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Crank (person)

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"Crank" is a pejorative term for a person who

  1. holds some belief which the vast majority of his contemporaries would consider counterfactual,
  2. clings to this belief in the face of all counterarguments or evidence presented to him.
The term implies that
  1. a "cranky" belief is so wildly at variance with some commonly accepted truth as to be ludicrous,
  2. arguing with the crank is useless, because he will invariably dismiss all evidence or arguments which contradict his cranky belief.
Common synonyms for "crank" include kook and crackpot. The word quack is usually reserved for someone who promotes a medical remedy or practice which he knows to be ineffective.

Contents

Relativity of crank beliefs

The term crank is often applied to persons who contradict rigorously proven mathematical theorems, such as the impossibility of squaring the circle by ruler and compass, or who deny extremely well established physical theories, such as the special theory of relativity.

In the latter case, when scientific paradigms are overthrown, a belief previously considered cranky could in principle later be considered mainstream. Examples are rare, but they do exist; for example, the notion of continental drift proposed by Alfred Wegener was widely considered by contemporary geologists to be cranky, but was eventually dramatically vindicated.

It appears to be even more unlikely that the opinion of the mathematical community might change concerning whether some proven theorem is true, despite nineteenth and twentieth century discoveries in mathematical logic which are often popularly misunderstood as having overthrown theorems previously regarded as true. It would be more correct to say that mathematicians have gradually become aware of subtle issues which had previously been overlooked. That is, previous mathematical knowledge has been enriched, not overthrown, by such discoveries as non-euclidean geometry or Gödel's theorem.

Nonetheless, since the nature of mainstream opinion can change over time, it is useful to define crankery in terms of characteristics which are independent of the allegedly cranky belief. Indeed, it is widely accepted that the true hallmark of the crank is not so much asserting that the Earth is flat as making this assertion in the face of all counterarguments and contrary evidence. All authors (see the references) who have studied the phenomenon of crankery agree that this is the essential defining characteristic of a crank:

No argument or evidence can ever be sufficient to make a crank abandon his belief.
From this point of view, the fact that most people can alter their opinions when confronted with sufficiently strong arguments or evidence shows that the real significance of the fact that mainstream opinion can change over time is that most individuals are not cranky.

Common characteristics of cranks

The first book of the philosopher and popular author Martin Gardner was a study of crank beliefs which has become classic. More recently, the mathematician Underwood Dudley has written a book on mathematical cranks. And in a 1998 UseNet post which has become classic, the mathematician John Baez humorously proposed a "checklist" intended to "diagnose" cranky beliefs regarding contemporary physics. Comparing these analyses, we can extract some characteristics of cranks which seem to be widely acknowledged.

Virtually universal characteristics of cranks include:

  1. Cranks vastly overestimate their own knowledge and ability, and vastly underestimate that of acknowledged experts.
  2. Cranks insist that their alleged discoveries are urgently important.
  3. Cranks rarely if ever acknowledge any error, no matter how trivial.
  4. Cranks love to talk about their own beliefs, often in inappropriate social situations, but they tend to be very, very bad listeners, and often appear to be utterly disinterested in anyone else's experience or opinions.
Some cranks exhibit a lack of academic achievement, in which case they typically assert that academic training in the subject of their crank belief is not only unnecessary for discovering "the truth", but actively harmful. Others greatly exaggerate their personal achievements, and may insist that some alleged achievement in some entirely unrelated area of human endeavor implies that their cranky opinion should be taken seriously.

Some cranks claim vast knowledge of any relevant literature, while others claim that familiarity with previous work is entirely unnecessary; regardless, cranks inevitably reveal that whether or not they believe themselves to be knowledgeable concerning relevant matters of fact, mainstream opinion, or previous work, they are not in fact well-informed concerning the topic of their belief.

In addition, many cranks

  1. seriously misunderstand the mainstream opinion to which they believe that they are objecting,
  2. stress that they have been working out their ideas for many decades, and claim that this fact alone entails that their belief cannot be dismissed as resting upon some simple error,
  3. compare themselves with Galileo or Copernicus, implying that the mere unpopularity of some belief is in itself evidence of plausibility,
  4. claim that their ideas are being suppressed by secret intelligence organizations, mainstream science, powerful business interests, or other groups which, they allege, are terrified by the possibility of their allegedly revolutionary insights becoming widely known,
  5. appear to regard themselves as persons of unique historical importance.
Cranks who contradict some mainstream opinion in some highly technical field, such as mathematics or physics, almost always
  1. exhibit a marked lack of technical ability,
  2. misunderstand or fail to use standard notation and terminology,
  3. ignore fine distinctions which are essential to correctly understanding mainstream belief.
That is, cranks tend to ignore any previous insights which have been proven by experience to facilitate discussion and analysis of the topic of their cranky claims; indeed, they often assert that these innovations obscure rather than clarify the situation.

In addition, cranky scientific "theories" do not in fact qualify as theories as this term is commonly understood within science. For example, crank "theories" in physics typically fail to result in testable predictions, which would render them unfalsifiable and hence useless.

Perhaps surprisingly, many cranks may appear quite normal when they are not passionately expounding their cranky belief, and they may even be successful in careers unrelated to their cranky belief. Others can (charitably) be characterized as underachievers in all walks of life.

The psychology of cranks

Many of the characteristics noted in the previous section suggest that crankery may represent some kind of cognitive disorder or personality disorder.

An interesting and widely quoted study by two Cornell University psychologists, Justin Kruger and David Dunning, bears directly upon a striking and virtually universal characteristic of cranks: they simultaneously vastly overestimate their own knowledge and ability and vastly underestimate that of other persons, including that of acknowledged experts in the field.

Kruger and Dunning noted a number of previous studies which tend to suggest that in skills as diverse as reading comprehension, playing chess or tennis, or operating a motor vehicle, "ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" (as Charles Darwin put it). Specifically, they hypothesized that with regard to a typical skill which humans may possess in greater or lesser degree,

  1. grossly incompetent individuals tend to greatly overestimate their own level of skill,
  2. grossly incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others,
  3. grossly incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy,
  4. if they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill.
They set out to test these hypotheses on human subjects, sixty-five Cornell undergraduates registered in various psychology courses.

In a series of studies, Kruger and Dunning examined self-assessment of logical reasoning skills, grammatical skills, and humor. In one of their most striking results, they found that

  1. students whose test skills put them well below average (bottom 10th percentile) guessed that they ranked in the top third of the class,
  2. students whose test skills put them well above average (top 10th percentile) slightly underestimated their class rank.
After being shown their test score, the subjects were again asked to estimate their own rank, whereupon the competent group accurately estimated their rank, while the incompetent group still vastly overestimated their own rank. Only after extensive tutoring in the skills they had previously lacked did a followup study suggest that these formerly grossly incompetent students had improved both their actual skill level and their ability to estimate their class rank.

These results may explain why cranks so often seem to represent, not individuals with an exceptional degree of knowledge, but rather individuals with an exceptional degree of ignorance concerning the subject of their cranky belief.

As noted above, in addition to a general lack of ability to accurately assess their own skills and knowledge, many cranks also exhibit easily recognizable deficiencies in reading comprehension, logical reasoning, and other cognitive abnormalities, which obviously contribute both to how they arrive at some bizarre counterfactual belief in the first place, and to how they are able to cling to such a belief in the face of all objections.

It is also striking that many cranks seem to exhibit certain symptoms of grandiosity or megalomania. This may perhaps also be understood, in terms of the phenomenon studied by Kruger and Dunning, as resulting from a simultaneous vast overinflation of their own social value and underestimation of the social value of others.

Cranks are almost invariably male. This seems to be consistent with evidence that in typical tests of performance males as a group have a similar mean ability but a larger variance of ability than females, so that individuals exhibiting either extreme ability or extreme disability are more likely to be male than female. Males are also commonly held to be more likely than females to be comfortable in defying social norms or operating outside any recognized social group.

Internet Cranks

The rise of the Internet has given a voice to people well outside the mainstream who may get labeled cranks through internet postings or websites promoting particular beliefs. Indeed, certain people labeled cranks have become internet legends.

There are a number of websites devoted to listing people as cranks, with one of the most well-known being [Crank dot net]. It is estimated that there are thousands of websites promoting "new energy schemes" alone.

There are also newsgroups which are nominally devoted to discussing (alt.usenet.kooks) or poking fun (alt.slack, alt.religion.kibology) at cranks.

Etymology

The meaning of the word crank described in this article was apparently first defined in the 1833 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary: "a person with a mental twist; one who is apt to take up eccentric notions or impracticable projects",Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989) probably related to "An eccentric notion or action; a mental twist put into practice". In 1906, Nature offered essentially the same definition which is used here:

The word Crackpot apparently also first appeared in 1883:

The term kook appears to be much more recent. The adjectival-form, kooky, was apparently coined in 1959 as part of American teen-ager (or beatnik) slang, which [derives from] the pejorative meaning of the noun cuckoo. The noun-form kook, may have first appeared in 1960 in Britain's Daily Mail newspaper:

See also

Discussions of particular types of crank beliefs:

Lists of specific cranky beliefs:

Spoofs:

References

 

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

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