Crackpot Consultancy Service

‘Talk to a physicist. Call me on Skype. $50 per 20 minutes.’

Sounds like a really dodgy hotline when you put it that way, but perhaps I should be charging for those AAAAAAAA posts...

The majority of my callers are the ones who seek advice for an idea they’ve tried to formalise, unsuccessfully, often for a long time. All of them are men.

That last point is interesting. On checking my pseudoscience folder I did in fact come across one woman. I have certainly encountered women who believe in crystal healing, channelling, unspecified mystical forces about "destiny", etc. But female pseudoscientists who've come up with their own physically-motivated but demonstrably wrong idea appear to be very rare indeed. How strange.

After exchanging a few sentences, we can tell if you’re one of us. You can’t fake our community slang any more than you can fake a local accent in a foreign country. My clients know so little about current research in physics, they aren’t even aware they’re in a foreign country. They have no clue how far they are from making themselves understood. Their ideas aren’t bad; they are raw versions of ideas that underlie established research programmes.

Well, some of their ideas are bad. Very, very bad. Others are 99% identical to mainstream ideas that they've invented all by themselves (which is genuinely very impressive), seemingly unaware of what keywords to search for. And then there's a whole spectrum in between.

After our first conversation, they often book another appointment. One of them might even publish a paper soon. Not a proposal for a theory of everything, mind you, but a new way to look at a known effect. A first step on a long journey.

Sweet ! A success story !

Science writers should be more careful to point out when we are using metaphors. My clients read way too much into pictures, measuring every angle, scrutinising every colour, counting every dash. Illustrators should be more careful to point out what is relevant information and what is artistic freedom. But the most important lesson I’ve learned is that journalists are so successful at making physics seem not so complicated that many readers come away with the impression that they can easily do it themselves.

Huh, interesting. As opposed to the journalists/politicians who make scientists out to be an "elite".

I still get the occasional joke from colleagues about my ‘crackpot consultant business’, but I’ve stopped thinking of our clients that way. They are driven by the same desire to understand nature and make a contribution to science as we are.

Ah, well, some people genuinely want to learn and have just happened to get the wrong/outdated/insufficient information. You can reason with these people, they are perfectly sensible. But then there are those who insist that mainstream findings must be wrong because their idea is just so obviously right. Nothing you can ever say with convince them, they will simply shout that you're being dogmatic.

https://aeon.co/ideas/what-i-learned-as-a-hired-consultant-for-autodidact-physicists