Since we talked about expertise as an amateur, it’s only fitting that we take a look at the flip side of the non-academic, non-corporate intellectual: the genuine, dyed-in-the-wool, crackpot. They are not Guerrilla Scholars, nor are they true amateur scholars or scientists. Amateurish, yes. But their work seems to feed a diseased mind and a fragile ego that is not nearly mature enough to cope with the ups and downs of true science or scholarship.During their careers, most physics professors have received unsolicited treatises from individuals who claim to have come up with the ever-elusive Grand Unified Theory of Everything. They will write meandering discourses that amount to little more than rants about their paradigm-shattering discovery, but cannot marshal a single cogent fact in support. My spouse and I refer to such intellectual detritus as “crank scholarshipâ€, and we have a special section of one bookshelf dedicated to what we consider to be truly noteworthy “crankâ€. Usually, this is stuff that is either self-published, or some commercial publisher was somehow persuaded to print the stuff.
Crank scholarship isn’t restricted to physics. I’ve seen some incredible stuff in antiquities, either the Giza Pyramids or the Dead Sea Scrolls, or some other famous piece of ancient civilization draws crackpot theories like UFO cultists to Roswell. I think the operative word here is “famousâ€. Somehow these people who are unable or unwilling to acquire the knowledge and discipline that real science and scholarship demand, still want to associate themselves with these external ideas that denote great minds. New cosmologies, the mysteries of the Pyramids, the spectacular discovery of the Scrolls… all of them somehow boost the ego of someone who can somehow lay claim to their secrets.
I find it interesting, for instance, that I haven’t heard of a crank scholar who based his or her work on the archive of Ebla. This amazing discovery in the 1970’s of over 40,000 tablets and fragments was one of the most remarkable documentary discoveries in the history of Mesopotamian archaeology. But it has faded over time and so it draws few cranks.
How do you spot crank scholarship? There are some guides out there, including this one by John Baez. But here are some telltale signs that you are reading (or, God forbid, having a conversation with) a certified pseudoscholarly loon:
1. They do not speak the language of their field. Cosmology or physics is discussed without a single equation. Egyptology is descanted upon without any knowledge of Egyptian, or the knowledge of a language or other sub-discipline is clearly incomplete.
2. They make great claims for themselves beyond that of their work, comparing themselves to Einstein or Feynmann or Newton when this actually has nothing to do with the results of their work.
3. They take the fact that no one in the established scientific or scholarly field takes them seriously as unimpeachable evidence that they are right and, moreover, that they are the victim of a vicious conspiracy to silence them.
4. They will often tell you that they have been working on their project in complete isolation; they have kept their work secret from everyone for fear of having it stolen, but now they are going to reveal it to the world.
5. Their work contains no testable hypotheses if it’s a scientific treatise. Work in the humanities uses that vague associations and parallels (the dreaded “parallelomaniaâ€) with no connecting rationale as evidence of cause, effect, bias, conspiracy, or what-have-you.
6. The real wackos believe they are on some kind of divine mission, and that if you do not embrace their findings at once, you are an enemy of the truth. I agree with a friend of mine that these cranks represent an as-yet uncatalogued form of megalomania or some other delusional disorder.
What can you do about it? Not much. Just don’t get into a conversation with them, and don’t ever let them think you are taking them seriously. You’ll never be rid of them.