1. These crackpots think they're right because they're ridiculed!

Excerpt from CLOUDS IN A GLASS OF BEER, by Craig F.Bohren (c)1987, J. Wiley & Sons, Inc.

"The story of Arrhenius could be cast in such a way that he was a hero and his foot-dragging detractors were villains. I must say, however, that I am not opposed to scientific conservatism. Indeed, it is necessary (although when faced with it myself I chafe and writhe and say bad words.) We forget that many cockeyed ideas that were resisted by the savants of the day - the Establishment is the pejorative term used - are often shown to have been - cockeyed. Every now and then a rare genius turns out to have had a good idea despite initial resistance to it. And subsequently, hordes of crackpots try to make capital out of this: Arrhenius was ridiculed, he was right; I am ridiculed, therefore, I, too, am right. A manifestly faulty syllogism, but one widely appealed to nevertheless."

<GRIN!>

Since I've encountered the above error more than once, I begin to wonder whether the skeptical authors can even hear the crackpot complaints. Can't they hear the various cautions issued by "crackpots" against overly-scornful behavior? I certainly hope the skeptics aren't being consciously dishonest; that they aren't intentionally using False Attribution or "Straw Man fallacy" in order to steer attention away from their opponents' valid points. "Straw man" is a very common debating strategy used to spread confusion and sway audiences. But sometimes debaters use it by accident.

Why are the 'skeptic' authors wrong? Let's look at the details. Their argument with the crackpots starts when, over and over again, particular skeptical researchers dismiss extraordinary claims without first inspecting the evidence. They justify their refusal to inspect evidence in various ways. Here are a few, some made as arguments, others as unspoken assumptions:

• If a new theory or observation is obviously crazy or impossible, we should distrust the evidence which supports it. Evidence which contradicts well known theory is almost certainly wrong, and only VERY STRONG evidence should be accepted. After all, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

• Hundreds of scientists hurl ridicule at this theory, and history shows that the concensus opinion of a large group of scientists is invariably trustworthy.

• Science only grows, it does not backtrack. Therefore if a new discovery suggests that modern science has made an extremely major and unnoticed mistake, and that massive backtracking is required, then that discovery is wrong.

• Modern science is nearly complete, there are no more gigantic scientific revolutions possible, so if the new discovery was real, scientists would already know about it.

• Inspecting the details of a crazy claim is distasteful, and it's a big waste of time. Crazy claims are always just what they seem, and in this case we can safely judge a book by its cover, with no need to read one bit of it.

But wait a minute. In these sorts of crackpot-vs-skeptic discussions, I myself have said "but they laughed at Arrhenius..." yet my statement had nothing at all to do with Dr. Bohren's quote above. I was not saying that I'm right because I'm ridiculed! The skeptics are misinterpreting the response of the offbeat researchers. They hear this: "I am ridiculed, therefore I am correct!" But this interpretation is wrong. This was mis-heard. It is not what the unorthodox researchers are trying to say.

The Crackpots' mention of the Wrights, Arrhenius, Galileo, etc., was meant to address an entirely different point. Here it is:

Although the crazy ideas usually prove to be just that, every so often they do prove to be correct. They even occasionally prove to have immense value. They trigger scientific revolutions. Therefore "crazy" ideas must never be automatically dismissed out of hand without first inspecting their supporting evidence. If we ridicule crazy ideas without giving them a fair hearing first, sooner or later we'll ridicule the next Galileo.

Some Skeptics would prefer that the apparent crackpots always prove to be just that: crackpots. But the reality is not so simple. If we fight too hard to eliminate the "weird" stuff, then we run the risk of suppressing the next Copernicus. I say it this way: There are diamonds hidden in the sewage. Those who make it their job to keep Science entirely and totally "clean" will also become the newest generation of scoffing debunkers who fight to prevent the next group of genuine, disruptive, revolutionary advances.

The history of new ideas proves this by example. Any inspection of science history will reveal a long list of genuine discoveries which were treated with hostile prejudice. If skeptical people ignore such powerful evidence presented by "the crackpots," and if they instead distort the historical examples and proclaim them to be a simple logical error, then it is the skeptics who make the logical error, not the crackpots. When a crackpot drags out the old "They Laughed at the Wright Brothers" argument, that person is not stating that ongoing ridicule proves crackpot ideas must be correct. Instead that person is simply saying this:

"You who make a policy of automatically rejecting 'crazy' ideas without first giving them a fair hearing, you would have joined the experts in 1905 who refused to view the Wright Flyer in action, and whose continuing public ridicule eventually forced the Wrights to abandon the USA and move to France."

"Theories have four stages of acceptance:
     i) this is worthless nonsense;
     ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view.
     iii) this is true but quite unimportant.
     iv) I always said so."
                  - J.B.S. Haldane, 1963

"All great truths began as blasphemies" - George Bernard Shaw

2. Crackpots' complaints of intellectual suppression are really just conspiracy theories!

sci.physics FAQ, section 1.7 (7/97)
People putting forward extraordinary claims often refer to Galileo as an example of a great genius being persecuted by the establishment for heretical theories. They claim that the scientific establishment is afraid of being proved wrong, and hence is trying to suppress the truth. This is a classic conspiracy theory. The Conspirators are all those scientists who have bothered to point out flaws in the claims put forward by the researchers.

Skeptics should do their opponents the courtesy of actually listening to their opponents objections. When a crackpot complains that the scientific peer group is attempting to suppress his/her work, we should carefully examine the complaint. Does the researcher actually claim to be the target of an organized conspiracy? If not, then to state otherwise is indulging in a "straw man" argument. After all, dissenters in any group are often suppressed by majority opinion, and such "intellectual suppression" has nothing to do with organized conspiracies. Think about it. It makes sense that if a significant portion of individual scientists really are afraid of being proved massively wrong, if most scientists really do have emotional investment in a current worldview... then a certain portion of the "scientific establishment" really will tend to indulge in suppressive acts. The history of science reveals that this has happened time and again (recall Galileo, Wright Bros., Plate Tektonics, Chandrasekar's black holes in 1930, jumping genes, Krebs cycle, etc.) Anyone who thinks these suppression events don't happen is simply ignorant of science history. See:

Ridiculed Geniuses
http://amasci.com/weird/vindac.html

Suppression of dissenting voices has nothing to do with conspiracies. Just as no conspiracy is needed to explain intolerance (racism or sexism,) no conspiracy is needed to explain intellectual suppression. All we require is that a collection of individual attackers have a common motivation. If the victim of genuine suppressive acts makes a complaint, then it would be a great injustice to dismiss their complaint as simple paranoia. Analogy: if women complain about receiving lower salaries then men, should we dismiss them as Conspiracy Theorists?!! Obviously not. As the old saying goes, you aren't paranoid if a group of people really is out to get you. And a group can be out to get you even if the group doesn't organize or conspire. In other words:

COMPLAINTS OF INTELLECTUAL SUPPRESSION ARE VERY DIFFERENT THAN CONSPIRACY THEORIES.

In addition, those who claim that suppression doesn't exist by (claiming it's just conspiracy theories) demonstrate their ignorance of the workings of science. After all, one main role of peer review is to suppress science! It's supposed to suppress the bad, incompetent, misguided science. Intellectual suppression is built into modern science as a corrective mechanism. It's hardly a "conspiracy." And peer review isn't the only way that misguided research is suppresed. It's also suppressed when the scientific community simply ignores it, or when a few zealous scientists attack it actively. This sort of "suppression" is common and perfectly normal, and has nothing to do with conspiracy theories. Suppression becomes a very serious problem when the the suppression itself is misguided; when revolutionary discoveries are rejected for publication and when research grants are denied.

I see the above sci.physics FAQ entry as being dangerous. It promotes a view where anyone who complains of scientific suppression is nothing but a delusional paranoid. The entry is implying that intellectual bigotry cannot occur. It says that complaints of mistreatment are invalid BY DEFINITION. It justifies the following common ploy of many skeptics: "ridicule first, no need to ask questions later, since those who complain of widespread ridicule are obviously delusional."

While it's true that large numbers of crackpots do exist, with many of these genuinely suffering from delusions of persecution, it's also true that suppression of minority opinions exists in science. Kuhnian revolutions or "paradigm shifts" are probably caused by this suppression. After all, scientists are human, and if we did not find particular "paradigms" so useful, and cling to them so fiercely, then science might progress more smoothly and never require any periodic revolutions.

Also, scientific discoveries sometimes threaten powerful interests (e.g. when popular pesticides are shown to be harmful, etc.), and in those cases, attempted suppression is very real.

There is also a less honorable example...

When human beings encounter ideas which threaten their fundamental worldviews, the typical response is to thoughtlessly and instantly crush the new ideas; to eliminate them. The searing discomfort engendered by new ideas is called "Cognitive Dissonance." The feeling is almost painful, and it's even more painful for scientists whose salaries or sometimes their very careers depend on correct mental models. When we feel this type of pain, most of us will take immediate steps to stop it. Researchers are not immune to this, although the historical evidence is so shameful that it is not widely acknowledged outside the fields of Science History/Sociology. Professional scientists who pursue unpopular research tend to encounter not only the expected passive disbelief and dismissal. They also suffer active suppression: ridicule, loss of funding (even loss of funding for their conventional work,) attempts to revoke honors, and myriad subtle attacks by colleagues, with the attacks often performed behind the scenes. In fact, one common attack is exactly the one above. It goes like this:

"Scientists never attack each other, so if you think colleagues are trying to hurt your career, you must have mental problems and therefore need professional help."

When someone says "They laughed at Galileo", we must take care not to automatically assume paranoia on their part. We should instead hear it as a plea to examine their evidence, just as Galileo pleaded with his contemporaries. Remember, it was not the religious authorities who ignored Galileo's evidence. Instead it was his fellow scientists who refused to actually come and look through that darned telescope!

3. Crackpots are really just saying that progress doesn't exist

"When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."

Oh, really?

It's very convenient that skeptics chose the roundness of the earth to illustrate how today's scientists are too advanced to make mistakes. Better they should learn the history of biology, where transposable genes were ridiculed for decades before the recent acceptance, and where the experts were blind to the symbiotic nature of mitochondria and chloroplasts until very recently.

Yes, our knowledge of Earth's roundness is close to 100% complete. But is this really a good model for science as a whole? History contains other examples. The most famous even involves the surface of the Earth. If we understand Earth so well, why was Plate Tektonics ridiculed as crackpotism for thirty years until geologists finally started taking it seriously in the 1960s? The example of the Earth should tell us to take care before hurling ridicule, since supposed experts might know far less about the world than they imagine.

Asimov's quote is possibly dangerous to the more creative scientists. It subtly suggests that they must abandon revolutionary discoveries because science is complete and has no room for such things anymore. It implies that the most important workings of the world are all discovered, so everyone should stop studying it. But this is nuts. Major discoveries even today are forcing scientists to reexamine everything they thought they understood about cosmology. Suppose something similar occurred with a fringe research topic, e.g. human minds and PSI phenomena. If "psychic powers" are ever proved valid, then such an event won't be unique. It will simply join the long list of other disruptive revolutions which deflate scientists' hubris and push their understanding of the world ahead too suddenly for their own comfort.

One final note. They "laughed" at Galileo, but they DIDN'T laugh at Bozo the Clown, not really. Examine the quote carefully, since it contains a subtle twist. By "laughed" in the first sense, we mean "they used mockery to suppress a dissenting voice." By "laughed" in the second sense, we mean "they found Bozo funny."