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gwern comments on [LINK] Freeman Dyson reviews "Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons, and Alternative Theories of Everything" - Less Wrong
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Comments (19)
But they also had to correctly pick out the one which was the revolution - every such scientist faces tons of ideas and hypotheses to consider. Is your hypothesis here a kind of regression to the mean: all scientists are equally vulnerable to holding crankery?
Essentially, yes. They just happened to have had a string of sixes when they threw the dice, culminating in prominence. If you suppose that the crank-susceptible scientists significantly outnumber the crank-immune, you get predictions which resemble our observations that many prominent scientists are susceptible to crank.
Where by crank-susceptible I mean, approximately, susceptible to infection by crank...