The Reversed Absurdity Heuristic

The absurdity heuristic is an intuitive filter for unfamiliar ideas - if an idea gets intuitively (system one) tagged as silly, you disregard it. You may even mock it, to demonstrate to everyone else that you think like them.

Applied against ideas selected randomly from the set of all possible ideas, this is probably good epistemic hygiene. You don't have time to meticulously study every idea that comes along, and an instant filter that screens out ideas that aren't worth wasting cognitive load keeps you sane.

But I think it might be worth looking at ideas that get rejected solely because of the absurdity heuristic - ideas for which no one has bothered to articulate a proper counterargument. Every approximate heuristic has false negatives, and absurd-seeming things sometimes (though rarely) turn out to be true. Citation: We live in a universe that runs on quantum physics, literally everything is counterintuitive at the most fundamental level.

If an idea is embraced by some people even as everyone else is laughing at them, there has to be something about the idea that its proponents value even more than avoiding public ridicule (and, in general, people really want to avoid ridicule - as anyone who has been bullied can attest, it's extremely painful). Now, that reason could end up being megalomania, foolishness, sunk cost fallacy, belonging to a subculture with different standards of absurdity than your own, or any number of ways in which human minds are known to fail and probably a ton that aren't known - but sometimes it will be "because the idea is right".

tldr: If all you know of an idea is that it seems absurd, it is probably wrong. But if all anyone knows of an idea is that it is absurd (excepting its proponents), it might be worth looking at.

See also: Why I Defend Scoundrels