In defense of crackpots, many of the canonical writers here would ping the crackpot meter of most people, as would most of the LW contributors.

Korzybski is a prime example. If I hadn't had a very strong prior from personal discussions, there is no way I would have made it 10 pages into Science and Sanity.

For serious reading, my priors are more important than typesetting. For web blogs and filtering forums, it's a decent way to filter complete unknowns.