Paul GrahamVerified account

People hate things that contradict their deeply-held beliefs. But since ideas that contradict deeply-held beliefs are the most interesting (see the history of physics for example), anyone on the hunt for interesting ideas will tend to offend a lot of people.

The difference between someone on the hunt for interesting ideas and a controversialist is that for the former, controversy is collateral damage. E.g. Darwin, who sat on natural selection for 15 years, no doubt partly because he feared the resulting controversy.

The idea hunters will often find themselves engaged with controversialists, though, and they tend to lose (in the short term) to the clever, energetic ones, because for them controversy is the goal, whereas the idea hunters want to get back to thinking.