comment to http://science-professor.blogspot.com/2008/04/someone-should-study-this.html
This is a fantastic comment thread! I especially appreciate the reference to the MJT book.
I’ve hung out with a few cranks in my time. One person I know, who’s extremely well-respected in his field (which is not a science), is trying to publish a book on an improved version of the Titius–Bode law. I suggested that when he’s sending a draft to researchers who have expressed interest, he should leave out the chapter on how the planets’ orbits relate to musical scales, at least.
And I’ve had some lovely conversations with Ed Fredkin, a brilliant computer scientist who says, “I’m very interested in physics, but physicists are very uninterested in me being interested in physics.” Maybe one of these days he will turn out to have been right, that the universe really is some kind of simple automaton. His work has gone on to inspire another famous crank, Stephen Wolfram, who (again) has done some solid academic work — before giving up altogether on academic norms like giving Fredkin credit and not suing your collaborators for publishing papers on their work.
And a few weeks ago, I had the privilege to sit next to Carl Hewitt in a meeting. Some ideas he was exploring in the 1970s have been the basis for a large fraction of the work in programming languages in the 80s, 90s, and today (Erlang, the latest hot language, is largely the latest realization of his Actors model), so he’s the real deal. He gave me a copy of a paper he’s working on about nonstratified inference in paraconsistent logics; I haven’t been able to make heads or tails of it yet, partly because my grounding in symbolic logic is pretty weak. So what’s his crank-hood? He was banned from editing Wikipedia because he kept editing physics articles to explain the importance of the Actors Model in physics. (Maybe he’ll turn out to be right, but I think for now there are problems with Bell’s Inequality, which is also a problem with Wolfram’s ideas.)
Worse are the cases where cranks like Martha Rogers have actually gotten their crazy ideas inside the academy, destroying it from within.
(I haven’t met Wolfram or Rogers.)
I have a mailing list to publish my own crazy ideas, but I try not to get too attached to them. I hope that some of them might be significant enough to turn into academic publications, but I’m constantly terrified that I’ll turn into a crank myself. The major thing distinguishing me from the people I’ve listed above, then, would be that they have accomplished some significant things before retiring into crankhood, while I’m just some guy.
It would probably be helpful for people like me to have a guide to the warning signs of crankhood, with examples. Obviously, if this just allowed cranks to take on protective coloring and infiltrate academic mailboxes with greater ease, it would not be a public service; but if it could enable some of us non-academics to recognize when we’re being insufficiently critical of our own ideas, and perhaps in the occasional case that we have some idea that’s actually worthwhile, to figure out how to distinguish it from our less worthwhile ideas and then present it in a way that its merit could be detectable — that might have the effect of actually diminishing the amount of wacko mail that comes in.
Oh, and there was this time I was at Google just after lunching with some friends there, sitting down outside with my laptop on the edge of the grounds before leaving, and the security guards were politely turning away a guy who just had to present his just-patented invention to somebody, anybody at Google — but he didn’t actually know anybody there, and wasn’t willing to disclose anything about his invention.