This idea terrifies me even more than it amuses me. The notion of the long-term influence that could be gained by a network of cooperating Time-Cube-style theorists is enough to give me nightmares.

Yet helping crackpots (along with every other motivated people) find each other is unavoidably part of what the Internet does. I believe the good coming out of it outweighs the bad, but you're definitely not the only one being afraid.

It seems that many of those scared are those who've learned in a time of knowledge scarcity (it was difficult to find any information at all on any subject. It took at least a trip to a library and some ability to search the index). Today the challenge is to critically navigate in an overdose of information, a lot of it complete rubbish. The hard part is about filtering out, not finding material.

Now what scares me is that, at least in my country, many teachers haven't realised that the times of knowledge scarcity are gone. They tell student that using Wikipedia is cheating, instead of teaching them how to understand and navigate its (wonderful) citation system, to properly assess information quality.

(note: I suspect your comment to be tongue-in-cheek, but I felt like interpreting it 1st degree anyway)

I was only half tongue-in-cheek. I'm not really that worried about obvious crackpots having an effect directly. It is entirely plausible though that they could have an indirect effect. If banded together they could reach more of the public with crackpot ideas, and even if the public generally recognizes these ideas as crackpot, they will have succeeded in shifting the Overton window, enabling public acceptance of less obvious crackpot theories.

I am worried though about the (further) rise of anti-intellectualism and anti-science. The effects of this should be pretty clear just by reading the news. This does worry me more than the concerns you've described.

If one were to look at my Facebook feed at any random time and imagine it representative, one would come away with the impression that vaccines are an evil plot by pharmaceutical companies to make money, that airplane contrails a.k.a. chemtrails are an unknown but surely nefarious conspiracy by the government involving mass quantities of psychoactive chemicals dumped into the air, that "natural" healing using tea and crystals and such is way more effective than doctors and hospitals and pharmaceuticals, and plenty more along those lines.

My mother is deeply into this stuff, and I have some friends through her who are lovely people aside from the part where they believe in this stuff. They don't make up a large proportion of my Facebook friends, but some of them are very loud about their beliefs.

Now imagine if you don't care a whole lot about this stuff one way or another, you get your shots on schedule because that's what people do, you never considered government conspiracies because the news never mentioned them, and you see the doctor when you get too sick because that's what everybody does. Then you become exposed to all this stuff, written very confidently and seeming to be backed up with solid facts, charismatic people, and high production values.

I think there's a good chance you'd start believing it!

See also the Freemen on the land who pass incoherent legal information on to each other.

(American readers may be more familiar with the similar "Sovereign Citizen movement": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_citizen_movement)

For a good example of such a case:

http://captainranty.com/freeman-shafted-by-clueless-judge-2/

...I got halfway through that before realising that the author was actually serious rather than using snark!

Most people like that really just need someone to talk to, so introducing them to eachother solves both their issues neatly

This reminds me of "The Three Christs of Ypsilanti":

    Rokeach brought together three men who each claimed to be Jesus 
    Christ and confronted them with one another's conflicting claims, 
    while encouraging them to interact personally as a support group.
    [...]
    While initially the three patients quarreled over who was holier and 
    reached the point of physical altercation, they eventually each 
    explained away the other two as being patients with a mental 
    disability in a hospital, or dead and being operated by machines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Christs_of_Ypsilanti

That seems a bit... I want to say cruel, but maybe it's not? I'm sure most of these mathematical cranks have various kinds of mental illnesses. Perhaps referring them to each other is creating an ad-hoc support group, or perhaps it's just ridiculing them.

Agreed. However, at some point in time remember Galileo was also called a crank. Be careful in that respect.

Indeed. He was totally a crank, and also an asshole (which is what got him under house arrest). He was rightfully rejected by contemporary scientific community for pushing a model that didn't even agree with empirical data about planetary motions they've accumulated so far, as opposed to the commonly accepted models.

Yes, be careful in that respect, because the story of Galileo is one of the common historical misconceptions.

EDIT: Sources - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10878748.

Could you please give me some citations, papers or any reference? Was he not an advocate of the Heliocentric model accepted today, that almost got him killed? Please correct my historical misconceptions.

Added a link to sources to my original comment.

Will definitely be reading that thanks. However this does not change my initial point: some forward thinking individuals are ahead of their time and are sometimes ostracized for the wrong reasons.

I agree that some crank-looking people end up being Ramanujan, but the vast majority are not. When you look at the lunacy that most cranks put out, you start to see that there is a sea of weirdness out there, and doubtlessly a lot of mental illness. The old http://crank.net still seems to be up (hah! "powered by GNU m4"), so take a stroll to get a sample of the common thing that maths and physics profs have to wade through in their inboxes.

Keep in mind for the vast majority of human existence thus far, humans sometimes just flip their shit and become untrustworthy. So some percentage of humans always expecting this from everyone is probable. So which is the mental illness, expecting a fellow primate is or will become bezerk, or that fellow primates non-deterministically do in fact go bezerk?

I have no doubt the signal to noise ratio is disconcerting. Not all shells contain precious perls...

"In the late 1950s, three men who identified as the Son of God were forced to live together in a mental hospital."

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...

doesnt end well

In the case or people threatening legal action against you, putting them in touch with each other may not be the wisest move.

This is basically the plot of Umberto Eco's book "Foucault's Pendulum".

Ah, I would swear something similar was mentioned in Simon Singh's Fermat's Last Theorem. ...Perhaps done by a mathematician who was a referee for the prize.

Anyone here recall?

The usenet oracle is alive and well!

No grovel! ZOT

This is both ingenious and hilarious. The best kind of solution, in my opinion.