Scott Aaronson's "Ten Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough is Wrong" on https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=304 is a similar argument. Though there's no hard logic why a non-TeX math paper from an outsider would be wrong, the probability that it's right is extremely low.
And the same correlative "evidence" for sexism (which really is just a conflation of equality of outcome and equality of opportunity) could just as readily be taken as a manifestation of functional inequality.
But social stigma and an imepenetrable bias in academia keeps any meaningful research in this area from occurring, probably because people are afraid of the potential implications. That's bad science and ultimately is probably bad for society if it turns out these unproven assumptions for equal competence are untrue.
Absolutely. And thus sadly a solid field needs a certain (ideally low) amount of gatekeeping.
But there are also academic fields which are very far from solid, in which the same license to ignore "cranks" is employed, not to save some mathematicians time, but to build a wall around an ideology.
I don't really think there's an easy way to tell the difference "from 10_000ft", the two situations look identical in that there are journals, those who publish can get jobs, and later edit these journals... and without reading any of the work, there's no way to tell if it's basically solid or basically nonsense.
Because it's a violation of the principle just stated above. Since he proved he can do physics at high level enough to be part of CERN, but was excluded on political grounds... And yes, of course in a perfect world fair competition between ideas would eventually win. That is of little consolation to those who are punished for expressing their thought.
A big international organisation with collaboration as a core goal is simply not a good fit for a well known asshole.
One, no, he didn't, he made errors of basic science in his argument and that should make his entire physics work suspect.
Two, "he can do physics at high level" is the opposite of everything CERN and the scientific method itself stands for. The scientific method does not say, if you're a genius, you can make discoveries. The scientific method says, if you work consistently and steadily and reproducibility in a community of peers, you can discover things about the world by using data from the world. Science is not about hiring mages who have a high enough mana level. CERN is a collaboration and a laboratory, which implies working together. If you're operating on a high level at your own, you have no need for CERN. If you're operating at a high level when you happen to have other colleagues around, then being able to work with those colleagues is a skill you must have as a scientist.