> There is too much crank science in the world to evaluate it all in good faith Absolutely. And thus sadly a solid field needs a certain (ideally low) amount o

> There is too much crank science in the world to evaluate it all in good faith Absolutely. And thus sadly a solid field needs a certain (ideally low) amount of gatekeeping. But there are also academic fields which are very far from solid, in which the same license to ignore "cranks" is employed, not to save some mathematicians time, but to build a wall around an ideology. I don't really think there's an easy way to tell the difference "from 10_000ft", the two situations look identical in that there are journals, those who publish can get jobs, and later edit these journals... and without reading any of the work, there's no way to tell if it's basically solid or basically nonsense.