"Crank" is a pejorative A pejorative , as a noun, means a word or phrase that implies disapproval or contempt and is meant to be insulting, impolite, or unkind: "A belittling or disparaging word or expression." When used as an adjective, pejorative is synonymous with derogatory, derisive, dyslogistic, and contemptuous. Standards of politeness limit the use of term for a person who holds a belief that a vast majority of their contemporaries consider false.[1] A "cranky" belief is so wildly at variance with commonly accepted truth as to be ludicrous, and arguing with cranks is useless, because they will invariably dismiss all evidence or arguments which contradict their unconventional beliefs.

Common synonyms for "crank" include kook and crackpot. Crank differs from fanatic Fanaticism is an emotion of being filled with excessive, uncritical zeal, particularly for an extreme religious or political cause or in some cases sports, or with an obsessive enthusiasm for a pastime or hobby. Philosopher George Santayana defines fanaticism as "redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim"; according to in that the subject of the fanatic's obsession is either not necessarily widely regarded as wrong or not necessarily a "fringe" belief. Similarly, the word quack Quackery is a derogatory term used to describe unproven or fraudulent medical practices. Random House Dictionary describes a "quack" as a "fraudulent or ignorant pretender to medical skill" or "a person who pretends, professionally or publicly, to have skill, knowledge, or qualifications he or she does not possess; a is reserved for someone who promotes a medical remedy or practice that is widely considered to be ineffective. Crank may also refer to an ill-tempered individual or one who is in a bad mood, but that usage is not the subject of this article.

Contents

Relativity of crank beliefs

The term crank is often applied to persons who contradict rigorously proven In mathematics, a proof is a convincing demonstration that some mathematical statement is necessarily true. Proofs are obtained from deductive reasoning, rather than from inductive or empirical arguments. That is, a proof must demonstrate that a statement is true in all cases, without a single exception. An unproved proposition that is believed to mathematical theorems In mathematics, a theorem is a statement proved on the basis of previously accepted or established statements such as axioms. In formal mathematical logic, the concept of a theorem may be taken to mean a formula that can be derived according to the derivation rules of a fixed formal system. The statements of a theory as expressed in a formal, such as the impossibility of squaring the circle Squaring the circle is a problem proposed by ancient geometers. It is the challenge of constructing a square with the same area as a given circle by using only a finite number of steps with compass and straightedge. More abstractly and more precisely, it may be taken to ask whether specified axioms of Euclidean geometry concerning the existence of by ruler and compass, or who deny extremely well established physical theories In the sciences generally, a scientific theory is constructed from elementary theorems that consist in empirical data about observable phenomena. A scientific theory is used as a plausible general principle or body of principles offered to explain a phenomenon, such as the special theory of relativity This theory has a wide range of consequences which have been experimentally verified, including counter-intuitive ones such as length contraction, time dilation and relativity of simultaneity, contradicting the classical notion that the duration of the time interval between two events is equal for all observers. Combined with other laws of physics, or a round earth (See Flat Earth Society The Flat Earth Society was an organization that sought to further the belief that the Earth is flat rather than a sphere. The modern organization was founded by Englishman Samuel Shenton in 1956, and later led by Charles K. Johnson, who based the organization in his home in Lancaster, California. The formal society appears to have disbanded after). More engineer-minded cranks may claim to have invented a magic compression algorithm or a perpetual motion The term perpetual motion, taken literally, refers to movement that goes on forever. However, the term more commonly refers to any device or system that perpetually produces more energy than it consumes, resulting in a net output of energy for indefinite time. The law of conservation of energy, which states that energy cannot be created or / free energy The second law of thermodynamics is an expression of the universal principle of increasing entropy, stating that the entropy of an isolated system which is not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium machine.

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 Continental drift is the movement of the Earth's continents relative to each other. The hypothesis that continents 'drift' was first put forward by Abraham Ortelius in 1596 and was fully developed by Alfred Wegener in 1912. However, it was not until the development of the theory of plate tectonics in the 1960s, that a sufficient geological proposed by Alfred Wegener Alfred Lothar Wegener was a German scientist, geologist, and meteorologist was widely considered by contemporary geologists A geologist is a scientist who studies the solid and liquid matter that constitutes the Earth and terrestrial planets. Geologists usually engage studying geology, and approach this using physics, chemistry and biology as well as other sciences to be cranky, but was eventually dramatically vindicated (Williams 2000).

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 Mathematical logic is a subfield of mathematics with close connections to computer science and philosophical logic. The field includes the mathematical study of logic and the applications of formal logic to other areas of mathematics. The unifying themes in mathematical logic include the study of the expressive power of formal systems and the 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 A non-Euclidean geometry is characterized by a non-vanishing Riemann curvature tensor. Examples of non-Euclidean geometries include the hyperbolic and elliptic geometry, which are contrasted with a Euclidean geometry. The essential difference between Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry is the nature of parallel lines. Euclid's fifth postulate, or Gödel's incompleteness theorems In mathematical logic, Gödel's incompleteness theorems, proved by Kurt Gödel in 1931, are two theorems stating inherent limitations of all but the most trivial formal systems for arithmetic of mathematical interest. The theorems are of considerable importance to the philosophy of mathematics. They are widely regarded as showing that Hilbert's.

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 The flat Earth model is an ancient view of the Earth's shape which conceived of it as flat like a piece of paper or an infinite plane. This belief contrasts with the view introduced around the 4th century BC by natural philosophers of Classical Greece that the Earth is spherical as making this assertion in the face of all counterarguments and contrary evidence. Certain 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.

Common characteristics of cranks

The second book of the philosopher and popular author Martin Gardner Martin Gardner is an American mathematics and science writer specializing in recreational mathematics, but with interests encompassing stage magic, pseudoscience, literature (especially the writings of Lewis Carroll), philosophy, scientific skepticism, and religion. He wrote the Mathematical Games column in Scientific American from 1956 to 1981, was a study of crank beliefs, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science was Martin Gardner's second book, and has become a classic in the literature of entertaining scientific skepticism. It is perhaps the first modern book of scientific skepticism of pseudoscience. More recently, the mathematician Underwood Dudley has written a series of books on mathematical cranks, including The Trisectors, Mathematical Cranks, and Numerology: Or, What Pythagoras Wrought. And in a 1998 UseNet Usenet, a portmanteau of "user" and "network", is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It evolved from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name post, the mathematician John Baez John Carlos Baez is an American mathematical physicist at the University of California, Riverside. He is known for his work on spin foams in loop quantum gravity. More recently, his research has focused on applications of higher categories to physics humorously proposed a "checklist", the Crackpot index The crackpot index is a number that rates scientific claims or the individuals that make them, in conjunction with a method for computing that number. The method, proposed semi-seriously by mathematical physicist John Baez in 1992, computes an index by responses to a list of 37 questions, each positive response contributing a point value ranging, intended to "diagnose" cranky beliefs regarding contemporary physics.[2]

According to these authors, virtually universal characteristics of cranks include:

  1. Cranks overestimate their own knowledge and ability, and 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 bad listeners, and often appear to be uninterested 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 because they believe it "poisons" the minds by teaching falsehoods. 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 Galileo Galilei was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations, and support for Copernicanism. Galileo has been called the "father of modern observational astronomy," or Copernicus Nicolaus Copernicus was the first astronomer to formulate a comprehensive heliocentric cosmology, which displaced the Earth from the center of the universe. His epochal book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), published in 1543 just before he died, is often regarded as the starting point of modern, 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 Mathematics is the study of quantity, structure, space, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns.They formulate new conjectures and establish truth by rigorous deduction from appropriately chosen axioms and definitions or physics Physics is one of the oldest academic disciplines, perhaps the oldest through its inclusion of astronomy. Over the last two millennia, physics had been considered synonymous with philosophy, chemistry, and certain branches of mathematics and biology, but during the Scientific Revolution in the 16th century, it emerged to become a unique modern, 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.[3]

In addition, cranky scientific "theories" do not in fact qualify as theories In the sciences generally, a scientific theory is constructed from elementary theorems that consist in empirical data about observable phenomena. A scientific theory is used as a plausible general principle or body of principles offered to explain a phenomenon as this term is commonly understood within science. For example, crank "theories" in physics typically fail to result in testable predictions, which makes them unfalsifiable Falsifiability is the logical possibility that an assertion can be shown false by an observation or a physical experiment. That something is "falsifiable" does not mean it is false; rather, that if it is false, then this can be shown by observation or experiment. Falsifiability is an important concept in science and the philosophy of and hence unscientific.

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.

Science fiction author and critic Bruce Sterling Michael Bruce Sterling is an American science fiction author, best known for his novels and his seminal work on the Mirrorshades anthology, which helped define the cyberpunk genre noted in his essay in CATSCAN 13:[4]

Online communication can wonderfully liberate the tender soul of some well-meaning personage who, for whatever reason, is physically uncharismatic. Unfortunately, online communication also fertilizes the eccentricities of hopeless cranks, who at last find themselves in firm possession of a wondrous soapbox A soapbox is a raised platform on which one stands to make an impromptu speech, often about a political subject that the Trilateral Commission The Trilateral Commission is a private organization, established to foster closer cooperation between United States, Europe and Japan. It was founded in July 1973, at the initiative of David Rockefeller; who was Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations at that time. The Trilateral Commission is widely seen as a counterpart to the Council on and the Men In Black Men in Black , in popular culture and in UFO conspiracy theories, are men dressed in black suits claiming to be government agents who attempt to harass or threaten UFO witnesses into silence. It is also frequently used to describe mysterious men working for unknown organizations, as well as to various branches of government allegedly designed to had previously denied them.

The psychology of cranks

A widely quoted study by two Cornell University Cornell University, located in Ithaca, New York, USA, is a private university and a member of the Ivy League. Cornell is one of two private land grant universities, and has four state-supported statutory or contract colleges. Its two medical campuses are located in New York City and Education City, Qatar psychologists, Justin Kruger and David Dunning, is often thought to bear directly upon a striking and virtually universal characteristic of cranks: they simultaneously overestimate their own knowledge and ability and underestimate that of other persons, including that of acknowledged experts in the field.[Need quotation on talk to verify]

Kruger and Dunning hypothesized that with regard to a typical skill which humans may possess in greater or lesser degree:[5]

  1. incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill,
  2. incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others,
  3. incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy,
  4. if they can be trained to improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill.

They confirmed these hypotheses in a series of tests.

These results are taken to 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 deficiencies in reading comprehension, logical reasoning, and other cognitive abnormalities, which may 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.

Many cranks seem to exhibit grandiose or megalomaniacal Megalomania is a historical term for behavior characterized by an obsession or preoccupation with wealth, power, genius, or omnipotence—often generally termed as delusions of grandeur or grandiose delusions. Megalomania denotes an obsession with having and/or obtaining, grandiosity and extravagance (especially in the form of great fame and behavior.[citation needed] This may perhaps also be understood, in terms of the phenomenon studied by Kruger and Dunning, as resulting from a simultaneous overinflation of their own social value and underestimation of the social value of others.

Internet cranks

The rise of the Internet has given another outlet to people well outside the mainstream who may get labeled cranks through internet postings A usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from many users in different locations. The term may be confusing to some, because it is usually a discussion group. Newsgroups are technically distinct from, but functionally similar to, discussion forums on the World Wide Web. Newsreader software is used to or websites A website is a collection of related web pages, images, videos or other digital assets that are addressed with a common domain name or IP address in an Internet Protocol-based network. A web site is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via the Internet or a private local area network promoting particular beliefs. There are a number of websites devoted to listing people as cranks. Community-edited websites like Wikipedia have been described as vulnerable to cranks.[6][7]

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

Etymology

This article contains too many quotations for an encyclopedic entry. Please help improve the article by removing excessive quotations or transferring them to Wikiquote Wikiquote is one of a family of wiki-based projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation, running on MediaWiki software. Based on an idea by Daniel Alston and implemented by Brion Vibber, the goal of the project is to produce collaboratively a vast reference of quotations from prominent people, books, films and proverbs, and to give details about them. Help is available. (March 2008)

Old English Old English is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written in parts of what are now England and south-eastern Scotland between the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century. What survives through writing represents primarily the literary register of Anglo-Saxon. It is a West Germanic language and is closely related to Old cranc- is preserved only in crancstæf "a weaver's instrument".

It is from a Proto-Germanic Proto-Germanic, or Common Germanic, as it is sometimes known, is the hypothetical common ancestor of all the Germanic languages such as modern English, Dutch, Afrikaans, German, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, and Swedish. The Proto-Germanic language is not directly attested by any surviving texts but has been reconstructed using the stem *krank- meaning "bend". German krank has a modern meaning of "sick, ill", evolved from a former meaning "weak, small". English crank in its modern sense is first recorded 1833, and cranky in a sense of "irritable" dates from 1821. The term was popularised in 1881 for being applied to Horace Greeley Horace Greeley was an American editor of a leading newspaper, a founder of the Liberal Republican Party, a reformer, and a politician. His New York Tribune was America's most influential newspaper from the 1840s to the 1870s and "established Greeley's reputation as the greatest editor of his day." Greeley used it to promote the Whig and.

In 1906, Nature Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. It ranges in scale from the subatomic to the cosmic offered essentially the same definition which is used here:

A crank is defined as a man who cannot be turned.

– Nature, 8 Nov 1906, 25/2

The term "crank" (or "krank") was once the favored term for spectators at sporting events, a term later supplanted by "fans". By implication, the "kranks in the bleaching boards" think they know more about the sport than do its participants. There is more discussion of this term in The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, by Paul Dickson.

The word crackpot apparently also first appeared in 1883:

My aunty knew lots, and called them crack-pots.

– Broadside Ballad, 1883

As noted in Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, the terms "crackpot", "crackbrain" and "cracked" are synonymous, and suggest a metaphorically "broken" head. The terms "crazy" and "crazed" also originally meant "broken" and derive from the same root word as "cracked". The dictionary gives no indication that "pate" and "pot" have the same root, despite their apparent similarity, and implied colloquial use of "pot" to mean "head" in the word "crackpot". However, the term "craze" is also used to refer to minute cracks in pottery glaze, again suggesting the metaphorical connection of cracked pots with questionable mental health.

The term kook appears to be much more recent. The adjectival In grammar, an adjective is a word whose main syntactic role is to modify a noun or pronoun, giving more information about the noun or pronoun's referent. Some examples can be seen in the box to the right. Collectively, adjectives form one of the traditional English eight parts of speech, though linguists today distinguish adjectives from words-form, kooky, was apparently coined as part of American teen-ager (or beatnik Beatnik, a media stereotype of the 1950s and early 1960s, was a synthesis of the more superficial aspects of the Beat Generation literary movement of the 1950s into a cartoonish misrepresentation of the real life people and the spirituality found in Jack Kerouac's autobiographical fiction. Kerouac spoke out against this misdirected detour from his) slang Slang is the use of highly informal words and expressions that are not considered standard in the speaker's dialect or language, which derives from the pejorative meaning of the noun cuckoo. In late 1958, Edd Byrnes Edd Byrnes is an American actor known for his starring role in the television series 77 Sunset Strip. He also was featured in the film version of Grease first played a hair-combing parking lot attendant called "Kookie" on 77 Sunset Strip 77 Sunset Strip is an hour-length American television private detective series created by Roy Huggins and starring Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., Roger Smith, and Edd Byrnes. The noun Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of expressions. The syntactic rules for nouns differ from language to language. In English, nouns may be defined as those words which can occur with articles and attributive adjectives and can function as the head of a noun phrase-form kook, may have first appeared in 1960 in Britain's Daily Mail The Daily Mail is a British newspaper currently published in a tabloid format. First published in 1896 by Lord Northcliffe, it is the United Kingdom's second biggest-selling daily newspaper after The Sun. Its sister paper, The Mail on Sunday was launched in 1982. An Irish edition of the paper was launched in 2006. The Daily Mail was Britain's newspaper:

A kook, Daddy-O, is a screwball who is 'gone' farther than most

– Daily Mail, 22 Aug 1960, 4/5

See also

Spoofs

Notes

  1. ^ Crank at Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary
  2. ^ New improved crackpot index Posted by John Baez at Sci.physics Google group.
  3. ^ Hodges, Wilfrid (1998). "An Editor Recalls Some Hopeless Papers". The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 4 (1): 1–16. doi:10.2307/421003. http://www.math.ucla.edu/~asl/bsl/0401/0401-001.ps. A paper describing several attempts at disproving Cantor's diagonal argument, looking at the flaws in their arguments and reasoning.
  4. ^ CATSCAN 13: "Electronic Text" (Bruce Sterling, SF Eye)
  5. ^ Kruger J, Dunning D (1999). "Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments". J Pers Soc Psychol 77 (6): 1121–34. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.77.6.1121. PMID 10626367.
  6. ^ Fact or fiction? Who contributes to Wikipedia? Despite its vulnerability to cranks the online encyclopedia's usefulness should not be underestimated. | Global Agenda (March, 2...
  7. ^ Wikipedia. | Booklist (September, 2002)

References

Further reading

Pseudoscience
Terminology Cargo cult science · Charlatan · Crank · Fringe science · Junk science · Paranormal · Pathological science · Protoscience · Quackery · Superseded scientific theories · True-believer syndrome
Examples AIDS denialism · Apollo Moon Landing hoax conspiracy theories · Astrology · Bogdanov Affair · Creation science · Dianetics · Faith healing · Homeopathy · Intelligent design · List of topics characterized as pseudoscience · Lunar effect · Melanin theory · Parapsychology · Perpetual motion · Time Cube · Ufology
Resources Committee for Skeptical Inquiry · Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience · The Ragged Edge of Science · The Skeptic Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience · James Randi Educational Foundation

Categories: Pseudoscience | Pseudo-scholarship | Pejorative terms for people | Eccentricity | Figures of speech

 

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