Promethean progress

A forum for heretical ideas

Every piece of knowledge you take for granted was once somebody’s weird idea that most experts dismissed. Every moral certainty you hold was, at some point in recent history, either unthinkable or its opposite. Staying home from the office when sick was a sign of weakness pre-covid; now, infecting your colleagues is considered worse than working from bed.

In our perception, public support for major civil movements, companies, technologies, nations and leaders have swung wider in the last 5 years than in the previous 20 years.

Defense was taboo just 2 years ago, now it’s all the rage, even though the russian invasion of Ukraine started 12 years ago. Natalism is having a comeback, industrialism is cool, dropping out of university to join YC is the new middle class path; the examples go on.

Maybe we’re in an opinion bubble as founders, investors and techies, but it feels like nothing really shocks us anymore. What most people think is edgy feels like something a character in a Silicon Valley reboot would say.

We want to examine the Wheel of Heresy: what does the machinery look like that turns heresies into orthodoxies, and orthodoxies back into heresies, and what is even heretical anymore?

Why? Because venture is built on paradigm shifts, not incrementalism. We also feel Europe is severely lacking in the public dialogue on valid but non institutionalized topics.

We are hosting the first Prometheus Forum this year, as an experiment to have heretics exchange ideas, and hopefully change some minds.

Vindicated Heretics

The canonical examples are Galileo and Copernicus, but these are too distant and too clean. In reality, there are too many stories to tell, and those are only the documented ones. There may be hundreds of historical truth tellers that were burned as witches without anyone to write down their words.

Ignaz Semmelweis — Handwashing (1847)

Ignaz Semmelweis discovered in 1847 that doctors washing their hands between autopsies and deliveries could reduce maternal mortality from 18 percent to under 2 percent. The medical establishment’s response was not to investigate his evidence but to take offense. Many doctors were insulted by the suggestion that a gentleman’s hands could be unclean. In 1865, his colleagues committed him to an asylum. He died fourteen days later from a beating by guards, of a gangrenous wound on his right hand. He died of the kind of infection he had spent his life trying to prevent. The eponymous “Semmelweis reflex” is the automatic rejection of new information that contradicts established norms. Adoption of handwashing took another twenty years.¹

Dan Shechtman — Quasicrystals (1982)

Dan Shechtman observed a diffraction pattern in 1982 that violated what every crystallographer believed was a fundamental law: crystals must have periodic atomic arrangements. His lab notebook read “10-fold??”, acknowledging that what he was seeing was supposed to be impossible. The head of his research group told him to “go back and read the textbook.” He was asked to leave the group for “bringing disgrace” on the team. Linus Pauling, two-time Nobel laureate, dismissed him publicly.

“There are no quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists."

Pauling maintained this position until his death in 1994. Shechtman received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2011. He received it alone.²

Lynn Margulis — Endosymbiosis (1966)

Lynn Margulis argued in 1966 that the cells in your body are the result of an ancient merger between separate organisms, and that mitochondria were once free-living bacteria. Her paper was rejected by approximately fifteen journals before anyone would publish it. She was called "science's unruly earth mother." The theory is now the orthodox understanding of how complex cells evolved.³

Stanley Prusiner — Prions (1982)

Stanley Prusiner proposed in 1982 that infectious diseases could be caused by misfolded proteins. No DNA, no RNA, no virus, no bacteria. Just a protein that recruited other proteins to misfold. This violated the Central Dogma of molecular biology at the most fundamental level. He was ridiculed. He won the Nobel Prize in 1997. The subsequent discovery that prion-like mechanisms underlie Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and ALS has made this one of the most consequential heretical ideas of the twentieth century.⁴

The pattern is consistent enough to be taught as a law: the more consequential the idea, the more violent the initial rejection. And the rejection is not random. It follows predictable sociological lines: career incentives, institutional prestige, the economics of existing treatments and theories that would become obsolete. If a conclusion is highly uncomfortable, then it's more likely to be rejected. Big, important ideas tend to lead to discomfort.

Nano-banana-pro-2 generated

The Ant Mill

There is a phenomenon in army ants called a death spiral. When a group of ants becomes separated from their colony, they begin following the pheromone trail of the ant in front of them. Since they are walking in a circle, each ant reinforces the trail for the next. They march in a continuously rotating circle until they die of exhaustion. Collective action resulting in tragedy. Jesper Grimstrup, a disillusioned former theoretical physicist, published about the Ant Mill phenomenon in 2025.⁵

Thomas Kuhn had a word for the productive version of this: "normal science". During normal science, researchers solve puzzles within an accepted paradigm. They don't question the paradigm itself, that would be unproductive, even career-ending. The paradigm defines which questions are legitimate, which methods are acceptable, which answers count. This is not a bug. Most of the time, constraining the search space is how you make progress. Kuhn called it "the essential tension": science needs both the discipline of tradition and the disruption of innovation.⁶

But Kuhn identified a structural vulnerability. When anomalies accumulate and results don't fit the paradigm, normal science doesn't abandon the framework. LHC not finding supersymmetric particles didn't lead to a major revision of theory. It generated ad hoc modifications, auxiliary hypotheses, epicycles. This continues until a crisis point, when an alternative framework emerges and enough practitioners switch allegiance to tip the balance. Kuhn observed that it resembles a "conversion experience" more than rational persuasion, which is why the old guard rarely converts, and why Planck was right that science advances one funeral at a time.

The ant mill is what happens when normal science loses its self-correcting mechanism: the anomalies pile up but the phase transition never comes. Through “almost correct” incentive structures, the field veers off into an unproductive direction.

The young solo researcher, Grimstrup notes, has almost entirely disappeared from theoretical physics. Half a century ago, it was the norm. Today, the field has coalesced into a small set of large research communities where technically skilled “technicians” focusing on narrow specialties outcompete visionary, conceptual thinkers.

The ant mill turns.

If science fails this badly, public discourse fails even faster and worse.

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The Spinning Corridor

The same machinery operates outside science, faster, and with less pretense of objectivity.

The Germans call it Meinungskorridor. In 1990, 78 percent of Germans felt free to speak politically. By 2023: 40 percent. The Overton window used to move slowly: gay marriage took 25 years from unthinkable to settled law. Now the window spins. UBI went from fringe to near-mainstream in five years. The free trade consensus collapsed in a decade. The rules-based order is in question. Nuclear energy has flipped moral valence four times in living memory and now polls at 61 percent, with its strongest support among Republicans. Same technology, same physics, different tribal signals.⁷ ⁸

The lab leak hypothesis is a good example. Misinformation in 2021, organized against via a conflicted Lancet letter, privately acknowledged as plausible by the same scientists who publicly dismissed it, endorsed by the FBI by 2024. The frame shifted completely. No accountability for those who enforced the wrong one.

The Overton window is oscillating, about to explode like an Isar Aerospace launch. Keynesianism to monetarism took a generation; now intellectual fashion cycles like fast fashion. Each generation overturns the previous one’s orthodoxy out of identity, not evidence. As usual we want to rebel against our parents, but accidentally take on our great-grandparents’ opinions to do so.

The Selection Problem

Most heretical ideas are just wrong. Social structures are reasonably good at tolerating harmless wrong beliefs and correcting dangerous ones toward correct-enough norms. I’m sure the Artemis II crew agrees.

Unorthodox beliefs are a mixture of genuine insights and crankery, and the ratio heavily favors crankery. Flat earthers are heretical. Anti-vaxxers are heretical. The person who thinks they have disproved Einstein in their garage is, in the vast majority of cases, simply wrong. For every Shechtman there are ten thousand cranks. For every McClintock, a thousand confused amateurs.

The hard problem is not holding heretical ideas. Anyone can do that. The hard problem is designing selection mechanisms that filter for productive unorthodoxy without filtering for conformity. This is what Prometheus attempts: presenting heretical ideas openly as a way of breaking social barriers. These are experiments in selection mechanism design.

The ideas that matter most are often the ones the machinery is designed to suppress. Not because suppression is evidence of truth, but because the machinery does not distinguish between the heretic and the crank. The ratio of world-changing insights among the uncomfortable ideas is higher than zero.

With Prometheus, we’d like to invite those of dissenting opinion to present their cases for why they’re right and most others are wrong about their area of expertise. This can range widely from philanthropy to AI, from public health to statecraft. The main point is that we want to hear from people who have thought deeply about important topics, and we want to spread infectious ideas in an accepting forum focused on discourse instead of judgement or norms.

We will filter out for “cranks” and provocateurs who are driven by the attention, as well as not-that-unorthodox ideas that are widely accepted in the tech world but maybe not yet in wider society.

The exact design of the forum is still in the making, but we’d like to focus on very few talks/shows/demonstrations, and small, curated interactive workshops around specific topics.

If you are open to challenging the paradigm, if you want to experience the weird ideas of tomorrow, or if you want to convince others of your weird ideas, please join us at the inaugural Prometheus Forum in Munich.

1. Sackur, E. (2010). The asylum delivery and violent death of Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis. British Journal of Psychiatry. doi:10.1192/bjp.196.5.a17

2. Shechtman (Chemistry 2011). nobelprize.org

3. Sapp, J. (2016). Lynn Margulis and the endosymbiont hypothesis: 50 years later. Molecular Biology of the Cell, 27(6). doi:10.1091/mbc.e16-07-0509

4. Nobel Prize Committee. Prusiner (Medicine 1997). nobelprize.org

5. Grimstrup, J. (2025). The Ant Mill: How Theoretical High-Energy Physics Descended into Groupthink, Tribalism, and Mass Production of Research. jespergrimstrup.org

6. Kuhn, T.S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press.

7. Cicero Online / Allensbach Institut (2024). Meinungsfreiheit survey data. 78% (1990) to 40% (2023) of Germans feeling free to express political opinions. cicero.de Gallup (2024).

8. Nuclear energy support in the U.S.: 43% (2020), 54% (2023), 61% (2025). news.gallup.com