The power of the odd explanation

The cholesterol-drug explanation for rising obesity is deliciously perverse. Medicine reduced one health cost of weight gain, people responded to the cheaper risk, waistlines expanded. It turns medical progress into part of the cause and makes the obvious explanations look dull.

That pleasure is precisely the danger. Contrarianism can make weak explanations sound intelligent. Take a familiar account, reverse it, add a surprising mechanism and wait for the audience to enjoy feeling clever. The mechanism can be plausible, elegant and completely wrong. Surprise alters attention. It does not alter probability.

The proper value of an odd explanation is the specificity it demands. The drug account points towards access, timing, awareness and the particular dangers treatment reduced. Food prices, work, transport and activity point towards different patterns. Put those implications beside what actually happened. One account may explain more; several may operate together; the glamorous reversal may explain almost nothing.

Most people perform this in the opposite order. They fall in love with the strange story, collect supporting details and call objections conventional thinking. The ordinary explanation must produce documentation. The exciting one escapes the same scrutiny because it caused surprise.

Ideas do not earn support by being entertaining. Keep the odd account long enough to make competing explanations more precise. State what would follow from it and compare those consequences with the world. If the proposed pattern is absent, remove the account from the argument. The remaining explanations are then more specific about the patterns they need to explain.