Changes

2. As a consequence of continuing peer rejection, the crackpot becomes more and more strident with advancing age, until eventually one finds him doing vigorous vocal battle in fringe arenas, open forums, anti-science mailing lists, and magazines devoted to fringe ideas and readers who thrive emotionally on fringe ideas.

2. As a consequence of continuing peer rejection, the crackpot becomes more and more strident with advancing age, until eventually one finds him doing vigorous vocal battle in fringe arenas, open forums, anti-science mailing lists, and magazines devoted to fringe ideas and readers who thrive emotionally on fringe ideas.

3. In any serious discussion of a scientific issue, the crackpot will usually offer polemics rather than reason, invective rather than fact, and a harangue that he's a "revolutionary" against an "establishment". Sometimes he makes accusations of a [[conspiracy theory|conspiracy]] against him. At other times, the accusation is of "social control" of the minds of scientists. He appoints himself as the avant-garde of a "paradigm shift", when usually there is no "paradigm" in any Kuhnian sense, but merely a consensus view about a small scientific question. One basic philosophical failure of the crackpot is the failure to understand that "paradigms" and "paradigm shifts" are usually recognized after the fact by historians and almost never during the time of the shift, and secondly that paradigm shifts are almost always the work of younger scientists and not of older scientists.

3. In any serious discussion of a scientific issue, the crackpot will usually offer polemics rather than reason, invective rather than fact, and a harangue that he's a "revolutionary" against an "establishment". Sometimes he makes accusations of a [[conspiracy theory|conspiracy]] against him. At other times, the accusation is of "social control" of the minds of scientists. He appoints himself as the avant-garde of a [[paradigm shift]].

 

4. Many crackpots, for one reason or another, have no physical access to the current scientific literature, and the result is a shutting out of any new input. New results are unimportant to the crackpot: he will say the case was closed years ago, or tell you the results are meaningless without his even reading the new paper, or tell you he knows of the group that did the work and he doesn't trust their laboratory.