How do I help my friend who went down the path of crankery?

Question

I went to undergrad with someone who I am good friends with. He was always very bright and got into a top tier grad school. I went to another grad school and we're both postdocs now (again, at different universities).

However, in grad school he got involved in some questionable research activities. He did work with his adviser that was legitimate, which is how he graduated and even got a postdoc (it was good work and it was from a top school) but he had "side projects" which are now the entirety of his postdoc and "research". His adviser tried to stop him from graduating because of the crankery. However, since my friend did have research done for a PhD, his adviser couldn't stop him.

At first, I thought I just didn't understand my friend's research, but now I am convinced that it is pure crankery and it has gotten worse over time. I have tried offering gentle corrections but he isn't having any of it. He's nice enough, just doesn't listen.

How do I help my friend? In grad school, at least he did some legitimate research. Currently, he's doing none and the stuff he is doing is getting more and more cranky all the time.

Answer 1

I’m sorry for the pessimistic answer, but you can’t help your friend. I speak from experience with an acquaintance with similar tendencies. Cranks suffer from delusional thinking. Nothing you can say will make him see that what he is doing is nonsense. It’s fascinating to try reasoning with such people and marvel at the sorts of answers they give to questions asking them to explain their ideas and why they make sense. But in the end, none of what you say will make any difference whatsoever to your friend’s beliefs.

Answer 2

Two thoughts:

First: Check out this article.

The point it makes is that many of us think we know more about something than we actually do. For example, would you say you understand how zippers work? Flush toilets? Flutes? If you are like most people you probably think you understand these everyday objects more than you actually do. This effect is known as the "illusion of explanatory depth".

SLOMAN: So, the illusion of explanatory depth was first demonstrated by a couple of psychologists named Rozenblit and Keil. And they asked people how well they understood how these things worked, and people gave a number between 1 and 7. And then they said, "Okay, how does it work? Explain in as much detail as you can how it works." And people struggled and struggled and realized they couldn’t. And so when they were again asked how well they understood, their judgments tended to be lower. In other words, people themselves admitted that they had been living in this illusion, that they understood how these things worked, when, in fact, they don’t.

Something similar might work on your friend. Ask them to explain the mainstream theory, why we believe it, etc.

Second: Check out this article, which deals with a mathematical crank known as the "trisector" who claims to be able to trisect an angle with just compass and straightedge, which is something that has been proven to be impossible.

The author, who deals a lot with cranks, says you should not examine their proof for an error or ask them to find the error in the proof of impossibility. Instead, you should:

To the first letter from a trisector respond politely, being sure to congratulate him for the goodness of his approximation, or its simplicity, or his cleverness in finding a new approximation. Include a computer printout giving the errors in the construction for angles of various sizes - I go from 0 to 180 degrees in steps of three. This is important because the computer still has the power to inspire respect and awe. Also, enclose some other approximate trisections with some remark like, "I thought you might be interested in seeing how other people have gotten approximate trisections."

I have greatly improved my success rate in recent years with this technique. I still remember my gratification at my first success. An engineer in New Jersey had produced a large hard-bound book, more than 250 pages long, with the title Adventures in Geometry stamped on the cover in gold. I thought that anyone who had invested so much in the trisection was beyond salvation, but in response to my letter he wrote in part:

"I am satisfied that I have achieved only an approximation, and I will now put it aside."

A soul snatched from damnation! I have had some other recent successes and perhaps some of the now silent trisectors are convinced too.

This might not be adaptable to your friend's field, unfortunately.

Answer 3

No one responds well to being told they are crazy. I would ask probing questions: "Can you show me a functioning simulation? What specific predictions does your theory make?". Basically encourage them to apply the same tools of critical thinking to their own ideas as they might apply to other ideas.

Answer 4

If your friend is showing symptoms of delusion or obsession, encourage your friend to get help from a mental health professional.

Answer 5

A question worth pondering - is it crank, or just alternative?

What's the difference? Cranks believe that the truth is being suppressed, that their work is particularly astounding, and that any criticism is an attempt to suppress them.

If the views are merely "alternative", then they're trying to explore possibilities, and that's actually an acceptable thing. Most new theories begin as "alternative", and the greatest discoveries happen when someone is viewing things from an unusual perspective.

The approach to helping your friend to be better is different depending on which category it falls into. True cranks need to discover their problem for themselves, which means you need to point them in the direction that will lead them to self-discovery of the problems. Alternative researchers are best helped through guidance - often the best approach here is to ask probing questions and offer possible ways to improve the work, rather than trying to get it discarded entirely.

To demonstrate the difference between these, consider General Relativity and theories that compete with it.

In the "alternative" category, you will find a broad array of alternatives, many of which have been tested and found to not match experiments, but some of which have come from quite well-known physicists and mathematicians. This is healthy - if General Relativity is going to be improved upon, it will be through development of alternatives.

Meanwhile, an example of a "crank" within this field is Autodynamics. The creator of this "theory" (a term I am using quite loosely, and unscientifically) claims that his first book on it was immediately blacklisted by the "National Atomic Energy Commission" of Argentina, and that a daily newspaper published an account of his theory, and was then threatened with being shut down if they published any more from him. To be clear, this is information provided on the official Autodynamics website (which I won't link to, here - if you want to view it, follow the above Wikipedia link, it's linked from there). Essentially, the claim is that Autodynamics didn't "win" against General Relativity because it's being suppressed.

It can, at times, be hard to tell the difference. The best way to tell, is that aspect of claimed suppression. Does your friend believe their work is being suppressed?

Answer 6

Adding on to @jerlich 's answer, ask your friend to explain it to you. Ask them to show you examples of why they think their theory might be correct. Be open to them being right, and have them prove it to you. Where you see flaws, point them out, and ask for them to be explained, apply Ockham's razor, etc.

Where you see flaws, suggest an experiment that would clarify your theory vs theirs.

Answer 7

The way you have framed this question, and the answers so far (whether optimistic or pessimistic), have all approached the situation as an intellectual one, about convincing your friend that the knowledge they believe they have is incorrect. I suggest that this is not the way to proceed.

Instead, think of this as an issue of communities. Your friend's academic work has left the 'respectable academia' community and moved into 'crank' territory – this may be within a community of likeminded others (the internet makes this very easy to achieve) or perhaps as a lone operator. The situation isn't like a misinformed student, it is analogous to (but not the same as, and not as serious as!) someone who believes in a conspiracy theory, religious cult or extremist beliefs. There is no one set of reasons people can be vulnerable to such beliefs, but common characteristics might include loneliness, a sense of frustration or powerlessness in their previous situation, and isolation which enables them to lose perspective quickly.

Under this view, trying to help your friend by discussing the correctness/validity/truth/whatever of the work they are doing is orthogonal to the problem. Instead, see what you can do about the underlying issue. Perhaps your friend was frustrated with what they saw as a lack of progress in mainstream academia. Perhaps they are corresponding with someone charismatic who gives them the positive feedback they have been craving. Perhaps they are very bored (and lockdown has made this much worse!) and when they are writing their crank work they feel a sense of purpose and satisfaction.

Therefore, consider what you would do to help any friend who seemed to be 'falling into the wrong community'. Perhaps inviting them to join your squash league would help. Perhaps encouraging them to volunteer teaching highschoolers would help. Perhaps reminding them of some non-academic pursuits they were involved in when you were undergrads would help. You could also gain insight by looking online at advice given to people with friends/relatives who are conspiracy theorists, COVID-19 deniers or have extremist political views (again, I am not suggesting that these are all equivalent!) which typically stresses that arguing directly with them doesn't really help.

Answer 8

Unlike the stereotypical crank, your friend is actively engaged in research to make a living (presumably). The absence of credible work will automatically force him to confront some tough questions, following which he will have to make a tough, decisive choice. All is probably not lost. The best you can do is to stay around and be supportive (of the person, not the suspect research) in case he does fall upon hard times and could use help. Would be nice to avoid the temptation to be smug and say I-told-you-so if this does happen.

Otherwise, it's best to play a passive role rather than actively counter him.

Answer 9

One approach that might be useful here is to focus attention on the academic filters relating to publication of research. If your friend is truly absorbed by nonsensical theories and ideas, presumably he will have a hard time publishing those ideas in academic journals, and this will make it hard for him to establish a career where he can be paid to do his research.

Consequently, you might start by asking him if he is having any success publishing the ideas that you regard as "crank" ideas. If he has been unable to get through peer review then you might further inquire as to the problems he was having and this could lead to a frutiful discussion of what would be required for his ideas and theories to be proved or disproved. Try to focus on the falsifiability of his theories and what kind of evidence he could examine to show that the ideas are true or false. Ask him to explain his theory to you and to explain how he will demonstrate its merit to peer reviewers. You can then raise objections and challenges as "devil's advocate" to "assist" him with preparing for peer review. (Of course, you can also tell him you find his ideas to be wrong.) That will allow you to challenge the merits of his ideas from the perspective of helping him to prepare for the rigours of academic publication.

If he truly is well off-track, one possibility is that he might come to reject any value in peer-review entirely. If he seems to be heading in this direction, encourage him to look at the merits of the filtering and feedback system that peer-review provides (especially for novice researchers). Remind him that he was able to complete his PhD, so in principle he should have the skills needed to put forward publishable work if his theory is sound.

(And of course, if he is having no trouble having his ideas published in reasonable academic journals, this might mean that your diagnosis of their crankery is incorrect.)

Answer 10

If you spend a reasonable amount of time with this person then you can sidestep the whole crankery problem using animal training techniques such as training an incompatible behavior and least reinforcing scenario. (This doesn't work for problems like cold emails from trisectors, unfortunately, it requires a pretty strong commitment to regular reinforcement.)

Train an incompatible behavior: Get them to start working on something else, some problem that actually is solvable. You don't have to say work on something else instead of crankery at all, simply working on something else will be incompatible with working on crankery (only so many hours in the day, etc.). As an example, a bird trainer who didn't want his bird to land on his head trained the bird to land on a specific target instead. Training the bird to land on the target was much easier than trying to convince the bird not to land on his head, and obviously if the bird lands on the target then it is not landing on his head. This shouldn't be too hard, since most academics are easy to distract with any new problem, and you can use lots of positive reinforcement (asking to hear about results, showing interest in the problem, praise for any clever solution, etc.).

Least reinforcing scenario: When they go back to the old, unwanted behavior (crankery), just ignore it and use positive reinforcement for the new, wanted behavior. If you try to argue with them that the crankery is useless/bad/etc. then they will just be motivated to come up with new reasons why it is good/important/etc. and spend more time thinking about it/working on it....the opposite of what you want! Instead just ignore it and change the subject whenever it comes up. If they start a conversation with [crankery, blahblahblah], you could redirect with something like, "Actually I have been spending all of my time on [cool topic]! Did you hear about [cool application] they have been using it for? It is really nifty, let me tell you about it..." (Or even just make a non-committal noise and then start talking about something entirely unrelated.) Talking about the crankery doesn't get any reinforcement from you (good or bad), it just falls into a black hole and gets no response (to the crankery) at all.

Answer 11

I think that, rather than discussing the specifics of the "work" of your friend, it might help to encourage your friend to "take the outside view": briefly ignore the great potential/novelty/grandeur/etc. of this particular work, and instead consider what to do with "other works superficially similar to yours". If they accept this and have a reasonable view of "similar works" (Nobel prize winning works are the wrong reference class...), their frame of mind should become a bit closer to yours, at least for a moment.

Some questions to consider can be: Would it be worth spending as much time on those projects as you do now? Would now be the best moment to spend time on it, or are there more urgent or less risky projects to work on right now? Is this good for your career? If there are simpler or more concrete goals that the grand work in theory should resolve, would it be better to primarily focus on these goals instead?¹

If your friend either rejects this exercise, insists on an incorrect reference class, or concludes that it's nevertheless still worth it to spend most of their time on this, then I don't think there's much you can do. They've made their decision.

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_{1: This seems to have worked at least once: "I believe [a hypothesis commonly believed to be true] is false. (...) Even if [this hypothesis] is true, my belief in the opposite has led me to many ideas I’d have never found otherwise.", Ryan Williams, On the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis And yes, said ideas indeed did lead to a some good papers.}

Answer 12

I don't know.

You say little about the actual field of research he (you too ?) is in. You are a bit vague of the depth of the friendship. Seems like you two are just ex-sparring partners from undergrad days and the relation has fallen off since then.

But you do feel concerned on a human level and want to know what to do in this situation. I suppose you fear he'll be removed from his present position and/or excluded from serious consideration for any future appointment. One thing I know (though knowing and applying are two separate things) is that you can't be successful when trying to play two roles in someone's life: you can't be friend and critical colleague.

Bearing in mind some similar posts, it might be worth looking into if any other event has occurred in his life in recent years that may have started him down this road. This could be a traumatic event, a medical condition, a painful relationship break-up or - most likely here - encountering a charismatic yet misleading pseudo-scientist.

Something you can do is to go to your own doctor and frankly discuss the situation and how you should best handle it. The doctor may have ideas or experience of use. Or they may suggest that you contact a psychologist/counsellor.

Answer 13

Sometimes cranks are right. Consider Noah who became "delusional" that a great flood was coming. All the scientists of the world opposed him.

If your friend is not developing a perpetual motion machine, which is known to be an impossible source of energy, perhaps give your friend a little room for some original thought. This world would not enjoy much of its present collective knowledge without the participation of many who stepped beyond the bounds of what their present society would have termed sanity.

Christopher Columbus dared to sail off the edge of the planet, believing that the world was a sphere, and not flat at all. Many mocked him. He was considered delusional. But who ended up actually being delusional? It was those who accepted incorrect groupthink.

Without details, we cannot say much about whether or not your friend is truly going off the deep end. Neither can we know of a certainty that your friend is incorrect or less correct than yourself--or even the rest of us.

Given the historical problems with groupthink, I would propose that your friend is doing society a service. If those who are "delusional" accomplish nothing more than to get others to think more carefully about the facts and to be open to a new reality, they have accomplished a great thing. Without people like this, and imagining a world in which no one dared think or believe anything beyond what was popularly accepted to be true, we would never have advanced to where we are today. Even if your friend is not correct, your friend should be regarded as having the same rights that all of the rest of us have, including the right to be wrong.

Ultimately, what one chooses to believe is a personal choice and an inalienable right. It is sometimes possible and helpful to persuade someone through the utmost of tact and consideration, but it is never right, nor even actually possible, to coerce one's beliefs.