This is a useful video to me. I am somehow surprised that physics crackpots exist to the extend that this is a know concept. I actually knew this before, but failed to relate it to this article and my previous comment.
I once thought I had solved P=NP. And that seemed very exciting. There was some desire to just tell some other people I trust. I had some clever way to transform SAT problems into a form that is tractable. Of cause later I realized that transforming solutions of the tractable problem form back into SAT was NP hard. I had figured out how to take a SAT problem and turn it into an easy problem that was totally not equivalent to the SAT problem. And then I marveled at how easy it was to solve the easy problem.
My guess at what is going on in a crackpots head is probably exactly this. They come up with a clever idea that they can’t tell how it fails. So it seems amazing. Now they want to tell everybody, and well do so. That seems to be what makes a crackpot a crackpot. Being overwhelmed by excitement and sharing their thing, without trying to figure out how it fails. And intuitively it really really feels like it should work. You can’t see any flaw.
So it feels like one of the best ways to avoid being a crackpot is to try to solve a bunch of hard problems, and fail in a clear way. Then when solving a hard problem your prior is “this is probably not gonna work at all” even when intuitively it feels like it totally should work.
It would be interesting to know how many crackpots are repeated offenders.
They come up with a clever idea that they can’t tell how it fails. So it seems amazing...And intuitively it really really feels like it should work. You can’t see any flaw.
I do think this is an important aspect. Turing award winner Tony Hoare once said,
There are two methods in software design. One is to make the program so simple, there are obviously no errors. The other is to make it so complicated, there are no obvious errors.
and I think there’s a similar dynamic when people try to develop scientific theories.
This is a useful video to me. I am somehow surprised that physics crackpots exist to the extend that this is a know concept. I actually knew this before, but failed to relate it to this article and my previous comment.
I once thought I had solved P=NP. And that seemed very exciting. There was some desire to just tell some other people I trust. I had some clever way to transform SAT problems into a form that is tractable. Of cause later I realized that transforming solutions of the tractable problem form back into SAT was NP hard. I had figured out how to take a SAT problem and turn it into an easy problem that was totally not equivalent to the SAT problem. And then I marveled at how easy it was to solve the easy problem.
My guess at what is going on in a crackpots head is probably exactly this. They come up with a clever idea that they can’t tell how it fails. So it seems amazing. Now they want to tell everybody, and well do so. That seems to be what makes a crackpot a crackpot. Being overwhelmed by excitement and sharing their thing, without trying to figure out how it fails. And intuitively it really really feels like it should work. You can’t see any flaw.
So it feels like one of the best ways to avoid being a crackpot is to try to solve a bunch of hard problems, and fail in a clear way. Then when solving a hard problem your prior is “this is probably not gonna work at all” even when intuitively it feels like it totally should work.
It would be interesting to know how many crackpots are repeated offenders.
I do think this is an important aspect. Turing award winner Tony Hoare once said,
and I think there’s a similar dynamic when people try to develop scientific theories.