He definitely does engage in legitimate debate about reasonable theories and weighing plausible evidence. On issues like that he can be a reasonable contributor to the public debate. That's fine. The question is to what extent is that cover to get himself a seat at the public debate table, to lend credibility to the woo woo stuff which is what sells his books?

He doesn't make money from suggesting there might have been an asteroid impact that affected the climate at a given point in history. He gets paid for writing books about "Meetings with the ancient teachers of mankind".

Just because someone has some highly imaginative hopes and theories that you may personally find distasteful, does not a crank make, nor does it tarnish other stuff they've done, of course.

Unless you're comfortable with Newton being a crank for his alchemy, Oppenheimer being a crank for his mysticism, Turing being a crank for his desires, Galileo for his solar centrism, Harvard's Avi Loeb for his derelict alien ship, Chinese being cranks for TCM, and so many others.

It's funny how rational skepticism and "crank calling" (shaming?) rubs shoulders so closely with bigotry they're almost indistinguishable. But i suppose our beloved skeptics are apt to ignore that inconvenient interpretation. I just think that the propensity to think outside the box, and courageously push against the boundaries of (sometimes merely culturally normative, as in the case of TCM) orthodoxy, while also keeping connected to truth, is possibly one of the foundations of scientific genius, and seems to be something to be encouraged. At the very least, it's benign. I'm not quite sure why people seem to be so terrified of scientists who dare stand outside the herd, and propose new ideas.

Don't we have enough groupthink everywhere else (politics, think tanks, political science, education, religion), can't we have one place to celebrate dangerous ideas? Why wouldn't science be the perfect place for that?

I think it's possible your Hancockyness is a little overblown. Perhaps he's not quite the crank you think, tho he may be the crank you need.

Newton was a crank w/r/t to his alchemy. Likewise, Pauling with his Vitamin C. Doesn't invalidate any of their other work, but it does mean we shouldn't just take their authority as relevant in areas outside their core competencies.

W/r/t Turing, a person's sexual preferences aren't even in the same universe as someone's unsubstantiated personal beliefs about how the world works. Perhaps you would want to retract that piece? While I don't agree with you overall, I think your argument would be stronger if you excluded his example.

I think you're looking at the "crank / non-crank" evaluation as an attribute of a person. I'm suggesting it's more relevant to use a person/field-of-study grain to apply the label. (It probably also makes sense to break it down further, but at some point, the complexity outweighs the benefit.)

no. I think the turing thing is very important. Because just like Galileo it's a culturally normative thing to hate on gay sex back then just like hating on solar centrism was. And I think a lot of the other prejudices against far out ideas are going to be these bullshit culturally normative bigoted biases that turn out to be incorrect. Just like the blanket Western cultural bias against tcm. almost just like the marijuana thing...you know "marijuana turns you into the devil and makes you crazy"... "gay sex is morally wrong." All of this bullshit kind of was eventually overturned in the tide of public opinion but at the time people were so certain (just like witchcraft) you know that there was a reality to their demonization.

So no, won't rewrite nor retract. Is important to keep it in to reinforce how relative alot of this is.

I think you probably got upset by assuming I was associating gay sex with some sort of absolute measurable moral position. Hopefully what I said has reassed you that's not the case and let you feel better about it.

Btw good point about crank aspects not tainting the whole. Maybe sometimes what we think of as crank is simply undiscovered science. Maybe Newton would have had a better theory if he knew something more about nuclear transmutation.

I think there's a spectrum of these crank things though some stuff like flat Earth come on that has to be false.

But i think we should be giving more due, and less crank, to people like Hancock.. i know it's a personal thing tho, how your feel about a particular person. I just don't like to see a groupthink pile on, from any group.

Please let me reassure you that I was not upset by your statement - merely providing feedback for how to strengthen your point and avoid a distracting and loaded sidebar.

I'm still not clear what the broader point is. That sometimes norms change, and have non-linear impact?

Most of the time, a crank is just a crank. That's why we know about the outliers.

how can you provide feedback on how to make the point clearer if you don't understand what the point is? So I think you probably do understand it. There's no need to pretend you don't just because you disagree and you're not sure how to state your ddisagreements.

Sorry, (very) freudian slip there (i guess), i meant ressaured not re-assed haha

is that really true though that a crank is just a crank most of the time? I don't think that's true. I think the skill is looking for the sincerity and the truth in what they're saying aside from any noise that might be there as well. Just like you're trying to make the point of reducing distractions. And just like I think it's important in data analysis you know you want to increase the signal reduce the noise and that's something you as a reader can do. So I don't think it's true that a crank is just a crank it's too much of an easy dismissal. it's important to have these alternative hypothesis generators and to listen and not get distracted by the other stuff. If everyone was obsessed that Newton or Turing or Galileo had culturally normative crank ideas they would have missed the good stuff. And maybe there is good stuff in some of those culturally normative crank ideas. And maybe we did as a society miss out on some of the good stuff because we wanted to say oh cranks are just cranks. so I don't think we should do that and I think you should probably stop doing that if you want to support this idea of you know scientific inquiry and the expansion of knowledge. Just a pointer ;) :p

So, I see you making your points there and I've already made my points so I don't see anything more to add. I'm comfortable that we have different views on it.

Too many people who have genuine major contributions to fields make the mistake of thinking that because they’re an expert in one then they’re automatically qualified in others, or that because they nailed one thing their beliefs about something else must also be true (ie Pauling and vitamin C).

I see this all the time in medicine. One of the best neurosurgeons in my country and someone I consider a friend still tells me that I need to keep the microwave door shut for 3 seconds after it’s done or else the waves will escape and give me cancer. That defies the laws of electromagnetism on several levels.

We absolutely need alternative hypothesis generators, but the widespread acceptance of every crank idea that comes along even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is not only infuriating but actually serves to damage the scientific method, when the lady down at the mothers group claims that the vaccine gave her son autism and there is a global conspiracy led by bill gates to implant microchips in everyone.

At the end of the day, in my belief, it boils down to a sad lack of trust in experts - some of it warranted from the abuses and oversteps of the past, and some of it actively facilitated by people who have ideological reasons to oppose what the scientific truths are presenting (ie climate science denial).

Hard to disagree with that. Where does that term crank even come from?

I think science theories wrt to public belief have both high false positive and negative rates. A lot of people believe stuff to be true that isn't (that climate changes are only due to us, are terrible, and that there's something we can do about it that will help), and don't believe true stuff that is (flat earthers... I'm pretty open minded but also quite sure we live on a fucking ball).

The obvious caveat is nobody fucking knows anything we're all just fumbling around in the dark but consensus and a sense of certainty certainly does help. It's surprising how shit a lot of the data that we have (even in this scientific age) is. And how easily manipulated the narratives can be.

So i think we should be giving more due, and less crank, to people like Hancock.. i know it's a personal thing tho, how your feel about a particular person. I just don't like to see a groupthink pile on, from any group.

Wanted to add another comment after learning what TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) meant. This is a really interesting grey area. There appears to be validity to some of it, some of it is supernatural fluff. Out of the evidence-led examples, it's possible some of the effect is placebo.

There are many layers, some full of cranks and some not. Maybe this is a field where generalization just isn't useful? I dunno, but wanted to think out loud and thank you for making me think a bit more than planned today :).