Cosma Shalizi (1998): Psychoceramics: "Psychoceramics could... play a... role... analogous to that of lesion studies in neuropsychology. A working intellectual discipline, like probability theory or Sanskrit philology, has mechanisms which keep it from going off the rails, and keep cranks from taking over; most of the time and on balance, they produce reliable knowledge. This is manifestly not the case outside the bounds of such disciplines...
...But kooks represent not merely your average, garden-variety human irrationality and credulity; your kook is a person who has worked at his crackpot thinking, at least as much as a probabilist or Sanskrit scholar has specialized in their discipline. It would be fascinating and useful to know what the institutions and mechanisms are which lead some to the production of reliable knowledge, and others to the production of eccentric crap, and what the intermediate stages are (IQ-mongering, some sorts of literary criticism, UFOlogy and systematic theology all spring to mind). In fact the intermediate forms, the cults and sects and organized pseudo-sciences, which inhabit, in Medawar's great phrase, Pluto's Republic, might be more informative, though less entertaining, than the ravings of individual loons, since there one can look at the effects of lesioning different institutions possessed by real science and scholarship...
#shouldread #orangehairedbaboons #publicsphere #cognitive
