Talk:Crackpot index

April 2021

Hello to whoever is reading this! I would like to majorly revise this page to add more details links, reorganizing it in the process. Please let me know if you are already working on a major revision of this page or have any other objections. — Preceding unsigned comment added by HeeHawMama (talk • contribs) 18:44, 25 April 2021 (UTC)

Sceptics are not necessarily wrong

Sceptics are not necessarily wrong, and "consensus" is not a scientific concept. It seems that proof has been dismissed as a scientific principle, in that it cannot be obtained for the consensus view!

The mathematics of general relativity contains errors which it seems the proponents cannot understand, because they have not noticed them themselves, therefore how can they say that the theory is correct? Am I a crackpot because I see the mistakes in the mathematics which they cannot (which have been explained fully on the net without a single person being willing to stand and say why my point of view is wrong) and must be obvious to anyone who has actually understood the theory? I therefore deduce that no living person understands the theory and it is merely propaganda from a frightened science elite who risk exposure.

Moving on we see climate change as the next great belief! There is no testable scientific proof that CO2 causes significant global climate change, yet there is considerable proof that changes in solar activity do cause climate changes. Why then is CO2 climate change suddenly a consensus view of science (If a vote were actually taken it probably isn't).

Why has this topic got low importance? Well Wiki is proven to delete material which criticises "consensus" views, even if well founded with proof and examples. Perhaps someone would care to offer proof that I am worthy of the crackpot index, otherwise it is proved that "science" is no longer fact, simply propaganda! You can offer either mathematically correct support for Einstein's pseudo tensor or experimental verification of CO2 effect on global climate. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.139.37.222 (talk) 19:37, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

The purpose of talk pages is to discuss improvements to the article. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:16, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

The notion of a crackpot is bullying hate speech

It is bullying hate speech to label someone who offers an idea as being mentally ill, no matter how far out of the mainstream the idea happens to be. Only professionals, under specific circumstances, are legally authorized to characterize someone as mentally ill. We should not platform this concept of 'crackpot' on Wikipedia. We should not platform known purveyors of bullying hate speech, such as John Baez. J Mark Morris (talk) 01:42, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

Reliable sources disagree with you. Reliable sources win.

"Crackpot" does not even mean "mentally ill", and you probably do not know the first thing about Baez except that he invented this thing. So, your logic is: this thing is bad, therefore its inventor is bad, therefore he cannot be taken seriously, therefore the thing cannot be taken seriously. This is exactly the kind of circular logic which is typical for people who defend crackpot ideas. --Hob Gadling (talk) 09:49, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

Judge Richard Posner said it best: "A crank is a person inexplicably obsessed by an obviously unsound idea—a person with a bee in his bonnet. To call a person a crank is to say that because of some quirk of temperament he is wasting his time pursuing a line of thought that is plainly without merit or promise ... To call a person a crank is basically just a colorful and insulting way of expressing disagreement with his master idea, and it therefore belongs to the language of controversy rather than to the language of defamation." 2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:8197:5152:E445:5284 (talk) 14:19, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

Move to Crackpot Index?

Should we move this from Crackpot index to Crackpot Index, given that the RS capitalize it that way, rather than treating it as a generic term? Seems like MOS:CT and MOS:COMMONNAME probably override generic guidance of MOS:AT here. —siroχo 22:37, 10 August 2023 (UTC)