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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

I just squared the proton to electron mass ratio and rounded it to get that.

It's a common trope for physics crackpots to try to find closed expressions for things like the fine structure constant, electron/proton mass ratio, etc. The latter is completely nonsensical today because the proton isn't an elementary particle.

I got thinking about the "crackpot physics" subject again because about two weeks ago there were a series of crackpot physics posts to Hacker News by a woman. It might be "You've come a long way baby" but I'd want to check that it isn't a trans woman before announcing that.

(... certainly you see more men than women in real physics but you have Emmy Noether, Lisa Randall, Elise Meitner, Vera Rubin. It's men who get the idea that they are 'very special' and have 'unique insights'.)

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Didn't someone post 'What to do when the trisector comes' [1] here recently? Great read.

[1] https://web.mst.edu/~lmhall/whattodowhentrisectorcomes.pdf

Pretty much anyone that is in a position to be required to produce some body of work on a regular schedule in order to advance their careers can fall into this kind of thinking imo. Unecessarily gendering it seems inappropriate. There's a lot of tropes about men gaining ground and I'd ask you not feed them.

The real physicist has to "produce some body of work on a regular schedule to advance their career", the crackpot moves on his own pace. (e.g. I used to be a bit of an expert on this because I was involved with arXiv's anti-crackpot policy)

The real physicist publishes in journals like Physical Review E, the crackpot self-publishes books (or maybe) publishes in predatory journals that specialize in crackpot papers.

Crackpotism has nothing to do with science but with feelings of "I'm special", and it is right up there with taking LSD and thinking you are the Christ or the anti-Christ.

Crackpots who study physics and try to publish are a well-known phenomenon and almost all of them are men.

I don't think narcissism is the issue here and I don't think women are less likely to fall for scams, just different kinds of scams.

The latter, eg the choice to use the word "narcissism" in place of more charitable or reasonable explanations, is more what I was critiquing. Using narcissism frequently with respect to explaining men's behavior rather than exploring reasonable options is something I see more and more lately and needs some soft corrections.

There is the common use of "narcissism" as a synonym for "bad" and I disagree with that.

"Narcissism" is "self-love" and it is a part of the psyche like the heart is part of your body. When people have trouble with their heart they could have high blood pressure, heart disease, heart failure, heart attacks, heart defects, arrhythmia, etc. So even disordered narcissism is more than one disease.

I just brushed my teeth and that's a healthy expression of narcissism.

A physics crackpot imagines that he is an underlooked genius, is "special". The one thing he knows about Al Einstein is that Einstein worked at the patent office, he doesn't know about the many scientists and mathematicians who Einstein worked with. That's unhealthy narcissism.

If somebody is thinking about having money for retirement I'd say narcissism is always involved because you have some conjecture/mental picture about yourself that is based on your self-image, hopes and fears.

It's good to have realistic and positive self-esteem but boy is it hollow, shallow and ineffective to try to paint it on because somebody told you should.

Much more frighteningly, I think crackpots and Einstein share the trait of narcissism. You need that trait to think "I can solve the mysteries of the universe".

What great physicists have that crackpots lack is intelligence and/or diligence. I think it's mostly the latter, plenty of crackpots are smart. They just don't take the time to learn the math or study the centuries of prior art.

> Emmy Noether, Lisa Randall, Elise Meitner, Vera Rubin

Chien-Shiung Wu!

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