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Is there perhaps a way to separate the behavior of someone from your term for them in general? There could be "cranky behavior", but perhaps these are otherwise
by breck 7y ago
Is there perhaps a way to separate the behavior of someone from your term for them in general? There could be "cranky behavior", but perhaps these are otherwise normal people who are just amateurs in the field of physics (or other subject) who don't yet know their hand from their foot.
Might there be a constructive way to benefit from the comments provided by cranky behavior? I'm not suggesting taking direction from folks with no experience, but perhaps cataloging the comments on this IRC channel to see what the distribution is.
Perhaps don't think too hard about the solutions proposed in these comments, but instead what problem areas do they fall into. And then from that perhaps there's an opportunity, if not for new research, for creating some better synthesized educational resource that might help people get up to speed faster.
- at_a_remove 7y agoThat will not help. I am talking about people who refused to draw even the most basic diagrams or perform high school algebra. Also, any result or experiment leading to their pet idea not working was immediately rejected. It's little more than "someone else needs to do the heavy lifting to prove me right." They aren't going to do anything more than restate their idea, again and again, and then be angry that nobody is rushing to have large universities working on prototypes. John Baez has a lovely "Crackpot Index" that is an excellent jumping off point for a description of your average crank contact. It would be different for IRC but not dissimilar. I know you're trying to give people the benefit of the doubt, but experience hasn't shown that it is worth it or even feasible. As I said before, even the patent office has given up on perpetual motion machines.