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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

I also liked:

"I still get the occasional joke from colleagues about my ‘crackpot consultant business’, but I’ve stopped thinking of our clients that way. They are driven by the same desire to understand nature and make a contribution to science as we are. They just weren’t lucky enough to get the required education early in life, and now they have a hard time figuring out where to even begin."

In some sense, labeling somebody a "crackpot" assigns a sort of malicious wrongness to them. It is interesting to see somebody who's dealt with a significant subset of these people and discovered more actual, honest misunderstanding than we (or at least I) would have expected.

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For a while I held onto this archaic 1950 textbook on geology, solely because the introductory chapter included something like "the now thoroughly discredited crackpot theory of plate tectonics, which we will not consider here."

That's fun. I had the converse experience when I discovered and read an old pop science article that discussed the light ether as if it were established fact. I was quite young and it was several years until I learned in high school physics class that this was complete bunk.

And it's not until further studying that you learn about the Anderson-Higgs effect in superconductors--how a gravity wave burst is generated every time a type 2 superconductor becomes superconducting.

Light-ether is real. It's [very oversimplifying] the EM pressure from maintaining every EMF-free zone (the insides of particles superconductors), plus pressure of all the cosmic background radiation.

When I was a kid I read a book published in the 1980s called Yes We Have No Neutrons. It covered various episodes in pseudoscience like N-rays, cold fusion, and Freudian psychology. But there was also a chapter on neural networks that did not age very well at all.

The phrase "neural network" is itself a kind of pseudoscience, in being neither neural nor a network -- but an essentially pseudoscientific description of an algorithm better called "ensembled regression" or something of that kind.

NNs do not model the brain, and have basically nothing to do with it. I'd imagine rereading that chapter would be a good idea.

Ensemble methods have basically nothing to do with neural networks. The output of a NN is not some kind of "average" or "best pick" taken from the outputs of individual neurons. Rather, there are multiple layers each of which performs a kind of generalized multivariate regression on the outputs of the previous layer, and the parameterization for the whole hierarchy of layers is fitted as a whole. Very different.

NNs with dropout are, trivially, an ensembling. And I think it's not so hard to show NNs, by default, meet a criterion like it -- namely that if we have something like batch normalization between the layers, so they are something PMF-like, then each is taking an expectation.

either way, the technique has absolutely nothing to do with the biological cells we call neurones -- as much as decision tress have to do with forests.

It is metaphorical mumbojumbo taken up by a credulous press and repeated in research grant proposals by the present generation of young jobbing PhDs soon to be out of a job.

The whole structure is, as it has ever been, is on the verge of a winter brought about by this shysterism. Self-driving cars, due in 2016, are likewise "just around the corner".

I sympathesize about the overhyping. I certainly don't know if it's a good idea or not, but if you work for Google driverless cars are already on the road. https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/30/23002082/waymo-driverless...

I don't know if you can use the word "already" for something that's been nearly here for so long.

This is a terminological question which has nothing to do with whether a textbook in the 80s was right or not in calling neural networks a crockpot theory.

The terminology is now fixed and anyone who has more than a passing acquaintance with these things knows that neural networks have almost nothing to do with biological neurons.

It's a 1997, I've just skim read the chapeter -- and it seems entirely correct. Its views here are consistent with my own, NN is just a name for a technique -- baring little relation to the claims made about it in a hysterical press.

If it's a crockpot theory, it probably just hasn't simmered long enough.

> [A]NNs do not model the brain, and have basically nothing to do with it.

ANNs don't yet model the structure of the brain but it seems plausible that they could do in the future as the result of some "convergent evolution".

ANNs have a fair model of individual neurons. Artificial and biological neurons do roughly the same thing when evaluated, but they are connected and trained very differently.

For me it's too much of a coincidence that the two most generally intelligent systems (ANNs and BNNs) are both "linear networks of activation functions".

We have not managed to build general intelligence from any other formalism, and neither has nature.

Viewing ANNs as a poor model of BNNs may be looking at the question backwards. You could say that BNNs are trying desperately hard to model the pure mathematics of ANNs within the confines of biochemistry. The fact that a biological neuron is not exactly a ReLU may say more about the limitations of biology rather than the limitations of ReLUs.

> For me it's too much of a coincidence that the two most generally intelligent systems (ANNs and BNNs) are both "linear networks of activation functions".

I am unconvinced that "linear network" appropriately defines BNNs. Can you clarify this?

> Artificial and biological neurons do roughly the same thing when evaluated

They most certainly do not. The idea that biological neurons are a kind of programmable on/off switch is completely wrong. There is plenty of computation happening inside a single neuron.

The fact that we once thought only the interconnect of neurons is important, and not the individual neurons themselves, is actually pretty strange. We know full well that every single cell is capable of computation, as it must react to its internal and external environment to be able to function. Neurons are more specialized for computation than other cells, and of course the biological neural network is a still a huge part of animal intelligence, but the simple model where we ignored what was going in inside each neuron should have been seen as extremely unlikely to be the full picture from the start.

Strings, fibers, ropes, and threads do not model textiles. Trees have basically nothing to do with botany but we find their names acceptable. We're programmers, metaphors are our bread and butter.

Neural networks model the brain via convergent evolution. I don't have a link for this offhand, but I remember seeing several studies that discovered that if you train ANNs on at least some of the same data sources that the developing brain trains on, they develop the same sorts of structures and match to the same features.

I'm an academic working at the edge between biological neural networks in neuroscience, and artificial neural networks in machine learning. It is true that NNs don't model the brain, but it is not true that they have nothing to do with it. There is a whole fascinating field that compares the two and discusses their commonalities and differences.

But above all, "pseudoscience" is something different and is certainly not the right word to describe this issue of terminology.

> But above all, "pseudoscience" is something different and is certainly not the right word to describe this issue of terminology.

The definition of pseudoscience is "a collection of beliefs or practices mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method."

Arguably the idea that neural networks reproduce how brains work is pseudoscience.

In the very least, it's a deeply misguided marketing blurb. It's now considered a metaphor, just like the ones driving some corners of the artificial intelligence field.

Pseudoscience is an issue of method, not of wrongly held beliefs. Before Einstein, Newton's law of gravitation was believed to be correct. It was not, but it wasn't "pseudoscience", because it was falsifiable and the theory was correct up to a certain error value. "Wrong" and "pseudoscience" are not synonymous.

Moreover, you're dismissing an entire extremely active research field, which tries to understand up to which point artificial and biological NNs are or aren't similar. It's the field, for example, of Turing laureate Yoshua Bengio.

Neural networks CAN reproduce how the brain work (if you're doing computational neuroscience, in which case what you call NNs is something different, and it's an issue of terminology). Even simple binary NNs were originally born to understand the cognitive functions of the brain (McCulloch and Pitts, 1943). The field later diverged (with the advent of backprop), but still today they have a lot in common even inadvertently, for example the representations they learn in navigational tasks (Banino et al. Nature 2018) or in the visual cortex vs. CNNs for computer vision.

You're confused if you think residual neural net motifs don't underlie how human brains reason about analogies, and if you think they don't control vision processing categorization.

Do you have a picture of the book? Can you post a picture of the passage and cover? That would be fascinating to see! (I believe you fwiw, not doing the whole "pics or it didn't happen" :) )

I think the title included "Geomorphology" but I can't seem to find the exact instance. To be fair to geologists of that era, there wasn't a ton of evidence for plate tectonics at the time other than the matchup between continental boundaries. The mid-ocean spreading discoveries of a decade later kind of sealed the deal.

This theory of crackpot theories is popular with the crackpots, and I suspect it's a good signal of them. Some people do win the lottery, but your lottery ticket is still worthless.

I'm not sure that "crackpot" implies malice. To me, it implies a totally wrong starting point. You can't build astronomy on a foundation of astrology. Using Babylonian base-60 mathematics won't help you create a unified field theory. The guy who showed me some random velocity that he had picked, and taken c^2 divided by that velocity, had not shown that faster-than-light travel was possible.

It's like cargo-cult physics. They (try to) do all the things, but the starting point is wrong, so it can't work.

So showing them "where to even begin" is in fact the solution... if they'll listen.

This is admittedly a pedantic nitpicky comment, but humans did build astronomy on a foundation of astrology. Much like alchemy and the legit techniques used during that phase of exploration later got subsumed into chemistry.

I guess most people haven't read any of Newton's writing on alchemy. What's fascinating is that he's clearly mapping metaphors to experiences, in much the same way he did when writing Principia.

The difference is that in P. the metaphors and mappings create consistent experiences for everyone and can be manipulated symbolically using math.

That's a huge change, which is why science is everywhere and hardly anyone attempts alchemy today. But under the hood science is still a machine made of metaphors which are partial mappings of experience.

I don't think anyone believes all the different metaphors physics uses mesh together neatly, so at least some of them must be misleading. Improving the coverage is almost the definition of physics.

But it's also possible the consistent symbolic metaphor approach is limited in ways we don't yet know, and at some point it will reach its limits and have to be replaced with something else.

I really enjoyed Gleick’s biography of Newton, which spends a lot of time on both his math and physics work that panned out, and his alchemical work that didn’t.

Newton is the father of modern physics to us because we have perspective that he lacked. At the time he was working—in the moment—it wasn’t yet clear how the universe worked.

> his alchemical work that didn’t.

Call me a crackpot, but didn't it?

Newton is forever remembered as [one of] the granddaddy[ies] of physical sciences.

Alchemy, from any initiated source seems to be a series of rituals designed around the refining of the self into its full potential, rather than a material goal of becoming wealthy by being able to produce gold. That is, it's metaphorical.

I haven't read anything by Newton on his alchemy, but if I were to take my rudimentary understanding of mystical thought and read it against Newton's example—I would think he were quite successful having produced such novel mathematical and scientific breakthroughs—whether he was aware of that or not.

If there was gold to be found in a human experience and work, I'd say he produced endless amounts of it...

edit: I'm not making it up. Whether or not you want to believe in whatever, this is what alchemy is to magicians like Newton: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeticism#Alchemy

He didn't endeavour to just turn physical lead into physical gold. I know we shit on humanities around here, but facts still exist in that sphere.

Further, this isn't my opinion but that of Keynes - https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2012.005...

> Keynes underlined the last sentence of this passage, which could easily substitute for his own assessment of Newton's use of experimentation in ‘Newton, the Man’, that ‘His experiments were always, I suspect, a means, not of discovery, but always of verifying what he knew already’.13 Keynes repeatedly referenced Newton's ‘intuition’, calling it ‘pre-eminently extraordinary’, almost to the point of relying on mathematical proof and experiment only as a matter of social convention, rather than as a means of revealing some insight that had not already occurred to him. The mathematical proofs in Principia were alleged to be ‘dressed up afterwards—they were not the instrument of discovery.’

The purely metaphorical interpretation of alchemy is popular in some circles, but alchemy has a clear experimental basis. Newton did some pretty wild alchemical experiments. Metals are weird.

https://www.openculture.com/2016/11/videos-recreate-isaac-ne...

Attempting to transmute a metal in the material was a ritual act coinciding with the "Great Work". That tandem practice is built into the philosophy of performing the act. That is, to the "mundane" it was just chemical experimentation, but to the initiates of the magical (or other enlightenment) orders was a dual act reflecting one of their core intuitions (paraphrased): "as above, so below" or what is external to the mind is reflective of what is internal. In other words, irreducible to one or the other (mental or physical act).https://news.ycombinator.com/news

I'm teasing at proposing, after Keynes, that maybe his alchemy worked, and he just didn't understand how.

But there's no salvaging the storybook version of Newton here. Newton was many things, but the innocent, curious monkey sitting under an apple tree he was not. (well, he was—at least insofar as we all are, anyway)

> Newton is the father of modern physics to us because we have perspective that he lacked. At the time he was working—in the moment—it wasn’t yet clear how the universe worked.

His trial and error gave that perspective as a result. Somebody had to waste time on alchemy to then succeed in physics, the time spent on alchemy was not a waste.

Alchemy sired Chemistry and Medicine, not Physics. Physics comes from the natural philosophers pondering ballistics and not the people hoping to make gold out of lead.

Anyway, Newtons contribution with Principia was to collect facts known in his time and put them into one unified mathematical framework, he didn't actually discover any of "his" laws (as predicted by Stigler's law).

I agree.

I would also recommend Gleick’s book. The best part for me was the extensive quotations from Newton’s correspondence. You really get a sense of his personality from these, and how different he was from basically everyone he corresponded with.

Westfall's Never at Rest is pretty good too

> if they'll listen

This is where I find the line easier to draw. Starting from a wrong premise and reaching a wrong conclusion (even if reached rationally and logically) does not, itself, make a crackpot. The crackpot is the one who won't listen to the counterarguments. And when they do listen, they just shift the goalposts instead of actually adjusting their basis to better fit reality.

Agreed.

A looser, less perfect, but more easily applicable and economical heuristic that I have is:

- Is my (layperson) interlocutor mostly contrarian and skeptical of others? Then there is very little chance that trying to point them in the right direction will be productive. Being a reasonable contrarian requires a very high level of expertise.

- Is my interlocutor mostly curious and skeptical of their own understanding? Then my friend, this person is a rare golden perl, and I will spare no effort or patience, because in almost every case these people are the ones who haven’t lost the capacity to learn.

Assuming a unified field theory is possible, it is surely equally correct in any numerical base; calculations in base 60 will give you the same results as calculations in base 2, base 10, base ½(1 + √5), base 2i, or any other base.

If I understand the parent correctly, he's referring to the specific idea that base 60 math leads directly to the "right" answer, that solves the unsolved problems. I don't remember who was promulgating that idea, but the response you made (a) is correct, and (b) was rejected by the "crackpot" as not understanding the idea.

Oh, like how the Larouche nutcases promote 256-Hz tuning because of solitons?

> I'm not sure that "crackpot" implies malice.

It pidgeon-holes and ridicules people, we know it's insulting, and we use it anyway - that seems close enough to malicious.

Although mostly horrified / entertained watching a flat-earther documentary a while back with my teenage son .. I was also kind of impressed at one point when the flat earthers did a measurement with a laser over some kilometers to 'prove' the flatness of their landscape.

Needless to say the experimental results differed slightly from their theory. But what struck me is, they were actually doing science .. which is wonderful. I remembered thinking if only our local schools would do a little bit of science, or math for that matter..

I believe high school curricula (at least at the good ones) meet aspects of that in two ways:

1. There are labs / practicals as part of a scientific curriculum, though ultimately in a controlled fashion.

2. There are projects that allow a student to pursue an open-ended like of inquiry.

The unfortunate truth is that humans derive status from belittling others. Being highly educated is apparently no defense against this common weakness.

I don't get a status boost from letting google label 80% of my incoming email as spam, but I am quite glad that it does.

To be fair, it might not be about the desire to belittle or to derive status. I can understand the frustration of those who are educated in a demanding field that also happens to attract people proposing uneducated and usually unsound theories. The wildest of theories -- especially the wildest of them -- would often take a lot of work to untangle and make sense of to the point where it's even possible to discuss and think about them critically. The vast, vast majority of those kinds of theories are wrong yet they take a lot of work to disprove. That probably has little to offer to the expert other than perhaps exercise in the Socratic method with an uncooperative partner.

I'm not in the academia myself but I can totally see how the nth time someone offers their "insights" into something they almost certainly don't understand could make you think of them as crackpots.

I mean, one has to wonder how many real physicists are chasing crackpot theories in exactly the same sense. The drive that results in self-delusion is probably the same mentally/emotionally.

Also it isn’t just physicists on the receiving end. As a software engineer I get people wanting me to help them with their “crackpot” business ideas (although they sometimes don’t want to tell me their secret, and I heartily encourage them not to!). I have seen an acquaintance explore a crackpot electrical mechanism for perpetual energy. Mathematicians surely get their fair share of crackpots too!

Personally I think most of these problems could be easily resolved if we were taught the basics of how to manage emotions and ego in school. Unfortunately, that essential need is still controlled by certain institutional wills that I in turn label crackpot. - Not that I should be throwing stones, living in a house of glass...

I mean, physicists are notorious for chasing crackpot theories in other fields for the exact same reason - they assume their background is sufficient to understand the current progress of a field, when it's not.

Yet Physicists sometimes hit the jackpot too: “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

Classic.

Yeah, like that crackpot Alvarez and his nutty "an asteroid killed the dinosaurs" theory!

It turned out to be right, of course.

Sometimes entire fields get stuck in bad equilibria and need to be disrupted.

String theory is crackpot AF. It's not based on Occam's razor or empirical observation, just on the fact that if you accept a few really giant unfounded assumptions, then you end up with some neat math.

We'd be better off with a theory of everything designed by a neural network, at least people wouldn't belabor under the mistaken assumption that "theory of everything" actually corresponds to anything real.

Occam's razor is a very useful guiding principle, but it still is a philosophical principle, not a requirement for a theory to be scientific. Observation of course is, and in fact string theory (potentially) is consistent with observed phenomena. Its main problem is that it is too difficult, if possible at all, to determine if it actually is, and in which form. Actually the same Sabine Hossenfelder wrote a book about that as you probably know

There isn't anything for it to compete with.

Anyway, a string theorist on the faculty doesn't cost any more than a mathematician. For the others you are continually having to pay for LHCs, nanokelvin freezers, and optical tables.

> There isn't anything for it to compete with.

That's exactly the problem - instead of trying to produce new theories, people keep researching string theory, in massive numbers (relatively to the size of the field of theoretical foundations of physics, of course).

Also, there are a few other interesting avenues to explore - coming up with a relativistic version of de Broglie-Bohm pilot wave mechanics (or as close as possible to get, given Bell's inequalities), for example.

It's hard to imagine how you could test any alternative, either.

If the string people were putting all their effort into coming up with a testable prediction, we might be better off. But they are mostly trying to show their untestable thing is better than the next one over, instead.

A theoretical computer science analog to the physics crackpots might be semi-knowledgeable people who purport to prove P vs. NP one way or the other or solve some other open mathematical question or disprove a known existing result. Quantum computing probably attracts some as well but that's a bit of an overlap with physics.

Theoretical CS is of course niche enough that it probably doesn't attract mainstream people from outside of the field, so I suppose the field has its own crackpots. I suspect mathematics would be similar except somewhat more mainstream.

Of course some day someone will probably come along and actually prove something about those open questions but claims of proofs are much more common than actual proofs.

As for crackpot things within the academia itself, computer science also has areas such as AGI that are so hard to get actual scientific results from that it might be easy to deem it as just handwaving rather than actual research. Trying to build general AI with automated reasoning and knowledge bases back in the early days may not have been exactly a crackpot idea -- if anything, it was overly optimistic about hard logic -- but it certainly wasn't realistically going to succeed either, at least in hindsight.

Still haunted by interactions ten years ago with someone who claimed to have invented an impossibly efficient garbage collector supported by revolutionary data structures.

You would think this would be empirically verifiable but I nor others could make heads or tails of his argument.

When I saw the guy also had a theory of unified physics, I gave up.

Still don't know, he might have been onto something.

Further, there's the other half of the psychological stew: them as regard education in general and the attempt to untangle and think critically about wild theories as at best a waste of time and at worst a personal attack. I personally don't think of anyone as a "crackpot" unless they've demonstrated that they are impervious to the basic knowledge they need: "One or two seemed miffed that I didn’t immediately exclaim: ‘Genius!’,..."

I would like to avoid to paint in detail the ugly picture behind the issue I'm talking about, since that feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy. - You are obviously right to assume the best about people but it is also prudent to remain vigilant whenever there is hierarchy and competition for resources.

I don't have a solution... I do have a problem in that this drive-by dismissal of mine is getting attention when what I was excited about in another comment goes ignored. =\

> I do have a problem in that this drive-by dismissal of mine is getting attention when what I was excited about in another comment goes ignored. =\

Isn't that explained by the GP's point? Some things are much easier to engage with than others, regardless of whether it's for or against. Your statement above is two sentences, and while it undoubtedly accurately describes some occurrences, it also likely doesn't describe others. Without statements to clarify how absolutely you intend it to apply, people are free to make their own assumptions and if that assumption casts your statement as absolutist, it's easy to refute.

Communication can be hard, asynchronous communication even more so.

Sometimes I wonder if our school teachers' demand to read their minds was justified, and how we can sometimes immediately be aware of context in a way that machine learning consistently fails at.

The article touches on this in how the author quickly deduces who is one of them and who is not. Perhaps therein lies the entire issue at hand.

That's true, but also there exists a population that's unfortunately been misinformed by Quantum Pseudoscience Grifters. Physics (and medicine) seem to suffer particularly from this sort of thing. Enough misinformed people asking for real engagement will eventually wear even a patient person down (of course the ire should be more accurately targeted toward the grifters, not their victims).

I mean -- as a programmer, my significant other thinks that my presence soothes the Machine Spirits and makes the computer magically cooperate. Imagine if this was a superstition! The random requests for IT support would be really annoying.

> ...misinformed by Quantum Pseudoscience Grifters. Physics (and medicine) seem to suffer particularly from this sort of thing.

Quiet a few of the misinformed are HN commenters.

Generally, the pattern appears to be "Foo is complex. Conspiracy theorist asserts there is a conspiracy making Foo complex. We cannot trust the mainstream experts because they are lying. Gishgallop with endless bad faith questions which take an enormous amount of time to answer properly but ultimately do not convince the question asker".

The general takeaway, for me at least, is that even the most intelligent person can be sucked into crackpot conspiracy. The problem is "I'm an expert in this field, this means I'm smarter than most" and then thinking that intelligence in one area grants you insights into others.

The worst part is conspiracies like to hide under the motto of "I'm just being a good skeptic". However, a good skeptic needs to actually dig deeper than just surface level assertions. A good skeptic needs to look into the counter claims to their conspiracy. What are the sources? Do the actually point to data or are they just naked assertions? Do the sources reference only other conspiracy websites? Do they have references? If this claim is actually true, why is it rejected by the mainstream? Who is actually benefiting from hiding the truth?

> my significant other thinks that my presence soothes the Machine Spirits and makes the computer magically cooperate

I love this. Also hilarious.

In my experience, also true in certain cases.

You observe something that is being done a way you would not do it. There is no reason to suspect this is the source of the problem, but you do it the way you think it should be done. Lo and behold, the process works and the problem is gone. In retrospect you can see why, maybe the filename ':/%20' was bad luck, or whatever. Looking at the process, though, it's hard to claim success was achieved by a rational scientific process...

> The unfortunate truth is that humans derive status from belittling others.

It's not a truth any more than 'humans murder others when they're angry'. Sometimes humans belittle others and sometimes they gain status from it. Sometimes they lose status, and I suspect they almost always lose a little self-respect and feel more intensely the shame that was so strong, they just tried to project it onto someone else.

> Being highly educated is apparently no defense against this common weakness.

I think it depends on the fields of study. If you study humanity, you may understand this behavior. If you study quarks, I agree it is little defense.

It's hard to understand what this is aimed at. The original article is rather sweet, and you're replying to a comment that's saying that "crackpots" are mostly just normal people who've misunderstood something. I don't see any belittling going on here

I've run a 'crackpot consultant business' for like the past 30 years. except in the US it's called the 'Fortune 500'.

There's a wonderful exploration of "crackpots" in the aptly-named "The Crackpots" by Harlan Ellison in his short story collection "Paingod" (which is excellent). https://sckool.org/paingod-and-other-delusions-harlan-elliso...

Harlan writes about the story: “Think of someone you know, even someone you love, trapped into a corrupt or self-destructive or anti-social behavior pattern by an inability to get around the roadblock of erroneous thinking. [snip] Polly wouldn’t permit such an evil to exist-as an unconscious understanding of the massmind of the general Analog readership, which is at core and primarily engineers, technicians, scientists, men of the drawing board and the spanner. [snip] [I wrote the story] to see if I could gig the Analog readers of thirty-and-more years’ good standing, who would have coronary arrest at seeing Ellison in the hallowed pages of their favorite magazine. You can imagine my joy when I saw the issue on the newsstands, with my name on the front cover with Isaac Asimov’s, knowing that Analog’s faithful would be gagging, and knowing the little jibe I had waiting for them inside”…

I always get the feeling when I read either Harlan Ellison or Philip K Dick that they're giggling to themselves at some knowledge that they have, that no-one else has. They both play with form, straddle the line between puerile and innovative, and seemingly come up with original ideas with a wave of their hands.

They're both definitely in my favourite author list, of any genre.

I always got the vibe that Harlan was giggling, but in a malicious, "screw you" sort of way.

Very true! Apparently not such a nice person, but still an amazing author.

> In some sense, labeling somebody a "crackpot" assigns a sort of malicious wrongness to them.

The naive enthusiasm, self directed exploration, and passion many of these crackpots have are winning traits in many pursuits. Just a bit of poor luck they picked an especially high wall to scale with theoretical physics.

It's closer to "none of them are good at math, and aren't trying to learn".

It's why they rage at people not taking them seriously - if anyone tries to show something mathematically they can't understand it, don't want to admit it, and either wander off or ignore it and go back to the extensive prose.

The difference between a real crackpot and someone trying to understand something difficult is that the former is usually genuinely mentally disturbed while the latter is still in Dunning-Kruger territory.

Usenet science boards used to have various "personalities" who were clearly ill. They would post variations on the same word salad over and over, invariably claiming that Einstein was wrong about something or other, while they were right, which made them super-geniuses.

I understand high-profile physicists particularly tend to attract these people, so dealing with them must be a challenge, and there must be a temptation to skip over anyone who looks like they fall into that group even if they're just asking questions.

There was - possibly still is - a crossover group typically made of electrical/electronic engineers who knew just enough traditional EM theory to be dangerous, but not enough to know what they didn't know about GR and QM. For some reason they were also obsessed with trying to prove that relativity was wrong - perhaps because GR is so weird it's almost offensively strange to people who want to live in an un-weird universe.

These characters still exist on Reddit and elsewhere. They typically also stick to trying to disprove SR, because it barely requires more than high school math. No one ever tries to disprove the foundations of condensed matter physics.

Doesn't condensed matter physics heavily feature harmonic analysis? It's a pity -- if math weren't so damn difficult, we could point all the "crystal resonance" crowd in a productive, fascinating direction.

I'm a mathlet who is working slowly on learning more. Can you elaborate on the connection you're drawing?

Bloch's theorem I'd assume.

>No one ever tries to disprove the foundations of condensed matter physics.

My contribution to this severely under-served department:

"It can't possibly be correct to use relativistic field theory to write effective fields for excitations of a wave medium when the whole idea of SR was that there wasn't a medium."

That's not the "whole idea" of SR. What he said in his 1905 paper was,

"The introduction of a “luminiferous ether” will prove to be /superfluous/ inasmuch as the view here to be developed will not require an “absolutely stationary space” provided with special properties, nor assign a velocity-vector to a point of the empty space in which electromagnetic processes take place."

In 1920, after developing GR, his views were considerably more nuanced, as expressed in his 1920 lecture at the Leyden University, "Ether and the Theory of Relativity":

"Recapitulating, we may say that according to the general theory of relativity space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an ether. According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is unthinkable; for in such space there not only would be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time (measuring-rods and clocks), nor therefore any space-time intervals in the physical sense. But this ether may not be thought of as endowed with the quality characteristic of ponderable media, as consisting of parts which may be tracked through time. The idea of motion may not be applied to it."

Einstein, Albert. Sidelights on Relativity . Public Domain Books. Kindle Edition. (0.99$ on Amazon)

That lecture, by the way, is a superb example of presenting the frontier of 1920 physics - before Schrodinger, Dirac, and modern field theory - without using any mathematical notation whatsoever.

I believe (although it isn't my field) that Semiconductor physics is considered to be ultimately grounded in condensed matter physics, right? So we could look at the ridiculous idea that transistors could just keep getting tinier and tinier as a bit of a crackpot idea. Turns out these physicists managed to "yes, and..." their way into controlling, what, most of the economy?

Ironically, that's not what Dunning-Kruger claimed, and the Dunning-Kruger research itself has been largely discredited. A better term might be the "Dunning-Kruger Effect effect" for how these accusations are slung around.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect#...

I don't think that article says what you think it says.

The D-K effect is: "The Dunning-Kruger effect is defined as the tendency of people with low ability in a specific area to give overly positive assessments of this ability." That is exactly what the parent described, and is an empirically identified behavior. The criticisms are aimed mostly at the "meta-cognitive" and bias-based explanations for the behavior.

I think my favourite bit of Dunning-Kruger is that it's failure to account for regression towards the mean and the better-than-average effect are kind of an existence proof of a "Dunning-Kruger Effect". ;-)

I like to say most citations of D-K are examples of D-K.

https://timecube.2enp.com/

Archimedes Plutonium!

Robert MacElwaine! Alexander Abian! Tom Van Flandern!

For many years if I googled myself, on the first page of results was an archived post of Archimedes Plutonium calling me out in sci.math.

Ahhhhh, those were the days.

Now there is a name I haven't heard in a long long time...

I think this is why many profs have a secretary to screen this stuff out

Anecdotally, Engineers seem to want to prove relativity wrong as it places unfortunate limits on the kinds of things that could be built. No one is flash gordoning around space anytime soon.

On the other hand it also gave us marvelous energy sources such as nuclear power. However this connection is often missed amongst lay observers.

We would arguably be better off, all around, without that, if it meant no atomic bombs.

We weren't getting FTL anyway.

This is a very complex topic. however - even if we ignore the civil application of nuclear technologies for radiation therapy, nuclear energy, x-rays etc. Nuclear weaponry has been successful in preventing further destructive wars on the scale of WW2.

I don't believe anybody would have expected the western allies and the Warsaw pact countries not to go to war with each other had nuclear weapons not existed.

> Nuclear weaponry has been successful in preventing further destructive wars on the scale of WW2.

This will unfortunately remain true only until a nuclear war does break out. After such a moment, the few that survive may say "if only nuclear weapons weren't invented, we could have had another WW2 instead of this disaster".

The other arguments about nuclear physics that you make are much more convincing as an unmitigated good.

"There was - possibly still is - a crossover group typically made of electrical/electronic engineers who knew just enough traditional EM theory to be dangerous, but not enough to know what they didn't know about GR and QM."

The same can be said for physicists and mathematicians who know just enough EE. As a practicing EE who specializes in RF and antennas, I've had to debunk many crackpot antenna and circuits, who developers are looking for funding. The nice thing about RF is hunks of dielectric and conductor are pretty easy to fabricate or simulate, but they don't even try to prove their ideas.

On sci.math there were a couple of divide-by-zero freaks who seemed between them to post about 1000 posts a day.

> GR is so weird

Someone said about Quantum Mechanics that if you understand it, you obviously don't. Because it is so weird.

Well, that was Feynman.

He would have known, for sure.

The quote is “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” by Richard Feynman, 22 seconds into https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3ZRLllWgHI

“Science popularizers often use real-world metaphors to bring specialized knowledge to the public. This was not the case with Feynman. When he delivered that famous quote during a conference at Cornell University in 1964, he was trying to convince his listeners not to try to understand his explanation ‘in terms of something familiar.’ Instead, he announced that he would simply describe how nature works, inviting those present to ‘relax and enjoy it.’”.

Well, if they don't invent FTL drives then who will?

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