Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Go Forth and Create the Art! - Less Wrong
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The one crackpot I interacted most strongly did have experimental results, and trumpeted them loudly. The experiment turned out to be a notoriously finnicky one (not quite down to Millikan experiment territory) done in slipshod fashion. This was utterly predictable, given purely theoretical considerations and examination of his style, even before it came to the observations - his theory contradicted, say, the existence of comets.
Experiments can be wrong. Maybe even most attempts at experiments are wrong. What makes a scientist a scientist instead of a crackpot is the debugging and validation. Trying to exclude every way the results might not mean what it seems like they mean - not just doing control-experiment comparison and saying you've done your duty.
Crackpot experiments, lacking these extra checks, are worthless.
This would make most modern professional scientists crackpots which sounds a bit noncentral - they may be no true scientists, but they seem very different from the crackpots I've met.
There's a bit of a gap between what ordinary not-very-good scientists do to make sure the experiment is right and what they should be doing.
There is a colossal gulf between what crackpots do and ordinary not-very-good scientists do.