The first thing I notice about those links is that they tell stories about people. Even more telling, they’re stories about celebrities. This is an extremely good heuristic for identifying crackpots. It mostly talks about who proposed theories and how credible those people supposedly are, but this is not how science works and this is not what scientific papers sound like. Science is about the theories and experiments themselves; the information about who did them is relatively unimportant, and when scientists do mention people it’s to acknowledge their contributions, and it takes up only a very small fraction of the text.
On the other hand, when a non-scientist tries to make sense of a field like physics without the necessary technical skills, politics-level arguments are all they have to go on, since they can’t actually understand the subject at the object-level. They then imagine that everyone else is going on politics, too. Then, when every scientist they talk to tells them to take their politics-level arguments and get lost (because they’re busy working at the object-level), they don’t understand why, and imagine it’s because of a conspiracy. Common pattern, easily recognizable, and anti-correlated with truth.
The first thing I notice about those links is that they tell stories about people. Even more telling, they’re stories about celebrities. This is an extremely good heuristic for identifying crackpots. It mostly talks about who proposed theories and how credible those people supposedly are, but this is not how science works and this is not what scientific papers sound like. Science is about the theories and experiments themselves; the information about who did them is relatively unimportant, and when scientists do mention people it’s to acknowledge their contributions, and it takes up only a very small fraction of the text.
On the other hand, when a non-scientist tries to make sense of a field like physics without the necessary technical skills, politics-level arguments are all they have to go on, since they can’t actually understand the subject at the object-level. They then imagine that everyone else is going on politics, too. Then, when every scientist they talk to tells them to take their politics-level arguments and get lost (because they’re busy working at the object-level), they don’t understand why, and imagine it’s because of a conspiracy. Common pattern, easily recognizable, and anti-correlated with truth.