How to Distinguish a Key Principle of Reason, Logic and Science, from Irrational Exuberance in Contrarian Explanation
I really try to avoid using the term crackpot.
In science, the term crackpot is a bit like the terms Nazi, pedophile, and antisemite are in politics. The word freezes conversation. It strikes fear – often very unfairly – into all who are listening. Indeed, it is used in science for that very reason. Crackpot is very similar to the word crank, only worse. Using it in regards to a single person rarely helps, and using it against the wrong person can actually hurt – both the individual, and science as an enterprise.
As a young but very real scientist, I met MANY emerging young crackpots, who considered me a potential sounding board – and I like to think that I converted most of them to either outright scientists, or scientifically literate aficionados of real science. In fact, I don’t recall ANY junior crackpots who I could not make more logical and scientific by patience, understanding, and teaching of the sublime joys of REAL understanding and discovery.
More than that, was the GOOD that crackpots did for me. By patiently trying to understand what crackpots were saying, I invariably walked away a better scientist. Errors don’t just force you to ask ONE right question – they force you to ask MANY excellent questions. Sometimes it requires the patience of Job, but that’s just one more reason why reading my Bible has been so helpful.
Crackpottery, analyzed deeply, always leads back to real science, often including things I didn’t know, or didn’t know well enough. Most crackpot science is – in my experience, one of three things: (1) some very illustrative, useful, and “teachable” error, or (2) some well-known and very beautiful aspect of science or mathematics, which seems novel, but isn’t, or (3) some kind of “old science” which is very intuitive, but is now understood to be wrong.
Of course, there can be many layers of JUNK on top of the key scientific mistake, as the crackpot uses even more crackpot ideas to hold everything together, as the key idea fails. However, I would not want to laugh too loudly about such a dubious tactic, as “Bondo and paint” are also used very effectively in real science, politics, and law.
Sometimes, when discussing crackpottery in science, I like to say this.
“There is a potential scientist in every crackpot, and a potential crackpot in every scientist.”
I find that crackpot ideas are a great introduction to a conversation about real science. The trick is turning the exuberant crackpot away from the dopaminergic lust of superficial logical connections – and getting them addicted to the patient romance of deep conceptual relationships and understanding. If the latter reminds you of real love – Biblical, academic, humanitarian, or philosophical – you are absolutely right. I believe it is our duty, as people who LOVE science and math, to elevate crackpots from their trap, even if we fail, but in the process, to “teach to the fourth wall”. And that is exactly what I’m doing now.
The hot pants of OMG / string of buzzwords / “maybe this stuff is all related and I can see it” is the addictive pseudoscientific experience that crackpots cannot get out of their minds. But let them experience a “fellow scientist” showing them that they are TRULY CORRECT about something that they said, and how this idea was explored by famous scientists in history, and you can begin the process of instilling the DISCIPLINE that the crackpot so sorely needs.
Reforming a crackpot can take days, weeks, months or years. The key is to nurture the healthy joys that come from disciplined understanding, as a substitute for the toxic buzz of loose conjecture rooted in loose quasi-understanding.
Some crackpots are beyond help, and scientists who are teaching to more open minds (think about our own SteveInCO) cannot afford to waste their time on those few minds that will never attain self-skepticism within this lifetime. Walking away from crackpots who have very intentionally broken and super-glued the keys of reason in the corresponding locks, is simply necessary.
I get this. For all my criticisms of Neil deGrasse Tyson, and scientific disagreements with him, I completely understand his need to tell Terrence Howard to “move along, thank you” and to stop listening to the nonsensical ideas of Terryology.
Note that Joe Rogan does NOT get this, and he will need to be gently schooled on this point. I admire that Joe will listen to Terrence, but Joe is also a bit too easily swept up into Terrence’s world of delusional mumbo-jumbo.
Terrence Howard and Terryology are where we begin this discussion.
To be brief, Terrence was known more as an actor than as a pseudoscientist, but when he appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience, he exploded into the national consciousness. I am including the entire 3-hour interview, but I strongly caution against watching the whole thing without having some of the context I’m going to provide. On the other hand, a few random clicks will give you the flavor in a most enlightening way.
Terrence Howard is clearly a nice guy, and I am certain that I could be his friend. We might even have some profound discussions about the periodic table, as he comes very close to real science there, and THAT is where I would strike to try to reform him (see sidebar in Appendix). However, he is unlikely to ever gain the discipline of self-skepticism, to temper his equally welcome skepticism of scientific orthodoxy. The best that can be done, is to use him as a living example of an important dysfunction in science, and to educate the masses by reacting to him.
Surprisingly, that works really well, and that’s why I’m here.
Terrence is (in my humble opinion) a living example of the idea that a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing.
Terrence is an actor, but before that, he ALMOST became a scientist – specifically, a chemical engineer. However, at the exact moment when accepting some discipline from his teacher would have helped him become a true scientist, he rejected the teaching, and dropped out of school.
To get to the heart of that break, Terrence believes that, because 2 times 2 equals 4, 1 times 1 should equal 2. Now, I will admit that the feeling that something should be different is extremely useful in scientific discovery, but we also know from experience that should is extremely dangerous in almost any context. Psychologists routinely repair people by getting them to understand that their list of shoulds has grown too long and nonsensical to be mentally and physically healthy.
Terrence claims that the issue of this mathematical argument is why he dropped out of college – that his teacher could not accept this new form of math, which is part of what Terrence calls Terryology.
I have no idea if that account is true, or the full story, and I strongly suspect that Terrence was having more trouble than just a disagreement with his teacher over math. There is even some doubt that Terrence was ever in college, but let’s just set that aside, and assume that Terrence did start to attend college. It is very likely that Terrence had a bad understanding of math at very basic levels, and was not able to follow the teachers in his classes, due to that faulty understanding. However, in the hubris of academic freedom, which new students often experience, I suspect that Terrence basically went off the rails. Here is a teacher talking about his theory of Terrence’s defective education.
Many people think that Terrence is conflating addition (where 1+1=2 and 2+2=4 are true) with multiplication. I have my own theory – that Terrence is simply intuiting a new operation – unfortunately rather ill-defined – which is basically y=2x but poorly expressed as y=x*x or y=x^2 (y equals x squared).
And once I realized this, I noted something else.
If you ever had any differential (first semester) calculus, you may have noted that y=2x is – more or less – the first derivative of y=x^2 (y equals x squared).
This video explains what that means.
My explanation of Terrence’s idea would then be that the thing that should be 2 at 1, but is also 4 at 2, is in fact the derivative of self-multiplication – not self-multiplication itself.
I’m definitely NOT saying that Terrence Howard “re-invented calculus”, but what I am saying is that his “invention” – in a very typical crackpot way – is in fact a personal rediscovery of something real, known, and actually very beautiful – and THAT is part of the seduction of crackpottery. Terrence is able to see it, but he doesn’t have the patience and rigor to realize what he’s intuiting, nor the language to communicate it. He TRIES to communicate it, but he fails to use the language others have agreed to use. He uses new terms – neologisms – and people almost get it, in a similar way. As Terrence piles on more analogies and scientific verbiage, people nod and make sounds of insight, but nobody really, truly, understands.
Normal people having beautiful mathematical realizations is not uncommon. Moreover, these realizations are sometimes hard to put into words. Thus, these ideas may seem novel and inventive – and they are in fact novel to the person thinking them, and they were likely inventive, to at least some extent (unless they were just badly remembered math lessons). But the idea that this new thought is a NEW INVENTION TO THE WORLD is a huge leap that is almost never true.
The aforementioned near-tangibility of crackpot ideas, and the communicability of that near-tangibility, are part of the danger of crackpottery – the fact that others “kinda get it” just like Terrence does. This crackpot virality spreads a sort of vague almost-thinking which reminds me of the feckless and far-too-innocent Eloi in H.G. Wells story of The Time Machine.
However, don’t expect me to push for “Big Sister” and her net nanny censors to crack down on crackpots. Instead, we need more people to understand math, and to see the beauty in things like y=x^2 and its derivatives.
Biology – same thing. Remember – the vague “almost tangible idea” that men can be women if we all believe they are, is another great example of a viral crackpot idea – in this case, one that the current government endorses.
Trans women are real – they just aren’t truly women, even if we all try to believe that they are. I’m not calling for censorship of that idea, either. I’m calling for no censorship on the questioning of it, just like I would call for no censorship on Terrence Howard’s ideas, nor on the criticism of his ideas.
If you have already been somewhat seduced by Terrence Howard, you really need to listen to some of his critics. That said, I recommend an attitude of love and sympathy – even when you feel frustrated and annoyed. See if you can “do better” than these two critics, in terms of sharing their ability to be skeptical of what is obviously wrong, and remaining firm in your resistance to “feeling” the truth of what Terrence is saying, while still maintaining open-mindedness, and a desire to “make Terrence make sense” – but without compromising your skepticism.
What is the key difference between scientists like me and Steve, and pseudoscientists like Terrence?
Speaking for myself, the difference for me, is that I test and beat up my crackpot ideas, so in almost all cases where my “brilliant” idea isn’t simply WRONG, I discover that I’ve rediscovered something beautiful. Very few of my crackpot ideas have value, and most of those end up being hypotheses and conjectures that are not only limited, but need more work.
In my opinion, you’re not a true scientist unless you’ve rejected literally hundreds or thousands of your own ideas – refining just a few of the survivors into something that might have some limited value.
Self-skepticism is necessary. Enough to tame crackpot ideas, but not so much as to stifle innovative thinking.
What is the difference between, say, Robert Malone, who I deeply respect as a scientist, and Terrence Howard?
In a nutshell, Malone has been skeptical of his own ideas – and at a level which required extreme honesty and moral courage. His willingness to admit that his own technological children – mRNA therapeutics and vaccines – have problems and still need work, is just mensch level eleven. Time after time, Malone sees though the bullshit of a scientific orthodoxy which has cowered before self-interest, money, and power.
Malone, like many who question the current media-and-government-driven “new consensus” in vaccine and therapeutic science, points out the hypocrisy of the sudden new orthodoxy, relative to many of its backers’ own well-established principles of ethics and morality. Examples include the Hippocratic oath, “first do no harm”, patient rights, medical privacy and freedom, and a host of other ideas which were unassailable, just a few years ago. In essence, Malone calls upon the orthodoxy to live up to its own ideals, not in the Satanic Alinsky way that actually hates and despises those ideals, but in a Godly way that deeply loves and respects those ideals.
Crackpots, in contrast, tend to reject the orthodoxy in a dismissive way, without respecting any, or most, of its underlying and fundamental tenets. They almost always fail to explain what’s wrong with the consensus view, or the underlying principles. They dismiss it without adequate explanation. In fact, crackpots who disrespect Einstein without actually doing the hard work of understanding Einstein first, are so pervasive that disrespect of Einstein is almost diagnostic for crackpottery.
Although spotting and pointing out crackpot thinking is important, it is also important for us to push back, when the crackpot term is applied unfairly to people who are simply not crackpots.
Robert Malone, who my friends and I admire, is an obvious example to us of somebody who is not a crackpot, but Neil deGrasse Tyson and Peter Hotez, who we disagree with and don’t like, are also not crackpots, if we are honest. Neil and Peter and their ilk may have other problems, including extreme bias, corruption, and compromise by unethical government involvements, but they are not crackpots.
Even when they look and sound like crackpots!
Now, there are thousands if not millions of true crackpots, most of whom labor in obscurity, and I can’t show them all, but I would be remiss not to include at least one, a man named Roger Spurr, whose awful theories have been discussed on this site very much in the last few days.
Note the disrespect for Einstein – this is very typical.
If you can’t abide listening to his very vague and loose reasoning in the video, try this website, where you can read it instead. For me, that’s easier.
LINK: https://dipoleelectronflood.com/
I won’t get into the specifics of what is “not right” with the man’s thinking – because SteveInCO has already done so – HERE:
LINK: https://www.theqtree.com/2024/05/21/dear-kag-20240521-open-thread/#comment-1280735
Now, to be completely honest, I (and everybody else with any significant background in physics) have my own “crackpot” speculations on what may be right or wrong with the Standard Model of particle physics, as well as the top competitors for extending or replacing it. My personal crackpottery includes disrespect for supersymmetry, and massive side-eye on what I would call “irrational exuberance by the mainstream in regard to dark matter.” Nevertheless, I am always eager to test those thoughts, trash those thoughts, or modify those thoughts, based on the latest experimental results. Indeed, when the definitive experiments come in, supporting either supersymmetry or dark matter, I will be converted by them – as I should be. What I can say with certainty about Spurr’s reasoning, is that I would have thrown out nearly all of his thoughts long ago, based on the huge quantities of very solid and very basic evidence against them.
In many ways – like the term used by Wolfgang Pauli, that became (fairly or unfairly) the title of a book criticizing the non-productivity of string theory – Spurr is not even wrong.
So what is the path forward?
How do we deal with “bad science” – pseudoscience – crackpot theories – whatever you want to call them?
The Founding Fathers had a very excellent idea with Free Speech.
It is my belief that the ultimate protection against crackpottery is free speech. As long as we can criticize not only the orthodoxy, but the ideas of our fellow critics, then everything is subject to healthy sunlight. When secrecy is used to protect ideas from challenge, or government uses its punitive powers to protect its own very open crackpottery, bad things happen.
To quote a certain blog, quoting a certain scientist:
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.”
J. Robert Oppenheimer
I’m good with sunlight, as a way to help us find truth. And I hope you are, too.
W
SKEPTICAL WOLF IS SKEPTICAL
Appendix – Terryology and the Periodic Table
One place where Terrence Howard comes very close to actual innovative thinking is in his personal interpretation of the periodic table of the elements. This, despite many, many problems.
Terrence’s thinking about the elements is still (IMO) rather crackpot, and although his view of the table in terms of frequencies seems fascinating, it’s truly unnecessary, as his critics point out. Terrence’s few predictions are also quite wrong. Thus, his very different viewpoint is not clearly any BETTER than any other view of the elements, when gauged by the very basic metric of prediction generation. What Terrence is saying simply doesn’t appear to be useful.
HOWEVER, Terrence does come up with a very nice concept, which is hidden by his crackpot terminology, and almost lost by his inability to create a truly marketable neologism for it.
I happen to be good at neologisms, so I’ll do it for him.
As I’m watching Terrence, I am quite certain that he has “rediscovered” or “repackaged” some well-known concepts which are an important part of freshman chemistry. In particular, the concepts of electronegativity and electropositivity, which are powerful ideas about how different elements behave due to their electronics, seem to be things he’s describing.
Even more, if we accept that Terrence has rediscovered electronegativity and electropositivity, then he also seems to be proposing a very nice idea which bridges those two concepts, and which is frankly very needed, that idea being what I might call, more marketably, electroneutrality.
This is not Earth-shattering, but it’s nice.
So let me just be very clear. In a crackpot way, using bad terminology, making bad predictions, and wrapping it all in an unnecessary “musical” paradigm which most people don’t find useful at all, Terrence has still pushed a rather innovative idea – that highly “electroneutral” elements like carbon are a special thing we need to talk about in that context.
None of that is anything that my freshman chemistry professor didn’t say in different, more conventional ways. That’s exactly how I spotted it in Terrence’s ramblings. But bear in mind – that man was a true genius – with a photographic memory. He was a highly awarded and esteemed scientist, who worked on the Manhattan Project and many other such things. He was a rock star at the university. Students fought with each other and with the campus bureaucrats to get into his classes.
And while that great educator came close, but didn’t quite do it, Terrence straight-up pinpointed the fact that a curve inflection (think second derivative!) located between electronegativity and electropositivity is actually something worth conceptualizing, appreciating, and TEACHING.
I can imagine Terrence in my college chemistry class, taking that idea up to my professor, and that wonderful man not only listening and understanding through the broken terminology, but doing a complete lecture to us on what Terrence had just told him, or using it to create a test question, which he often did when somebody said something he found to be profound. I can see that same professor pushing the idea in chemical education – maybe even writing a paper on the concept. And in doing so, he would have demonstrated discipline to Terrence, showing him the true value of his thinking, and helped him to become an honest-to-God scientist.
I’m not certain if Terrence’s musical and frequency viewpoints have any real value in chemistry, but I do find them fascinating for both scientific and artistic reasons. Beyond that, the reason I don’t dismiss the possibility outright, is that Terrence put his finger on the undervaluing of electroneutrality in chemistry, using his bizarre methodology. So the fact that he came up with a worthwhile thought using it, may say something for the methodology used, especially if the latter could be cleaned up and made practical. I would bet against it, but not so much that I might not actually try to fully understand his frequency methodology at some point.
Like I said earlier, I have always gained something by trying to understand crackpots. Because, as I said, in every crackpot, there is a real scientist trying to get out and say something.
In closing, I’d like to thank Brave and Free for bringing the above video, which started all of this discussion. That is precisely why we’re here, practicing Free Speech – so that we can all learn something!
W
