It's not a strict criterion, but it's a great heuristic for whether or not someone knows what they're talking about. Sometimes an outsider makes a valuable con

It's not a strict criterion, but it's a great heuristic for whether or not someone knows what they're talking about. Sometimes an outsider makes a valuable contribution to a field, but 99% of the time, it's a crank blaming his lack of a degree on his exclusion from the standard outlets. This is less true in fields like programming where a lot of self-educated people still work happily. But in fields like physics that demand years of intense study just to grasp the field properly, then yeah, whether or not you have the relevant degree is a pretty good signifier of whether or not you're peddling bullshit.