ideas and truth actually works, and would benefit from a read of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences [LW · GW] .

In the ancient world, some people _DID_ wonder what the sun and moon looked like from very far away. Some of them actually _WENT_ very far away and looked (and saw minimal difference, but did do some clever calculations to measure shadows and times to figure out how far "very far away" was). Even if someone HAD postulated that there existed a distance so great that the sun would look like a point, and that our stars might be suns to them, they wouldn't be "right" in any useful sense of the word. There are zero predictions nor behavior changes to make based on that hypothesis.

I'd argue that we _do_ have a start at some ideas that might pan out in the same way (good models for questions we can't yet ask) - simulation argument, quantum immortality, etc.), and the big problem isn't finding more ideas, but in deciding which ones are worth giving up immediate resources to pursue sooner.

edit: this came out way more negative than I intended. I like the topic, and even though I'm skeptical that we'll identify any novel ideas or ways to evaluate them, I do hope that I'm wrong.

My apologies, it's the best I could come up with. I'm open to suggestions.

I don't think it's bad to pitch your own ideas in a thread like this, but your comment seems to me like it doesn't really address the OP.