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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ihnp4!gargoyle!carnes
From: carnes@gargoyle.UUCP (Richard Carnes)
Newsgroups: net.origins
Subject: Dealing with cranks
Message-ID: <181@gargoyle.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 10-Sep-85 16:43:41 EDT
Article-I.D.: gargoyle.181
Posted: Tue Sep 10 16:43:41 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 11-Sep-85 07:33:18 EDT
Reply-To: carnes@gargoyle.UUCP (Richard Carnes)
Organization: U. of Chicago, Computer Science Dept.
Lines: 22

Here is a description of encounters with cranks from Daniel Cohen,
*Myths of the Space Age*.  It will sound familiar to net.origins
regulars.

  ... a head-to-head collision with a confirmed crank can be a really
  frightful experience.  Suddenly one must deal with a mind that cares
  little for evidence and even less for logic.  The crank seems to have
  twice as many hours in the day as an ordinary person does to gather
  information, usually obscure and almost always irrelevant, to support
  his obsessive beliefs.  In any argument, he flings this information
  at his opponents in great handfuls.  No sooner has the critic
  knocked down one set of propositions than another set comes flying at
  him and that, too, has to be dealt with.  The crank can produce a
  seemingly endless stream of books, articles, and letters, and most of
  all he can talk, talk, talk.  A confrontation like this can be
  agonizingly frustrating and unbelievably exhausting.  Bertrand
  Russell once observed that the only way to deal successfully with a
  true crank is to counter his preposterous assertions with even more
  preposterous ones, until he is driven away, thinking that you are the
  crank.  Few, however, have that much energy or imagination.
  
Richard Carnes, ihnp4!gargoyle!carnes