Physics Forums Crackpot Index - Comments

[zoobyshoe]

Are there any female crackpots? I've never encountered one.

I've met many. The ones that stand out in my memory had a prior emotional allegiance to some new age, paranormal, or religious belief that stood in the way of them putting much effort into appreciating science.

 

[OmCheeto]

Now that it has quiet down a bit, I'll go all out and blast out the crackpots that come into this forum for a set of characteristics that aren't covered in the list, and something that hasn't been talked about.

1. They are liars and have no integrity. Why? They come here and explicitly agreed to abide by the PF Rules. But then, they turn around a break those rules. So they lied. Their agreement means nothing. This then makes everything they claim questionable. Why would you believe anything from them if their words can't be trusted?

2. They can't read and/or can't comprehend. They may have read the PF Rules, but they didn't understand what they've agreed to (don't laughed. I've seen this excuse being used!). So if they can't understand something as simple as our rules, what are the odds they can understand the physics that they were tackling? Again, it raises questions of what they are able to comprehend. Why would anyone listen or pay attention to someone like that?

3. They have no intention to respect anything, and don't care. This is easy. You show no respect, you get no respect. If you do not care about how we do business here, why should we care about what you have to say? Tit for tat.

Zz.

Thank you ZZ. That reminded me of a CPP from a while back.

I did experiments this morning, confirming that my invention is 99.95 efficient.

----------------------------
+/- 2 or 3 orders of magnitude. :tongue2:

 

[strangerep]

2. They can't read and/or can't comprehend. They may have read the PF Rules, but they didn't understand what they've agreed to (don't laughed. I've seen this excuse being used!).

I'm pretty sure they can read and comprehend ok. They just don't really agree with the rules. It's a bit like various criminal behaviours. E.g., a guy knows it's a crime to have sex with an underage child, but goes ahead and does it anyway because society's "rules" don't align with his own need for gratification...

 

[Drakkith]

In this day and age it can be very difficult to sort the cracked pots from the ones that are merely dirtied from use. As such, I have come up with the following rule that should make it much easier for the layman to find the cracks.

Did whatever you read or heard present its arguments in a clear, concise manner and make near-perfect sense even though you've never studied science before? Yes? It's a crackpot.

 

[Romulo Binuya]

Some rebels intrigue me and provoke my thoughts but since they are not on the mainstream they must be disregarded. They write well, I might grade their articles A for clarity, coherence, and cadence but then the contents are questionable.

Btw, I like conciseness especially when it's correct. Somebody put in a nutshell the Bose-Einstein and Fermi-Dirac statistics and quoted "Boson clump, Fermion repel", I'm impressed that I wrote a haiku.. the quantum of poetry :D

"Bedlam in hadron
Boson clump, Fermion repel
Profound existence."

 

[ZapperZ]

I'm pretty sure they can read and comprehend ok. They just don't really agree with the rules. It's a bit like various criminal behaviours. E.g., a guy knows it's a crime to have sex with an underage child, but goes ahead and does it anyway because society's "rules" don't align with his own need for gratification...

I covered that in #3.

Zz.

 

[ComplexVar89]

5 points: Uses http://vixra.org or similar reference

I had the misfortune of stumbling upon that website recently. Let's just say I made a hasty exit, because I didn't know whether to laugh, to pity those posting there, or if I would end up throwing my laptop across the room in frustration.

I sent a link from there to my best friend, and she laughed her rear-end off.