Cranks
I needed a break, and a recent e-mail inspired this. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the Citizendium. No, really, it doesn’t!
Various cranks and nuts have written me over the years, just as they often write many academics. Academics usually ignore them. When I have (perhaps imprudently) written them back, I’ve discovered a certain pattern.
(1) The crank claims to have special, difficult understanding of complicated matters, something that constitutes a “discovery.” Usually, the “discovery” involves a thorough misunderstanding of some easily discredited theory, or else a complete system of thought developed out of whole cloth, but which bears little interesting relationship to anything in the history of ideas.
(2) The crank has completely irrational contempt or disrespect for the experts in the field. He (almost always it’s a he) also has contempt for traditional scholarship and methods. This is virtually invariable as a feature.
(3) The crank, ironically enough, has an obvious desire to be respected by those experts, and has no small amount of bitterness owing to the lack of notice, much less respect, experts have paid his “discovery.”
(4) Frequently, the crank also believes he has some special gift, method, or other way of knowing, which is rare, and which renders skoolin’ unnecessary or beneath him. In fact, however, he is usually prone to the simplest of errors; it’s as if he has turned off all of his self-critical faculties. See this fascinating article: “One puzzling aspect of our results is how the incompetent fail, through life experience, to learn that they are unskilled.”
(5) The crank usually has some, but not a huge amount, of higher education–might have a bachelor’s degree, but often in a field outside of his own. E.g., a philosophy crank might have have majored in physics or business 30 years ago.
(6) For whatever reason, a lot of cranks seem to be older, over 30 and often over 50 or 60. I’m not sure why this is the case. Perhaps the older you get, the harder it is to recognize your own crankishness. (Scary thought.) But there are some young ones.
I’m just a crank myself when it comes to theorizing about cranks, I suppose…
You seem to imply that being a crank is like being pregnant, either your are or you ain’t. My experience at WP is that lots of people are partially cranky, sometimes it are just details in which they are deviating from established practice. Yet, they strongly believe that they are right. Those parttime cranks, pushing their mistaken points of view onto WP, were the ones that drove me away from WP.
Comment by Paul Wormer — November 28, 2007 @ 1:01 am
Well, I didn’t mean to imply it’s all-or-nothing. But the crankiest I’ve encountered seem to fit this pattern.
Comment by Larry Sanger — November 28, 2007 @ 8:30 am
Hmmm. If we can get a few more sources, I think see the start of a good article, [[Crank]].
Comment by Stephen Ewen — November 28, 2007 @ 11:47 am
What is the difference between a crank and a visionary? A visionary has 2.1 million articles on his website.
In my humble opinion a crank is a person who uses creativity as a weapon. Most people who have any authority have more means at their disposal, and so they never have to go there. Crankishness is the tyranny of the poor, in this case credential-poor. And wikipedia is what is civilizing them.
Like barbarians crossing the Rhine and the Danube, to settle inside Roman borders, the cranks are finally settling down. Someday if Wikipedia will go the way of the Roman empire then it will fall to another institution to respect the rules of civilized discourse the the norms of scholarship. That could be CZ, or something else.
Comment by Hasan Murtaza — November 30, 2007 @ 12:34 pm