[coldtea]

>Remarkable story. It's amazing how closed-minded "experts" can be.

Yes, but it's also amazing how kooky, dangerous, delusional non-experts that think they know better can be -- so their close-mindness is part of an attempt to balance that.

Just two examples that millions of people believe in: perpetual motion machines and homeopathic drugs...

[segfaultbuserr]

Yes. When an expert receives something from an non-expert outsider, statistically, it's very likely that outsiders have no idea on what they are talking about, and only a small chance that the outsider really knows something and even lesser chance that the outsider has made a groundbreaking discovery.

And from The Bullshit Principle (https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/01/28/bullshit-a...): the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it. As a natural result, if everything from outsiders are taken seriously, wasting 99% of time is guaranteed, so experts are trained to ignore them. Ignoring authentic insight is an unfortunately consequence, but I fail to see how the problem can be solved.

Also, the issue of expert vs. non-expert and insiders vs. outsiders are different. You can be an outsider who rejects established technical dogmas or institutional power structure, while still being an expert in terms of knowledge (although whether someone is being recognized as an expert is a social-political question, but let's idealize), and you're very likely to be rejected from the academia, however, on the other hand, the combination of "non-expert" + "outsider" makes people don't even take you seriously.