[edmundsauto]

Newton was a crank w/r/t to his alchemy. Likewise, Pauling with his Vitamin C. Doesn't invalidate any of their other work, but it does mean we shouldn't just take their authority as relevant in areas outside their core competencies.

W/r/t Turing, a person's sexual preferences aren't even in the same universe as someone's unsubstantiated personal beliefs about how the world works. Perhaps you would want to retract that piece? While I don't agree with you overall, I think your argument would be stronger if you excluded his example.

I think you're looking at the "crank / non-crank" evaluation as an attribute of a person. I'm suggesting it's more relevant to use a person/field-of-study grain to apply the label. (It probably also makes sense to break it down further, but at some point, the complexity outweighs the benefit.)

[balhbloo]

no. I think the turing thing is very important. Because just like Galileo it's a culturally normative thing to hate on gay sex back then just like hating on solar centrism was. And I think a lot of the other prejudices against far out ideas are going to be these bullshit culturally normative bigoted biases that turn out to be incorrect. Just like the blanket Western cultural bias against tcm. almost just like the marijuana thing...you know "marijuana turns you into the devil and makes you crazy"... "gay sex is morally wrong." All of this bullshit kind of was eventually overturned in the tide of public opinion but at the time people were so certain (just like witchcraft) you know that there was a reality to their demonization.

So no, won't rewrite nor retract. Is important to keep it in to reinforce how relative alot of this is.

I think you probably got upset by assuming I was associating gay sex with some sort of absolute measurable moral position. Hopefully what I said has reassed you that's not the case and let you feel better about it.

Btw good point about crank aspects not tainting the whole. Maybe sometimes what we think of as crank is simply undiscovered science. Maybe Newton would have had a better theory if he knew something more about nuclear transmutation.

I think there's a spectrum of these crank things though some stuff like flat Earth come on that has to be false.

But i think we should be giving more due, and less crank, to people like Hancock.. i know it's a personal thing tho, how your feel about a particular person. I just don't like to see a groupthink pile on, from any group.

[edmundsauto]

Please let me reassure you that I was not upset by your statement - merely providing feedback for how to strengthen your point and avoid a distracting and loaded sidebar.

I'm still not clear what the broader point is. That sometimes norms change, and have non-linear impact?

Most of the time, a crank is just a crank. That's why we know about the outliers.

[balhbloo]

how can you provide feedback on how to make the point clearer if you don't understand what the point is? So I think you probably do understand it. There's no need to pretend you don't just because you disagree and you're not sure how to state your ddisagreements.

Sorry, (very) freudian slip there (i guess), i meant ressaured not re-assed haha

is that really true though that a crank is just a crank most of the time? I don't think that's true. I think the skill is looking for the sincerity and the truth in what they're saying aside from any noise that might be there as well. Just like you're trying to make the point of reducing distractions. And just like I think it's important in data analysis you know you want to increase the signal reduce the noise and that's something you as a reader can do. So I don't think it's true that a crank is just a crank it's too much of an easy dismissal. it's important to have these alternative hypothesis generators and to listen and not get distracted by the other stuff. If everyone was obsessed that Newton or Turing or Galileo had culturally normative crank ideas they would have missed the good stuff. And maybe there is good stuff in some of those culturally normative crank ideas. And maybe we did as a society miss out on some of the good stuff because we wanted to say oh cranks are just cranks. so I don't think we should do that and I think you should probably stop doing that if you want to support this idea of you know scientific inquiry and the expansion of knowledge. Just a pointer ;) :p

So, I see you making your points there and I've already made my points so I don't see anything more to add. I'm comfortable that we have different views on it.