One of the advantages of not being a philosopher — and, in particular, not being a metaphysician — is that you don’t get emails like this:
Dear “Mrs Paul”:http://www.u.arizona.edu:~/lapaul,
may I offer you a final (as I think) ontological argument and ask your disproof on it? I’d be very thankful to you for answer.
Sincerely yours,
etc.
I imagine “Brad DeLong”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/ gets similar stuff on why gold is the One True Measure of Value, and “Jaques Distler”:http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/ has a folder of proofs that String Theory was Anticipated by the Ancients. When you’re a Sociologist like me, and your field has no credibility, people just assume you’re stupid and don’t bother sending you their Final and Completely True Theory of X in the first place. On the other hand, it does invite people to assume the answer to any problem you are studying is simply obvious common sense.
{ 39 comments }
Jacob T. Levy 11.15.04 at 3:37 pm
I would’ve thought that the issue was more that cranks are less likely to have heard of sociology, or to have even a loose understanding of what its major propositions and disputes are. I wouldn’t guess that political theory and con law have more “credibility” in any general way than sociology does; but god knows I get my share of crank mail (usually, and charmingly, still snail mail) purporting to prove the unconstitutionality of everything from UN membership to judicial review itself, or offering the decisive, fatal disproof of the coherence of Aristotle/ secularism/ democracy/ modernity/ religion.
About a year ago I got an impressively thick envelope– c. $3 in postage– that was all-the-way-gone tinfoil hat stuff about CIA mind control; but that’s not really the same as these earnest short proofs/ disproofs.
Chris Bertram 11.15.04 at 4:00 pm
I thought there was a whole tribe of people who believe that a complete explanation of the social domain can be given by modelling the interactions of rational utility maximizers. Don’t _those_ people write you cranky letters?
Oh … hang on … they all got tenure… in another subject … in Chicago …
[Chicago ref not meant as a dig at Jacob]
fyreflye 11.15.04 at 4:04 pm
Does this mean you never received the paper I sent you proving affirmative action is the cause of AIDS?
David 11.15.04 at 4:08 pm
What I’d like to know is how Laurie answered the poor benighted ontologist.
des von bladet 11.15.04 at 4:13 pm
There was a paper arguing that Everyone Else Is Wrong About The Ontological Argument (But So Is The Ontological Argument) in Mind just recently, although I took the precaution of not reading it. (For one thing it wasn’t in green ink. Where are your standards, Mind?)
Anyway, your URL lost a tilda somewhere: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lapaul/ works.
Josh 11.15.04 at 4:17 pm
It does seem that people dealing with philosophy are rather open to getting crank mail (my favourite experience thus far is from a welder in the midwest who alone understands the meaning of J.L. Austin’s theory of language). Unlike, say, bloggers …
pjs 11.15.04 at 4:30 pm
My understanding is that it is the religion professors who have it really bad where cranks are concerned.
I recently met a women who is a specialist in Ancient Near Eastern languages at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Ever since the Mel Gibson movie, people have been constantly sending her video and audio tapes of themselves speaking in tongues, certain that the gibberish they are speaking is in fact Aramaic, and hoping to have her tell them what message the Lord was articulating through them.
Anne Elk 11.15.04 at 4:34 pm
I have a theory of dinosaurs that is mine and belongs to me.
Ted Barlow 11.15.04 at 4:48 pm
On the other hand, it does invite people to assume the answer to any problem you are studying is simply obvious common sense.
Well, isn’t that true?
(I kid ’cause I love.)
Timothy Bays 11.15.04 at 4:52 pm
Ah yes. One of the problems with being a logician is the disturbing frequency with which I get e-mail of the form:
“I’m having a fight with my husband/wife about … (long story about $, infidelity, etc. eliminated). Don’t you think my position is more “logical.” Will you please tell him/her so!”
derek 11.15.04 at 5:16 pm
timothy, now I’m picturing the Vulcan Marriage Guidance Bureau…
me2i81 11.15.04 at 5:21 pm
I remember talking to my mother’s cousin (a political science prof. who I guess was once a sociologist) when I was taking Soc 1. He told me, “Sociology is a fraud. You go to political science conferences, they talk about political science. You go to history conferences, they talk about history. But you go to sociology conferences, and they don’t talk about sociology, because they KNOW it’s a fraud.”
John Emerson 11.15.04 at 6:03 pm
I make a practice of confrontong people who think that the Democrats should, for some reason, be ashamed of George Soros. The paleos are, for obvious reasons, careful not to talk about bloodsucking parasites, etc., though “shadowy” and “cosmopolitan” do appear.
Anyway, in justification one paleo (at Red State)explained that George Soros’ un-American philosophy was fatally and criminally flawed, and could be traced back to the odious John Stuart Mill. He referred me to Aquinas for a superior alternative.
abb1 11.15.04 at 6:15 pm
…it does invite people to assume the answer to any problem you are studying is simply obvious common sense.
Professors Steven Landsburg and David Friedman have convinced me that this is, indeed, the case. You aren’t saying that they are full of crap, are you? Oh, God, my whole world is collapsing…
John Quiggin 11.15.04 at 7:40 pm
Oddly enough, I never get gold bugs, but there are still plenty of Social Credit theorists out there.
Adam Kotsko 11.15.04 at 7:55 pm
Religion professors really are fortunate in the amount of attention they get from (certain segments of) the general public. I know of one professor whose lectures are routinely staked out by a man who has taken it upon himself to be the Guardian of Truth.
The problem is that thanks to Martin Fucking Luther, everyone’s an expert when it comes to Christianity.
Joel Turnipseed 11.15.04 at 8:00 pm
I would so love to be getting that mail…
mathematician 11.15.04 at 8:28 pm
I thought sociologists were the cranks.
(Sorry, couldn’t resist…)
Tobias 11.15.04 at 8:45 pm
>On the other hand, it does invite >people to assume the answer to any >problem you are studying is simply >obvious common sense.
Isn’t common sense an oxymoron?
Shai 11.15.04 at 11:08 pm
well one consolation is that it’s less annoying than the following sorts of questions:
“how many languages do you speak” (linguistics) “oh, so what’s the meaning of life then?” (philosophy), “so what can you tell me about this dream/nightmare I had last night” (psychology) (thinking of freud, and conflating psychiatry and psychology)
Walt Pohl 11.15.04 at 11:22 pm
As a lapsed mathematician, the reaction I would always get would be “Oh, I hated math in school. Actually, I used to like math, but then I had a teacher in nth grade that…”
bza 11.15.04 at 11:59 pm
Add mathematicians to the list of regular recipients of crank letters: “I have trisected the angle!”
norman normal 11.16.04 at 12:27 am
And those people would assume correctly.
Tom T. 11.16.04 at 1:03 am
Any connoisseur of American cuisine knows that Mrs. Paul is the pre-eminent name in fish sticks. As with Betty Crocker and Aunt Jemima, though, I always assumed that she didn’t really exist. Then again, perhaps that’s why she’s getting e-mails about ontology.
Kenny Easwaran 11.16.04 at 3:00 am
I just got my first crank proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem in e-mail last week! And he claimed to have disproved Wiles’ proof too, because it used elliptic curves, which obviously only work in the case of right triangles, which only talks about n=2!
mark steen 11.16.04 at 3:13 am
I’ve gotten quite a few crank emails, (being a philosopher) but I actually enjoy them. If you want to become a student of crankery, a fun place to start is http://www.crank.net “All cranks, all of the time.” Check out the crank of the day.(I don’t work for them, really. I just enjoy the site)
Sean 11.16.04 at 6:02 am
Anyone who works in cosmology or general relativity is typically deluged with crank email. Along with ordinary letters, occasional phone calls, and once in a while a knock on your office door (as I had last week). Strategies for coping are a common lunchtime conversation. A popular one is to pair off the crackpots to talk to each other. But it doesn’t work, as crankdom is highly ideosyncratic; inevitably they both come back to you and say “Why did you tell me to talk to that guy? He’s crazy!”
Dan Simon 11.16.04 at 7:44 am
At least the cranks in most fields are used to being treated as cranks. The cranks cryptographers have to deal with are usually accomplished mathematicians (with the occasional physicist thrown in), who can’t understand why their brilliant cryptographic idea doesn’t work, since the math/physics behind it is unassailable.
(Then again, it’s somehow much more satisfying to dismiss established experts in other fields as cranks, than merely to brag/gripe about all the attention one gets from mere lunatics. Eat your hearts out, pedestrian old-economy scientists!)
Chris 11.16.04 at 3:02 pm
I can tell you from personal experience that shai has it right: non-clinical psychologists have it the worst. Questions about Freud, or discussions about everyone’s “problems” are inevitable. Can you imagine if “Mrs Paul” had been an experimental psychologist? The same emailer might have written her asking if she can help him with his “ontological problems.”
I’ve reached the point at which I no longer even mention “psychology” when I tell people what I do. Of course, that means that people have no idea what I do, and when I try to explain it to them, either their eyes gloss over, or they wonder why the hell anyone would need to study what I study.
Uncle Kvetch 11.16.04 at 5:29 pm
“how many languages do you speak†(linguistics)
A corollary from my obscure little neck of the woods, linguistic anthropology: “So, you study the languages of the cavemen, right?”
jo. 11.17.04 at 3:26 am
Well, you can add English Professors to the list — in an odd way. A fellow turned up at my office door this afternoon, asking if I was ‘in English’. I (reluctantly) said that I was, and he produced a two-sentence rejection letter from a local small press.
He wanted me to clarify it for him, as he found it ambiguous. Were they rejecting his work because it was too bad, or because it was too good?
I realize that this isn’t quite the same as the “I have solved Fermat’s Last Theorem” cranks, but it was quite unnerving enough for me.
jo. 11.17.04 at 3:40 am
Well, you can add English Professors to the list — in an odd way. A fellow turned up at my office door this afternoon, asking if I was ‘in English’. I (reluctantly) said that I was, and he produced a two-sentence rejection letter from a local small press.
He wanted me to clarify it for him, as he found it ambiguous. Were they rejecting his work because it was too bad, or because it was too good?
I realize that this isn’t quite the same as the “I have solved Fermat’s Last Theorem” cranks, but it was quite unnerving enough for me.
Francis Xavier Holden 11.17.04 at 8:05 am
What happened to the “good old days” when we had USENET and Net Kook of the Year. And I do miss the body contact and actual police raids eminating from groups such as alt.religion.scientology. Blogs just aren’t the same contact sport.
Tony Healy 11.18.04 at 12:35 pm
Lack of credibility for academics seems to be having dire effects. A professor in Texas took eight months off to become a garbage scrounger.
“The idea seemed obvious, if risky,” he writes. “I’d try to survive as an urban scrounger, adopting a way of life that was both field research and free-form survival. As an academic criminologist, I’ve spent much of my adult life inside illicit subcultures, researching life on the margins, so the plan appealed. I resigned from my position as a university professor and my wife and I moved back to my home town of Fort Worth, Texas. (The Times 18 Nov 2004)
Tony Healy 11.18.04 at 12:37 pm
Lack of credibility for academics seems to be having dire effects. A professor in Texas took eight months off to become a garbage scrounger.
“The idea seemed obvious, if risky,” he writes. “I’d try to survive as an urban scrounger, adopting a way of life that was both field research and free-form survival. As an academic criminologist, I’ve spent much of my adult life inside illicit subcultures, researching life on the margins, so the plan appealed. I resigned from my position as a university professor and my wife and I moved back to my home town of Fort Worth, Texas. (The Times 18 Nov 2004)
Tony Healy 11.18.04 at 12:40 pm
Sorry for the double post. The first one reported as an error.
rufus 11.19.04 at 1:06 am
Chris, I feel your pain.
I once had the brilliant idea that I was going to start telling people my field was “Cognitive Science”, instead of “Psychology”.
Well, it didn’t go so well. On the first occasion I had to try this out the couple looked at me and said ‘oh, psychology’, and then I just looked like one of those insecure dorks who likes to put “science” in the name of what they do so it sounds more impressive.
Now I basically just say “I teach”. And if they want further info, we can go from there.
Incidentally, glad to have found your blog through your post. I’ll be adding it to my list. Yeah, that’s what I need, MORE blogs to waste time on :)
Erik 11.22.04 at 3:50 am
A philosophy professor I had would tell people that he was a math professor and start talking about something obscure in mathematical logic in order to not have to deal with people telling him their philosophy of life.
I think the problem of people using your academic field to push evil on you goes all the way down. When I was going to be a math major I had people ask me to add or multiply or divide numbers, as if I were going to college to study how to do long division, or you know, anything with actual numbers.
Lyndon 11.22.04 at 11:30 am
Thats just great, nice to see the smug self-satisfied laying it on those lacking critical facilities.
My own personal theory leaves room for all of us, we create our own realities.
You know its true, science is like just a series of russian dolls, we’re making it up as we go along :-)
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