Some points in that list are deeply rooted in human psychology. I will comment on some of them I have hit in the past: > 10 points for not knowing (or not usin

Some points in that list are deeply rooted in human psychology. I will comment on some of them I have hit in the past: > 10 points for not knowing (or not using) standard mathematical notation; I personally hate non-standard notation so I switch to the standard when I know about it, but at first, when moving out of well known waters you may be using non-standard notation. > 10 points for expressing fear that your ideas will be stolen; Ha ha, I don't express fear, but who is not afraid a little? > 10 points for stating that your ideas are of great financial, theoretical, or spiritual value; A lot of papers I have read starts with this actually, not to mention PhD or MSc thesis. > 10 points for each favorable comparison of yourself to established experts; Most papers boast about how they beat the baseline that everyone uses. I do it myself although I try to be honest about the circumstances when this happens and when it's better the alternative. > 30 points for not knowing how or where to submit their major discovery for publication; Sometimes it happens > 40 points for claiming to have a “proof” of an important result but not knowing what established mathematicians have done on the problem. It has happened lot of times, since the beginning of time that some people rediscover previous results, sometimes famous people on famous and important results. To put an example the FFT, but there are a lot of them. And besides, who likes to read others people code? I think the difference between a crackpot and other people is not accepting the mistake. It's curious it happens so much to engineers. I'm an engineer myself and if I learnt something during my studies is how little I actually know. I usually say that one thing STEM education gives you is the certainty that most of your ideas are wrong.