The unfortunate truth is that humans derive status from belittling others. Being highly educated is apparently no defense against this common weakness.
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.
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!
It turned out to be right, of course.
Sometimes entire fields get stuck in bad equilibria and need to be disrupted.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. =\
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...