W/r/t Turing, a person's sexual preferences aren't even in the same universe as someone's unsubstantiated personal beliefs about how the world works. Perhaps you would want to retract that piece? While I don't agree with you overall, I think your argument would be stronger if you excluded his example.

I think you're looking at the "crank / non-crank" evaluation as an attribute of a person. I'm suggesting it's more relevant to use a person/field-of-study grain to apply the label. (It probably also makes sense to break it down further, but at some point, the complexity outweighs the benefit.)

I see this all the time in medicine. One of the best neurosurgeons in my country and someone I consider a friend still tells me that I need to keep the microwave door shut for 3 seconds after it’s done or else the waves will escape and give me cancer. That defies the laws of electromagnetism on several levels.

We absolutely need alternative hypothesis generators, but the widespread acceptance of every crank idea that comes along even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is not only infuriating but actually serves to damage the scientific method, when the lady down at the mothers group claims that the vaccine gave her son autism and there is a global conspiracy led by bill gates to implant microchips in everyone.

At the end of the day, in my belief, it boils down to a sad lack of trust in experts - some of it warranted from the abuses and oversteps of the past, and some of it actively facilitated by people who have ideological reasons to oppose what the scientific truths are presenting (ie climate science denial).

There are many layers, some full of cranks and some not. Maybe this is a field where generalization just isn't useful? I dunno, but wanted to think out loud and thank you for making me think a bit more than planned today :).

Take a look at the revision history of the page, where you see him routinely reversing revisions that would improve the page -- particularly, reversing deletions of irrelevant but prejudicial content.

There is no reason to mention Graham Hancock on the page at all, or any century-old stories. They are there just to muddy the water, and to give the ex-professor a soapbox for name-calling.

The evidence is presented in a deliberately confused order, and very selectively. New evidence is not permitted. Wikipedia is ruled by people like that, now. We have to wait for them to die before we can have pages not somebody's hobby-horse.

I didn't say he was the only one to do so, but he put in the work to get observational data and brought to the mainstream archeaologists and historians who wrote countless works and based their dissertations on their 'irrefutable fact' of how the Ice Age ended which never included an asteroid impact and he staunchly challenged academia as a JOURNALIST and did the legwork with his colleagues who were actually trained archeologists and documented his observations.

And just so it's clear: I'm not parroting academia's indoctrination it forced me to bend to, but Wikipedia is not a valid source for citation for a reason, and if I had submitted a paper referencing it was dismissed entirely.

But here is an essay from the Man himself if you are so inclined to read it [0].

I think his work is notable and his contributions worthy and have merit, which is honestly much more than what many people based their PhDs on when they make arguments about things like the extinction of wooly mammoths and other mega fauna as result of Human over hunting. When NOTHING could explain these massive dead zones, but were none the less awarded degrees for their findings.

0: https://grahamhancock.com/hancockg17/

That's not a very good dismissal of the man's work, like I said that revelation alone is as solid as an entire University's department of post doc and grad students combined. It's overturned so many people's dissertations and the narrative of how the Ice Age ended, specifically to the migration of People into the Americas from Eurasia that has so many implications in other departments like biology.

Also, his observations of water erosion on Egyptian pyramids is very compelling, and places it way before the modern Egyptian narrative if its true as nothing provided by modern Egyptologists really explains how deep it is. Wind/sand erosion cannot carve that deeply, especially since so much of the pyramids was under sand until maybe only modern times when it became a large part of the Egyptian economy via tourism, thus preserving it from further erosion.