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SarahC comments on What is bunk? - Less Wrong
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So a claim is bunk if and only if:
Those with the right kind of difficult-to-access information or who trust the relevant "expert" class will assign it an extremely low probability.
Those without that information who either don't know or don't trust the relevant expert class may assign it a more reasonable probability or even believe it.
The claim is false.
(?) The claim is non-trivial, if true, it would have wide-reaching implications.
So claims to have a perpetual motion machine are bunk because to understand how unlikely they are you either have to understand some physics or trust physicists. Many people do not have that information and do not trust physicists (or aren't aware that physicists even have a position on this, or aren't aware there are such people as physicists). And perpetual motion machines are impossible.
One issue I can see arising a lot is that not every claim will have an obvious class of experts. Once upon a time the expert class for the question of whether or not God exists was theologians. But perhaps the right expert class today is analytic philosophers where theists are a shrinking minority (under 15%). Or maybe cognitive scientists or anthropologists (whose beliefs I don't know).
I think we ought to distinguish somehow between crackpots (believers in bunk) and incorrect contrarians. The former are obviously part of the latter but are they the same? It seems to me that even if Eliezer Yudkowsky is really wrong about a lot that he believes (and this seems possible to me) he is nonetheless not a crackpot. But is there more to this than 'crackpots are incorrect contrarians who I don't like or have never agreed with'? Is there an objective distinction? Perhaps because he is ignored rather than rejected?
"It seems to me that even if Eliezer Yudkowsky is really wrong about a lot that he believes (and this seems possible to me) he is nonetheless not a crackpot. But is there more to this than 'crackpots are incorrect contrarians who I don't like or have never agreed with'? Is there an objective distinction? Perhaps because he is ignored rather than rejected?"
Also a question I don't know the answer to. I wrote this post partly in response to my worries about Eliezer (and certain other autodidacts) whom I perceive not to be crackpots. Does that perception weigh in their favor, or only confirm me to be a fellow crackpot? I'm still trying to figure out what a crackpot is.
If you find yourself worrying whether a certain label applies to you, rather than wondering whether a specific set of claims are more or less likely to be true, be careful; social fears can easily derail the rational evaluation of evidence.
The question "What is bunk?" seems nigh unanswerable, a search for a dictionary definition to fill in a hanging node. Thinking in terms of "what class of claims can I dismiss as too unlikely on the face of it, and what claims have a high enough chance of truth that they're worth investigating?" is more realistic, IMO.