>We have billions of people who have ideas about how the world works and a much smaller number of people who can work to disprove those ideas.
Like I said you aren't wrong...its just important to note, that some of the best minds in physics didn't have the math chops to prove their ideas. But if we ask why there are so many more people with ideas of how the world works and such a small number that can validate/disprove them speaks directly to classism. Being able to prove/disprove physics theories is generally, going to require a significant investment in education from early childhood that has been, and still is, out of reach for most. Its not a lack of intellect or talent, but lack of investment across the board.
In other words until the ideas are disproven you shouldn't call them a cranks simply on the basis they don't have the math chops to prove their own theories.
>Camp out in an IRC channel like #physics on any network and prepare to be bombarded by idea people who just want someone else to do the heavy lifting, from math to the experiments.
Seems to be a pretty efficient strategy. The entire point of this website is to support a similar model where YC is bombarded by investors who want someone else to do the heavy lifting, and business and make the returns.
No, it is not classism, it is finiteness of resources. The constraining factor is the number of experiments we can perform based on what we have. Those accelerators do not just whiff themselves into existence as fast as people have ideas. We could wave our CRISPR wand and produce an army of geniuses, we would still need those experimental setups to test out the ideas, and those costs both money and time.
Cranks are cranks. I will most definitely call them that and continue to do so. I no longer camp out like that because I could not bear it any longer. If you would like to spend your life attempting to work out the particulars of some FTL drive that supposedly works by repeatedly raising magnets above the Curie temperature and then lowering them back under it, have at it. Fire up IRC. I suspect you will spend much time laboring to support the ideas of cranks because it simply is not a good use of your time. It was a good use not of my time, either.
That's all it is -- efficient allocation of limited resources. My time, your time, someone else's time. How are these decisions made? How do we decide which of the ideas do we examine first?
If it is "possible greatest payout," then we would spend all of our collective time on perpetual motion devices. They would, after all, be the greatest payout. And yet the patent office won't even look at them.
No, our first filter is: can this be tested? And to test, we must measure. To measure, we must calculate. And there is our math.
Good ideas will bubble up from the bottom, and more than one person will have a good idea. If one of those people does not have the math and another does, then science will eventually get around to the person who has the math.
What's your algorithm for deciding whose ideas get worked on? I bet that it has some kind of criteria attached to it. I doubt you are suggesting selecting humans from across the planet purely at random and asking for their scientific ideas.
Simply put, this is the scientific method. Make a new, better scientific method if you have a better (by whose standards?) algorithm for deciding whose ideas are worth examining first.
>No, it is not classism, it is finiteness of resources.
Education is not a finite resource (I think you know that and hence you changed the goal post from math to experiments).
Nevertheless, when those that have the resources look down on those without (calling them cranks), based not on the merit of their ideas but based on the lack of resources to prove the ideas...that is classism.
You cannot do the experiments without math. We both know this. We must have a predicted value for an experiment. We must use math to create the experimental apparatus. We must use math to examine our results and to look for acceptable error bars.
Education is absolutely a finite resource. We have finite universities and finite educators. The lifetime required to attain an education is also a finite resource, as you simply cannot have a workable society while also requiring that everyone get a PhD in anything they have an "idea" about.
Limitations about. We must make choices against them. We could do quite a lot of particle research should we decide to disassemble the solar system and re-purpose it into an accelerator, yet I will gently suggest that this proposal will not achieve much traction.
However, knock yourself out. You can manage to join IRC and fight against classism by spending your time working to support the ideas of people whom you will not call cranks. Prove me wrong by doing it for the next ten years. Time isn't a finite resource, right?
You still will not engage with the most basic thrust of this: we cannot entertain everyone's ideas simultaneously and decisions must be made as to which are examined first. Anything but that is some form of -ism because you have a selection criteria that might ignore an idea.
So we are left having to come up with some kind of heuristic to examine some ideas and not others. This is the scientific method. Is your idea testable? And if you claim it is, what values will we measure that are different from what currently exists?
Propose your alternate method. Then, tell me how you are going to exclude the people who, say, want to glue crystals to engine exteriors to improve the combustion efficiency, without anything seeming even a trifle discriminatory.
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.
That 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.
Like I said you aren't wrong...its just important to note, that some of the best minds in physics didn't have the math chops to prove their ideas. But if we ask why there are so many more people with ideas of how the world works and such a small number that can validate/disprove them speaks directly to classism. Being able to prove/disprove physics theories is generally, going to require a significant investment in education from early childhood that has been, and still is, out of reach for most. Its not a lack of intellect or talent, but lack of investment across the board.
In other words until the ideas are disproven you shouldn't call them a cranks simply on the basis they don't have the math chops to prove their own theories.
>Camp out in an IRC channel like #physics on any network and prepare to be bombarded by idea people who just want someone else to do the heavy lifting, from math to the experiments.
Seems to be a pretty efficient strategy. The entire point of this website is to support a similar model where YC is bombarded by investors who want someone else to do the heavy lifting, and business and make the returns.