[LINK] Freeman Dyson reviews "Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons, and Alternative Theories of Everything"

Crankery in old age is really sad. (And, weirdly enough, the topic of the latest SMBC strip.) I've wondered sometimes about why this happens; it seems to correlate with age but not young or middle age, so I discard the default hypothesis that a false idea finally got lucky and slipped through one's memetic defenses (since that feels like more of a Poisson distribution).

As you age, your general intelligence takes a real beating but your personality traits like Openness don't change so much (and great scientists will tend to be very Open). Openness and low IQ is also correlated with being New Agey crap and that sort of thing (IIRC, citations in Miller's Spent), and these bizarre false theories do seem New Agey in some respects ('it's all, like, circles of energy man!').

Could this be the problem? When you're young and sharp, you can keenly examine new theories and ideas, although you have the handicap of being ignorant and not having spent much time on matters; so your productivity rises in your middle age to your early 40s; but by that point, your raw intelligence has become blunt and dull, and your knowledge may be increasingly out of date, while your interest in new ideas remains the same. So you continue to seek out or look at new ideas, while you are no longer able to evaluate them.

So to test this we'd want to test the following:

1. Check the New Age <-> high Openness/low IQ correlation

   (If it doesn't hold true in unscientifically capable or trained populations, why would it hold true for old eminent scientists?)

2. Test that 'weird and false ideas' do disproportionately pop up in old age

   (as opposed to being adopted as impressionable grad students but only worked on & espoused in the leisure of old age/tenure/retirement, or following some 'lightning strike' model, due to say the simultaneous occurrence of emotional trauma and a meme impression)

3. That their rate does correlate with being Open

   (If there is no such correlation, it may be that the entire effect would be IQ-related.)

4. That their rate does inversely correlate with IQ at that time, ideally, at the instant they accepted the false idea

   (If it turned out the acceptors of false ideas had most of their IQ intact, and the more conventional ones were stupid, this would be rather odd.)

I dunno, I'm 26 and I've been getting more and more scientifically conservative as of the last 10 years. Excluding the topics of intense interest, of course, but in vast majority of those I tend to end up even more conservative as I learn why the scientists in the field have priors they have, and so i understand why there is apparently strong 'prejudice' among scientists, aka, priors. Yes, true, this 'prejudice' ends up wrong now and then, but the public has a cherry picked selection of when it ended wrong, without thousands times the cases where the 'prejudice' was right, and it is a very correct prior overall. Note: this absolutely doesn't apply to the consensus among non-scientists, which includes proto-sciences, and engineer 'consensus'.

Funnily enough, this article from The Atlantic accuses Dyson of similar: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/12/the-danger-of-cosmic-genius/8306/

The comparison between Carter and Kelvin/Tait seems inaccurate. Tait and Kelvin had an incorrect hypothesis but both did a lot of good work. Carter has a hypothesis which has been discounted for a long time and nothing else. Moreover, when Tait was doing his work, the hypothesis seemed plausible given what was known at the time. It took years to understand atoms enough to know that their hypothesis didn't work. The situation is not similar to Carter's.

There is good reason to pay more attention to scientific experts than to amateurs, so long as science is based on experiments. Only trained experts can do experiments with the care and precision that experiments demand.

This appears to me to be, at best, a non sequitur. The problem with cranks is not that they are careless in design or execution of experiments. Carter's problem is that he doesn't have a theory.

Does anyone have any idea what Dyson meant?

Nice article, thanks for linking!