An Open Letter to Fringe People on Engaging w/ Academics

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes, 34 seconds. Contains 1914 words

Hello friends,

Today’s just a short companion piece to go with Sunday’s post about academic gatekeeping.

This is the Trenchant Edges and I’m your host Stephen. We talk a lot about fringe culture here.

The Antikythera Mechanism is a Roman era device used to calculate astronomical positions. It’s sick as shit. Look up the Clickspring video series about it. I could have posted the Baghdad Battery but this is way cooler. Trust me.

Instead of my usual ranting this piece is going to be more direct advice. As I said in the last episode, I have a very different experience of formal academic culture than a lot of fringe people and this is more or less my guide to how to replicate that.

Academics see most fringe people as an annoying distraction from the real work and, frankly, usually with good reasons.

Why? Because there’s a fundamental mismatch in goals and motivations between most of them and most of us.

Most fringe people are working out personal issues or following curiosity. Academics take those basic building blocks and add method, rigor, and focus to them.

Some people confuse resistance from academics with a lot of things it’s not. We’ll go into why, but the most important thing is that modern scholarship starts with skepticism.

What do they have that I don’t?

The two big differences between scholars with expertise in a specific field and lay people is training and reference knowledge.

Getting an advanced degree like a PhD requires years of soul-grinding work. I won’t bore you with the details but it’s hard as hell and the biggest requirements are endurance and funding. That training teaches you a lot of shit.

Not all that shit may be right, but the point is being able to know enough about a subject to critique it at its own level.

We can see this very much in amateur physics theories, where typically a would be theorist has heard an analogy about something in physics and reasoned out a new idea based on that analogy.

But because they’re working on the analogy and not the underlying physics, usually expressed as math, what they come up with is gibberish. They’re not working on the actual field the problem is taking place in so they can’t meet it at that level.

It’s not a question of intelligence or credential. It’s just training and knowledge.

Reference knowledge is just as big an issue, especially when it comes to studies of culture or products produced by a culture you need to be able to compare stuff to potentially thousands of other similar and different objects from different sites.

Lots of fringe theorists zero in on a handful of examples and this can sometimes be wildly misleading. A friend of mine from college and I used to love talking about ancient aliens but she went and visited Puma Punku on her honeymoon.

The site is often held up as proof of ancient peoples being too precise for hand tools, implying someone else with better technology was involved.

Not shown are a pile of far, far more crudely cut blocks. These are just the best surviving examples of their work.

Is it less impressive that there are failures? I don’t think so. That was obviously a staggering amount of work by people who are better at stonecarving than anyone reading this ever will be.

Likewise, you hear some very superlative things about the Great Pyramid at Giza but when you remember that there were dozens of pyramids built before it over 500 years, starting with Mastaba tombs, you can literally put them in a sequence and see skill and style developing over time.

Anyone who could technology-so-advanced-its-indistinguishable-from-magic themselves a pyramid wouldn’t be practicing for hundreds of years!

This kind of thing is an easy tell when listening to unscrupulous theorists.

You could teach a university course on dishonest rhetoric using just the first season of Ancient Aliens!

Do you need training and reference information? Not formally. But if you want to put forth or defend at theory you’re going to need to learn a lot of the same stuff.

Advice for Discussing Fringe Ideas With Academics

1. Expect Disagreement

2. Know What the Current Consensus is

3. Recognize Hard Skill Gaps

4. Ask For Sources

5. Ask about Research Gaps

6. Understand Their Standards of Evidence

If you have an original idea and you want to put it to an academic it’s really important to understand their perspective. Not because they’re better than you or smarter or anything, but for basic communication.

I’ve heard apparently smart people describe academia as a hive mind committed to prevent any good ideas from gaining traction.

I must be blunt here: That’s delusional.

It’s a pure misreading of the social conventions and typical personalities within academia. It’s taking some very reasonable and ultimately good habits of many academics and turning it into a sinister conspiracy against you.

Unless you’re trying to sell a book about why you’re smarter than everyone who studies the field you’re discussing this is a terrible mindset to get yourself into.

Why?

Because it’s an obvious implication of formal training in skepticism.

You hear a new idea, and you immediately start looking for flaws. And if you don’t have similar training, you probably don’t know enough to make an argument or claim that survives that kind of scrutiny.

Most expert opinions start with, “Well, it depends” for good reasons. The world is complex and many things are ambiguous. Almost certainly more complex and ambiguous than it looks at first glance.

Lots of fringe theorists will bring up guys like Heinrich Schliemann (discovered Troy) and Alfred Wegner (father of plate tectonics) as proof that amateurs or those mocked by other scientists can be correct. And they’re right. But the word CAN does a lot of heavy lifting there.

Literally anyone with any idea *CAN* contribute to a field. That’s true.

But you’re not playing the odds if you expect your first idea to catch on like wildfire just after you suggest it. Even Schliemann and Wegner poured years into their theories to be proven right.

Resentment about this is understandable and very human but counterproductive unless you’re trying to sell things.

This brings us to our second point: Actually learning what the consensus view is on the subject you’re discussing. This can easily come from many places: Books, especially textbooks, documentaries, museums, youtube videos, etc.

But you will save yourself a lot of hassle by looking up who proposed the current view and reading *their* version of it. Oftentimes summaries do not fully convey the underlying argument and if you want to push a theory forward it’s worth learning the arguments in depth.

This is where I have to bring Graham Hancock back up because he keeps mentioning Gobekli Tebe, an amazing stone age site, like it hasn’t been studied for decades now. He keeps pointing to it as proof that archeologists have been wrong so there’s room for his theories about Atlantis. And yes, he specifically wants Atlantis to be real.

I’m actually pretty grateful to Hancock for introducing me to so many amazing sites.

But Archeology has outflanked him here because prior to Gobekli Tebe there are hundreds of smaller sites over the preceding 2,000 years. It’s cool as hell.

But Grant keeps acting like it came out of nowhere and thus its sophistication needs survivors of Atlantis to train a workforce to build it. But there are thousands of years of development that seem to culminate at Gobekli Tebe

He keeps shadowboxing a decades out of date consensus! Don’t be like that.

The next point is way more direct: For some subjects you literally do need certain skills. I don’t talk about physics because I don’t have the math for it. I don’t understand enough physics to have an opinion.

Maybe it’s reading a language, maybe it’s technical knowledge of how to conduct experiments, maybe it’s math. Understanding your limitations shows you what else you have to learn and tells you what to avoid making claims about. Very handy.

A soft skill gap might be something you can paper over with a bit of reading. Like, if you have a solid grasp of statistics but you don’t know how to calculate p values (or why you shouldn’t rely on them). But a hard skill gap might take years to overcome.

There are ton of subjects I won’t touch because I’m bad at learning languages and that leaves me only able to deal with translations, which introduce complexity and ambiguity.

The best thing about academics is they can usually recommend the exact book or paper you need to read to clarify your thinking on a point. I recommend making getting new sources a primary goal of interacting with them because it gives you both a concrete goal and is far, far faster than more indirect methods.

The counterpoint to this is asking where there are gaps in the existing research. This can help you identify places where your speculations might be more welcome because they’re still at that phase of work.

And lastly, you want to know exactly what an expert means by the word evidence. For you and I, it’s a general word. But for scholars, it’s a technical term that will have a narrow definition tailored to the field. If you don’t know what they consider strong evidence, you can’t make coherent arguments.

It’s also fine to argue for a different standard of evidence but in that case you want to be even more familiar with what evidence means in a formal context because you’ll need to make a technical argument on why the current standard is actually less predictive or useful than what you propose.

A good example of where less technical arguments fail is criticisms of IQ, which is largely a bullshit measure more correlated with test taking skills than anything else. General intelligence probably isn’t a coherent testable quality, but a crude average of different narrow capabilities.

It’s also quite racist, probably for reasons of environmental toxins, poorer education, and bad nutrition.

Which of those do you think a psychometrician is going to find a more compelling argument? Honestly, probably neither. Both are pretty common criticisms and anyone still invested in IQ has an argument against them.

My Strategy

This is less general advice and more just how I tend to engage with scholarship. It’s worked quite well for me.

1. Be nice.

2. Recognize academics as extremely valuable information sorters.

3. Follow up with the sources they give you.

4. Use their feedback to make your arguments stronger

You don’t have to fawn over people, but I cannot tell you how much information I’ve had world class experts hand me just because I wrote a polite email and showed a basic understanding of their work.

This also comes with a caveat that you may need to consider revising or throwing away your original idea.

That’s OK.

Doing so is one of the hardest part of scholarship and committing to killing your darlings (as the old writing advice says) is one of the hardest parts of a life of intellectual honesty.

But the rewards of admitting you’re wrong is you slowly get to be less wrong. And that’s some of the best shit in life.

Wrapping Up

Alright, that was fun. Love a soapbox.

And there’s another similar post coming in the next couple days. Maybe sooner.

This was supposed to be a short post but lol, I should have known better.

Anyway, I hope y’all enjoyed it.

Am I off base here? Let me know if I am.