[aleph_minus_one]

> crackpot submissions were a tiny fraction of submission to arXiv but they would have been half the submissions to certain fields like quantum gravity

Just some very outsider thought:

Could it be that this problem is rather self-inflected by researchers and their marketing?

Physicists market all the time that resolving these questions about quantum gravity will give the answers to the deepest questions that plagued philosophers over millenia. Well, such a marketing attracts crackpots who do believe that they have something to tell about such topics.

Relatedly, to improve their chances of getting research funding, a lot of researchers do an outreach to the general public to show the importance of the questions that they work on. Of course this means that people from the general pyblic who now get interested in such questions will make their own attempt to make a contribution because - well, this researcher just told me how important it is to think about such questions. Of course such a person from the general public typically does not have the deep scientific knowledge such that their contribution meets the high scientific standards.