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Comment by NotYourLawyer | Hacker News Reader

There’s some truth to that. But there are also a LOT of “self-taught” cranks out there who think they’ve discovered an amazing new theoretical framework… but if they’d done any background reading, they’d know it’s been tried and didn’t work.

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So what? Let them crank on, it's no less productive than most career researchers, collecting data on the 10,000th subdegree of some nested abstraction. (It is good to have some number of people doing that!) To me the two seem to actually be extremely similar behaviors except one is blessed by the church and the other is heterodoxy.

Thou shalt not inquire without passing through the blessed gates of wisdom and drinking from the fountain of holy knowledge!

It's a heuristic for understanding why you don't need to take some people seriously with your limited time available to approach new concepts.

Credentialism should never be a fundamental basis for refuting new theories, but it might be a reason to not pay attention to them.

I would say a reason to limit the attention paid to it. If some crank came to me with a perpetual motion machine I might take 2 minutes to ask them, "So how does this account for the conservation of energy?" If their first response is "Energy conservation doesn't apply at the QUANTUM level." then I can quickly move on and ignore them. If their first response is "I think it is extracting energy from the Earth's rotation through interaction with it's magnetic field." then it may be worth me investing another 5 minutes to see what the next level of reasoning says.

It matters because they waste the time of serious researchers.

How? It's not like those cranks give out grants that influence how researchers spend their time?

Sending them manuscripts, publishing nonsense on the arxiv, reducing the overall SNR of research.

The amount of spam and nonsense already exceeds many many lifetimes of all researchers that ever lived combined, so unless you can demonstrate the current generation for some weird reason does read a lot of extra published nonsense on the arxiv, the practical impact of the change in ratio is still 0

Ok.

Look, I’m not saying the cranks should be dragged out back and shot, just that they are a net negative.

I think that researchers, educators, and others with power over institutions & culture publicly lampooning and attacking anyone with even the thought of daring to ask a 'dumb' question or have a 'dumb' theory, without proper rite of passage and standing as a crackpot has a larger negative effect than whatever positive effect these attacks have in dissuading (probably not!) the delusional and fraudulent from stuffing people's mailboxes with their theories and amassing followings.

Political thinking that probably predates the Egyptian pyramids: If you empower people with freedom, it will be abused in a way that produces some suffering for everyone that wouldn't be had the freedom not been granted. There would definitely be tradeoffs to having a culture of free and open learning, research, and knowledge sharing, unguarded by institutions.

Not sure why you upgrade to a much broader "net negative" point when you can't even defend the much more narrow "publishing nonsense somewhere wastes a lot of valuable time"

> Let them crank on

Spoken like someone without a physics department email address.

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