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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!bonnie!akgua!mcnc!ncsu!uvacs!dsr
From: dsr@uvacs.UUCP (Dana S. Richards)
Newsgroups: net.origins
Subject: Re: Dealing with cranks
Message-ID: <2403@uvacs.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 23-Sep-85 11:03:42 EDT
Article-I.D.: uvacs.2403
Posted: Mon Sep 23 11:03:42 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 27-Sep-85 03:58:16 EDT
References: <181@gargoyle.UUCP>
Organization: U.Va. CS dept.  Charlottesville, VA
Lines: 21

> 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.  

Most cranks should be ignored for just these reasons.
But there are cranks and there are cranks.   The above note is about those
that are truly confirmed and I believe "beyond hope", i.e. inaccessible
by argument from any direction.
What intrigues me more are the truly "reasonable" people, people you
respect for their insight and analytical abilities, who have "blindspots"
where their faculties take a vacation, so to speak.
This happens in all fields, not just creationism, and I think we all
suffer from it to some degree.
My question is What has been written on this anomolous (normal?) behaviour?


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