bad posting habits, jeremy bernstein and scientific cranks

[Robert P. J. Day]

  there's an old essay by jeremy bernstein entitled something like
"scientific cranks: how to recognize them and what to do with them
until the doctor arrives" (can't find it online, dang), in which
bernstein writes about getting regular submissions from obvious crank
scientists, claiming to have solved some of science's biggest
mysteries -- guys showing up with a unified field theory scrawled with
crayon on a shopping bag, that sort of thing.

  bernstein goes on to list a number of clues that someone is a crank,
the first being that the crank doesn't understand even the most
fundamental basics of the field they're trying to overturn.  someone
who clearly doesn't have a clue about simple physics will nonetheless
claim to have disproved the theory of relativity, you get the idea.

  and another obvious giveaway is that the problem allegedly solved is
never a small one, it's never minor, it's never just an incremental
addition to scientific knowledge as it stands.  rather, it's
invariably an all-encompassing, universal, ground-breaking discovery
that will shake the very pillars of science as we know it, etc., etc.
as i recall, bernstein claims that that's pretty much a dead giveaway
of crankhood since, these days, while you might get the *occasional*
wondrous discovery, most of science is just slowly and methodically
pushing the boundaries of what we know outward, just a bit at a time.
fill in a missing piece here, tweak or refine a little bit over there,
that sort of thing.

  which brings us to mailing lists.

  and as long-time mailing list participants will know, the concept of
ML etiquette may have started out a bit chaotic but, over the years,
it's settled down nicely.  the fundamental principles have long been
in place and, as technology (like general science) marches on, those
principles might have to be tweaked or refined every so often, but not
much more than that.

  and then (in the spirit of bernstein) the cranks arrive.  no! they
proclaim!  you've been completely wrong all this time!  i bring you a
*new* unified mailing list theory which overthrows the current
orthodoxy!  a theory in which HTML is a *good* thing, and in which top
posting saves time!  i bring you the new paradigm of the next century
and, why no, i really *don't* know the current rules and why they're
there or why so many people have agreed to abide by them but ... no
matter!  change is good, and years of constancy are to be swept away
by my new universal worldview!

  cranks, the lot of them.  bernstein would be amused.

rday