7 ms·

You can go astray without really becoming a crank. A true crank that can't let the crankery go develops delusions of persecution and conspiracy to keep the trut

by Isamu 8y ago

You can go astray without really becoming a crank. A true crank that can't let the crankery go develops delusions of persecution and conspiracy to keep the truth out. Going astray may be as simple as not being able to provide the necessary clarity, the clear road map that leads from what is familiar, to those in the field, to the novel thing you are proposing. I am talking of course of heavily mathematical fields. Not going to comment on the murkier situation outside of that.

sp332 8y ago
The article wonders (in the 5th-to-last paragraph) if a different kind of rejection might help reduce the number of people who turn into cranks. Sometimes they have an idea and it seems like they can't communicate it, so maybe just saying "I understand your point even if I think it's wrong" could help.
- ssivark 8y ago
  Good point. In my experience, when communicating ideas, it helps to separate the nuances of “I hear/understand you” and “I agree with you”. For novel ideas, it takes a significant amount of time after you understand it, to decide on it. In the mean time it is important to suspend judgement while exploring the idea and its consequences. Most people genuinely interested in ideas want to make sure their thoughts have been understood, and will happily receive a critique if it comes to be. Seeing acknowledgment that they’ve been understood allows them to relax and start listening. OTOH, being repeatedly dismissed without being understood leads them to feel persecuted for novelty. Listening is an art.
  - behringer 8y ago
    It doesn't matter how good of a listener one is. If you can't refute a claim with evidence to the contrary, your refutation will feel like persecution. If a person can't be convinced with real evidence, that is the road to crack-pottery.
  - fossuser 8y ago
    I find it helps a lot when you're telling someone they're wrong first tell them how they're right. Typically there's some agreement with a difference of either an underlying core axiom or some other tradeoff that the two people are weighing differently. Pointing out the pieces you agree on helps the other person relax a little and open up when thinking about their position.
  - Kalium 8y ago
    You're absolutely right! People genuinely interested solely ideas will be satisfied to be understood and accept any reasonable critique that comes in response. One of the human failure modes that I witness on a regular basis is that people fail to separate "I hear/understand you" and "I agree with you" within their own heads. People have a tendency to assume that what they find convincing will be similarly convincing to another. As a result, if it's not convincing to another, this other person must not understand it properly and must just need to be educated on the subject. Or, more cynically, they aren't paying attention because they don't understand the importance of the work. My current operating hypothesis is that vanishingly few people are genuinely interested solely in ideas. Almost everyone has some ego at stake. Being told that your baby is ugly, no matter how kindly, compassionately, or empathetically it is done, is rarely a positive experience. This is where people like Dale Carnegie come in. Beyond the emotional aspects of it, there are other issues. It can be incredibly labor-intensive to delve deeply into a paper and determine how right or wrong it is. If it's wrong, it's even more work to understand precisely where and how it is wrong, and then give the kind of feedback a hypothetical egoless author genuinely interested solely in ideas would like. This can be a great deal to ask, unpaid, of people who have other things they would like to be doing. This is doubly true when most papers are patently wrong in some obvious way and the painstakingly handcrafted feedback unlikely to be taken up in the manner an idealist could hope for. I'm sure you have a way to handle this with the art of listening, and I'm just not seeing it. Can you help me understand? Again, you're completely right. It can definitely help to separate the ideas of understanding and agreement, and reasonable people interested in ideas will handle this gracefully! There just might be some room for nuance and perhaps a careful consideration of costs and burdens might be in order.
    - ssivark 8y ago
      > if it's not convincing to another, this other person must not understand it properly and must just need to be educated on the subject. Or, more cynically, they aren't paying attention because they don't understand the importance of the work. Here's a thumb rule I try to follow: Before having a strong opinion towards one side, one must be able to be articulate both (opposing) points of view. So, my goal in any discussion is to reach that stage -- mutually, if possible. After that point, I'm willing to trust reasonable people to exercise independent judgement. At least we can get a shared understanding of which differing assumptions lead us to different conclusions, and see whether there are any tests which will help us validate those assumptions. > Almost everyone has some ego at stake. Aye, we're all humans! All we can do is strive to be a little better each day :-) The same with regards to listening to someone -- I try to listen carefully and respond sincerely with what puzzles me. It's up to them what they wish to do with that. > It can be incredibly labor-intensive to delve deeply into a paper and determine how right or wrong it is. If it's wrong, it's even more work to understand precisely where and how it is wrong, and then give the kind of feedback a hypothetical egoless author genuinely interested solely in ideas would like. This can be a great deal to ask, unpaid, of people who have other things they would like to be doing. Absolutely! I don't mean to imply that one should take every crackpot paper seriously. I guess each researcher has a circle of respected colleagues whom one can trust for a little bit of indulgence. Also, this is partly what professors are paid for -- so I would hope they're willing to spend some time with their maturing students, and their colleagues, who have proven track records as researchers. An interesting related tidbit: Some of my physics professors were very sincere in asking eager grad students to have some humility and avoid spending much time on the murky swamp of quantum foundations (which has claimed many decades of smart researchers' lives)--and definitely not by ourselves, at least till we had a few manifestly productive years working on other things, and developed enough of a research sense to understand when to back away from unproductive lines of inquiry.
- navait 8y ago
  It seems that most people told him they did not understand why he was trying to say, and he persisted in writing incomprehensible papers. What else could people do for him? Publish a mess and hope that validation doesn't lead to him sending them more stuff that nobody understood?
  - DoctorOetker 8y ago
    except the paper is very readable, I just did. without commenting on importance, novelty, truth ... he explains clearly the (conditional) probability functions and performs substitutions i.e. deriving conclusions.
    - your-nanny 8y ago
      I did the same and concur.
- Isamu 8y ago
  The thing is, in mathematical fields, the reader is looking for a way to check what you are saying with what they know in terms of the math involved. In pure math for instance you should be able to follow the proof, or it might be possible to construct a counterexample, or at least to think about counterexamples. If the reader can't even get that far then maybe your paper is in trouble. In physics you still need some exposition that leads to being able to work out the math. Ultimately it should lead to something that is either fits with known theory or contradicts it, and in the case of a contradiction then it might be experimentally confirmed or denied. You've got an uphill struggle otherwise.
- sjg007 8y ago
  Maybe the rejection letters provided more details as to why they thought his argument was invalid which isn't captured in the article. If they did not, it seems to me that the reviewers didn't offer specific criticisms which would have been more useful. I find these questions and paradoxes that illuminate the limits of logical reasoning quite fascinating.
  - mannykannot 8y ago
    It is hard to provide specific criticisms of a work one does not understand, and which makes no testable claims. If it is just one reviewer, then he may be missing the point, but if it is everyone, you have to give some thought to the possibility that it is you who is mistaken. In principle, someone could be both right and incomprehensible, but there's no way forward unless one can get some people to both understand and agree with you. Even then, you could end up with one faction thinking it is on to something profound, while another thinks they are mistaken, as is happening with Integrated Information Theory at the moment.
- Isamu 8y ago
  I read the rejections in the article as saying "I don't understand you" or more specifically "you haven't made your case" rather than "you're wrong." I don't think they got to the point of deciding whether it was wrong or not. This might be more common in fields like physics, where it comes down to the math. If you can explain the math, and it seems flawless, then it is understandable and may be publishable. But it could still be wrong, in ways that could be verified by experiment.
- ajkjk 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure the kind of rejection doesn't matter on this. http://web.mst.edu/~lmhall/WhatToDoWhenTrisectorComes.pdf http://web.mst.edu/~lmhall/WhatToDoWhenTrisectorComes.pdf is a fascinating read on this. I suspect that a sound mind will deal with most kinds of rejection well, but an unsound one will deal with none of them well.
  - dorchadas 8y ago
    > I suspect that a sound mind will deal with most kinds of rejection well, but an unsound one will deal with none of them well. I don't think this necessarily holds. I'd need to look at studies, but I feel that the more time you've invested into something, the worse rejection is, sound mind or not. And this would be compounded if you get the feeling the other person isn't even trying to understand you and your point of view.
  - cousin_it 8y ago
    But that article says the opposite thing, that a certain form of rejection really does work: "Thank you for developing a good approximation to the trisection of an angle! It has an average error of only 0.1 percent, according to this computer analysis of all angles from 0 to 180 degrees in steps of three. It compares favorably with past approximate trisections developed by X, Y and Z that work as follows..."
    - ajkjk 8y ago
      Okay, fair. Mostly I linked it to illustrate how many forms of rejection don't work. Basically rejecting someone is tricky business.
pontifier 8y ago
I feel a little like I'm on this road myself. I've got a design for a type of fusion reactor that is simple and elegant, but I'm having a devil of a time convincing anyone that it's worth working on. It feels like the Idea is stuck in limbo and I can't get the resources together to test it. I feel like I have a responsibility to the Idea itself. As long as there is a chance that it could work, dropping it feels criminal. It needs to be killed completely, through testing, or it's going to keep haunting me.
- empath75 8y ago
  To convince someone to look at your fusion reactor plans, you have to first convince people that you'd be the kind of person capable of innovating in the field -- ie, publish papers, produce smaller results. Success follows success. Not knowing you or your ideas at all, I can already tell you that it's extraordinarily unlikely that you've come up with something new and effective, or you'd know how to get it built already.
  - pontifier 8y ago
    I know HOW to build it, I just don't have a million dollars laying around to actually do it. The prototype needs to be built inside an MRI machine.
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      That's going to be one heck of a prototype or one heck of a bang. Either way the results will be spectacular.
    - empath75 8y ago
      I meant you would know how to get funding for it, since nuclear physics research is a well established field.
      - pontifier 8y ago
        I've looked at funding. I've talked to people in the field. There does not appear to be any money available from any source to fund any fusion projects other than Tokamaks or similar devices. Tokamaks by the way, were invented by an outsider with no previous domain knowledge...

by Isamu 8y ago

sp332 8y ago

The article wonders (in the 5th-to-last paragraph) if a different kind of rejection might help reduce the number of people who turn into cranks. Sometimes they have an idea and it seems like they can't communicate it, so maybe just saying "I understand your point even if I think it's wrong" could help.

ssivark 8y ago
Good point. In my experience, when communicating ideas, it helps to separate the nuances of “I hear/understand you” and “I agree with you”. For novel ideas, it takes a significant amount of time after you understand it, to decide on it. In the mean time it is important to suspend judgement while exploring the idea and its consequences. Most people genuinely interested in ideas want to make sure their thoughts have been understood, and will happily receive a critique if it comes to be. Seeing acknowledgment that they’ve been understood allows them to relax and start listening. OTOH, being repeatedly dismissed without being understood leads them to feel persecuted for novelty. Listening is an art.
- behringer 8y ago
  It doesn't matter how good of a listener one is. If you can't refute a claim with evidence to the contrary, your refutation will feel like persecution. If a person can't be convinced with real evidence, that is the road to crack-pottery.
- fossuser 8y ago
  I find it helps a lot when you're telling someone they're wrong first tell them how they're right. Typically there's some agreement with a difference of either an underlying core axiom or some other tradeoff that the two people are weighing differently. Pointing out the pieces you agree on helps the other person relax a little and open up when thinking about their position.
- Kalium 8y ago
  You're absolutely right! People genuinely interested solely ideas will be satisfied to be understood and accept any reasonable critique that comes in response. One of the human failure modes that I witness on a regular basis is that people fail to separate "I hear/understand you" and "I agree with you" within their own heads. People have a tendency to assume that what they find convincing will be similarly convincing to another. As a result, if it's not convincing to another, this other person must not understand it properly and must just need to be educated on the subject. Or, more cynically, they aren't paying attention because they don't understand the importance of the work. My current operating hypothesis is that vanishingly few people are genuinely interested solely in ideas. Almost everyone has some ego at stake. Being told that your baby is ugly, no matter how kindly, compassionately, or empathetically it is done, is rarely a positive experience. This is where people like Dale Carnegie come in. Beyond the emotional aspects of it, there are other issues. It can be incredibly labor-intensive to delve deeply into a paper and determine how right or wrong it is. If it's wrong, it's even more work to understand precisely where and how it is wrong, and then give the kind of feedback a hypothetical egoless author genuinely interested solely in ideas would like. This can be a great deal to ask, unpaid, of people who have other things they would like to be doing. This is doubly true when most papers are patently wrong in some obvious way and the painstakingly handcrafted feedback unlikely to be taken up in the manner an idealist could hope for. I'm sure you have a way to handle this with the art of listening, and I'm just not seeing it. Can you help me understand? Again, you're completely right. It can definitely help to separate the ideas of understanding and agreement, and reasonable people interested in ideas will handle this gracefully! There just might be some room for nuance and perhaps a careful consideration of costs and burdens might be in order.
  - ssivark 8y ago
    > if it's not convincing to another, this other person must not understand it properly and must just need to be educated on the subject. Or, more cynically, they aren't paying attention because they don't understand the importance of the work. Here's a thumb rule I try to follow: Before having a strong opinion towards one side, one must be able to be articulate both (opposing) points of view. So, my goal in any discussion is to reach that stage -- mutually, if possible. After that point, I'm willing to trust reasonable people to exercise independent judgement. At least we can get a shared understanding of which differing assumptions lead us to different conclusions, and see whether there are any tests which will help us validate those assumptions. > Almost everyone has some ego at stake. Aye, we're all humans! All we can do is strive to be a little better each day :-) The same with regards to listening to someone -- I try to listen carefully and respond sincerely with what puzzles me. It's up to them what they wish to do with that. > It can be incredibly labor-intensive to delve deeply into a paper and determine how right or wrong it is. If it's wrong, it's even more work to understand precisely where and how it is wrong, and then give the kind of feedback a hypothetical egoless author genuinely interested solely in ideas would like. This can be a great deal to ask, unpaid, of people who have other things they would like to be doing. Absolutely! I don't mean to imply that one should take every crackpot paper seriously. I guess each researcher has a circle of respected colleagues whom one can trust for a little bit of indulgence. Also, this is partly what professors are paid for -- so I would hope they're willing to spend some time with their maturing students, and their colleagues, who have proven track records as researchers. An interesting related tidbit: Some of my physics professors were very sincere in asking eager grad students to have some humility and avoid spending much time on the murky swamp of quantum foundations (which has claimed many decades of smart researchers' lives)--and definitely not by ourselves, at least till we had a few manifestly productive years working on other things, and developed enough of a research sense to understand when to back away from unproductive lines of inquiry.
navait 8y ago
It seems that most people told him they did not understand why he was trying to say, and he persisted in writing incomprehensible papers. What else could people do for him? Publish a mess and hope that validation doesn't lead to him sending them more stuff that nobody understood?
- DoctorOetker 8y ago
  except the paper is very readable, I just did. without commenting on importance, novelty, truth ... he explains clearly the (conditional) probability functions and performs substitutions i.e. deriving conclusions.
  - your-nanny 8y ago
    I did the same and concur.
Isamu 8y ago
The thing is, in mathematical fields, the reader is looking for a way to check what you are saying with what they know in terms of the math involved. In pure math for instance you should be able to follow the proof, or it might be possible to construct a counterexample, or at least to think about counterexamples. If the reader can't even get that far then maybe your paper is in trouble. In physics you still need some exposition that leads to being able to work out the math. Ultimately it should lead to something that is either fits with known theory or contradicts it, and in the case of a contradiction then it might be experimentally confirmed or denied. You've got an uphill struggle otherwise.
sjg007 8y ago
Maybe the rejection letters provided more details as to why they thought his argument was invalid which isn't captured in the article. If they did not, it seems to me that the reviewers didn't offer specific criticisms which would have been more useful. I find these questions and paradoxes that illuminate the limits of logical reasoning quite fascinating.
- mannykannot 8y ago
  It is hard to provide specific criticisms of a work one does not understand, and which makes no testable claims. If it is just one reviewer, then he may be missing the point, but if it is everyone, you have to give some thought to the possibility that it is you who is mistaken. In principle, someone could be both right and incomprehensible, but there's no way forward unless one can get some people to both understand and agree with you. Even then, you could end up with one faction thinking it is on to something profound, while another thinks they are mistaken, as is happening with Integrated Information Theory at the moment.
Isamu 8y ago
I read the rejections in the article as saying "I don't understand you" or more specifically "you haven't made your case" rather than "you're wrong." I don't think they got to the point of deciding whether it was wrong or not. This might be more common in fields like physics, where it comes down to the math. If you can explain the math, and it seems flawless, then it is understandable and may be publishable. But it could still be wrong, in ways that could be verified by experiment.
ajkjk 8y ago
I'm pretty sure the kind of rejection doesn't matter on this. http://web.mst.edu/~lmhall/WhatToDoWhenTrisectorComes.pdf http://web.mst.edu/~lmhall/WhatToDoWhenTrisectorComes.pdf is a fascinating read on this. I suspect that a sound mind will deal with most kinds of rejection well, but an unsound one will deal with none of them well.
- dorchadas 8y ago
  > I suspect that a sound mind will deal with most kinds of rejection well, but an unsound one will deal with none of them well. I don't think this necessarily holds. I'd need to look at studies, but I feel that the more time you've invested into something, the worse rejection is, sound mind or not. And this would be compounded if you get the feeling the other person isn't even trying to understand you and your point of view.
- cousin_it 8y ago
  But that article says the opposite thing, that a certain form of rejection really does work: "Thank you for developing a good approximation to the trisection of an angle! It has an average error of only 0.1 percent, according to this computer analysis of all angles from 0 to 180 degrees in steps of three. It compares favorably with past approximate trisections developed by X, Y and Z that work as follows..."
  - ajkjk 8y ago
    Okay, fair. Mostly I linked it to illustrate how many forms of rejection don't work. Basically rejecting someone is tricky business.

pontifier 8y ago

I feel a little like I'm on this road myself. I've got a design for a type of fusion reactor that is simple and elegant, but I'm having a devil of a time convincing anyone that it's worth working on. It feels like the Idea is stuck in limbo and I can't get the resources together to test it. I feel like I have a responsibility to the Idea itself. As long as there is a chance that it could work, dropping it feels criminal. It needs to be killed completely, through testing, or it's going to keep haunting me.

empath75 8y ago
To convince someone to look at your fusion reactor plans, you have to first convince people that you'd be the kind of person capable of innovating in the field -- ie, publish papers, produce smaller results. Success follows success. Not knowing you or your ideas at all, I can already tell you that it's extraordinarily unlikely that you've come up with something new and effective, or you'd know how to get it built already.
- pontifier 8y ago
  I know HOW to build it, I just don't have a million dollars laying around to actually do it. The prototype needs to be built inside an MRI machine.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    That's going to be one heck of a prototype or one heck of a bang. Either way the results will be spectacular.
  - empath75 8y ago
    I meant you would know how to get funding for it, since nuclear physics research is a well established field.
    - pontifier 8y ago
      I've looked at funding. I've talked to people in the field. There does not appear to be any money available from any source to fund any fusion projects other than Tokamaks or similar devices. Tokamaks by the way, were invented by an outsider with no previous domain knowledge...