Credentials like having a PhD are reasonably good ways of “distinguishing experts from fakers” quickly, if not always accurately. (Watch out for Type II errors)
Look at the credentials of the person with the novel claim. If an engineer is making a claim about particle physics, it is less likely to be true than if a particle physicist is making a claim about particle physics.
Usually it is possible to find the author’s PhD online somewhere. If they are an academic, their university usually lists a small bio, which mentions their current field of study along with their masters/PhD subfield.
Of course, no one is sticking their neck out for the EM drive, so there’s not a prominent advocate to look up. Obviously this isn’t perfect. If it were 1905, Einstein’s career would have consisted of work at a patent office. He would have just been awarded a PhD, but have almost no experience in academia. He would have only published a few papers, although 1 was in a prestigious journal. His groundbreaking work on the photoelectric effect would look plausible, but hardly certain from such a new graduate, especially given how radical the claims were.
Credentials like having a PhD are reasonably good ways of “distinguishing experts from fakers” quickly, if not always accurately. (Watch out for Type II errors)
Look at the credentials of the person with the novel claim. If an engineer is making a claim about particle physics, it is less likely to be true than if a particle physicist is making a claim about particle physics.
Usually it is possible to find the author’s PhD online somewhere. If they are an academic, their university usually lists a small bio, which mentions their current field of study along with their masters/PhD subfield.
Of course, no one is sticking their neck out for the EM drive, so there’s not a prominent advocate to look up. Obviously this isn’t perfect. If it were 1905, Einstein’s career would have consisted of work at a patent office. He would have just been awarded a PhD, but have almost no experience in academia. He would have only published a few papers, although 1 was in a prestigious journal. His groundbreaking work on the photoelectric effect would look plausible, but hardly certain from such a new graduate, especially given how radical the claims were.