How not to be a crank: rules for not being a science-dick

any philosophy/belief system that is descriptive (as opposed to prescriptive/normative) will be _apodictically_certain_ to the extent that it is free from internal contradictions. in simple cases we can examine the ideas and be very confident that there are no internal contradictions.

for example: given "A implies B" and "A" then we can conclude "B".

essentially any time you formalize definitions to the point that a statement of equivalence becomes obvious as a tautology, then you have an idea you can be certain about.

1. criticism is easy. penetrating criticism that demands an answer beyond the evidence already presented lest the criticized appear totally defeated is hard. it's also the only kind of criticism worth doing, imo.

2. being listened to is a matter of having penetrating criticism and offering a reasonable alternative. if you destroy, you must offer a chance to rebuild afterward, or else the criticism will be too uncomfortable to respond to, and nobody will appear to listen as a result. if you are skeptical of this point (as you should be) refer to the position of string theory within the world of particle physics; its criticism of the mainstream is very difficult to recover from if accepted, and there's no real mental way forward as a result.

3. it sucks to have your work criticized in public -- it's intolerable, even. but it sometimes gets results. it also sucks to have someone be impolite to you. but i am sure we can all remember a time that someone (perhaps a teacher or parent) has corrected us impolitely when we did not deserve courtesy. you need to retain the ability to dismiss cranks out of hand once you've suitably proven that you can beat them by making a diligent argument. anything else would lead to your time being wasted rehashing the same mistakes of others in detail.

4. scientists are, very frequently, in their professional life, jerks. i am speaking from my own experiences and my own actions. the OP doesn't exactly brush on this, but sometimes being a jerk to the right people is what makes you the right friends. you don't really want to be friends with baddies anyway. this next point is super important and directly related.

5. don't be a jerk to people because they produced incorrect work. often the theories that turn out to be totally wrong are the ones that move the field forward the most by virtue of the work put into disproving them. if they're fabricating data or doing things that are methodologically unforgivable, that's a different story.

6. scientists are a stubborn lot, until they break in the face of evidence. if you are "right" and the world is "wrong," perpetually aggregating more evidence and showing it off will eventually work, especially if you make a point to summarize your findings every once in a while. this is just as true regarding criticism as it is regarding experimental results. here is a secret: if the subfield where you are directing your criticism has only made incremental progress for a long time -- which is to say, recently there have been no major breakthroughs or destructive revolutions which reshape prior understandings -- time is on the critic's side. incremental progress isn't stagnation, but it rarely adds enough evidence about fundamental assumptions to protect those assumptions from a sustained attack. if a field is making leaps and bounds forward, criticism is going to be shrugged off because there will be new understandings which are too juicy to slow down to refine. the later refining stages are where critics are the strongest.

Quote from the Science article linked to in OA. I think the OA is useful in laying out a less confrontational approach to raising issues.