It’s plain to see that many people on the Internet think that cranks are strictly a nuisance, and that the world would be better off without them. But, what these people appear to not realize is that “outsider amateurs” have already generated an enormous amount of important science and technology (See the book, It Doesn’t Take a Rocket Scientist - Great Amateurs of Science). And not only that, but we’re talking here about some of the most radical and reputation-threatening innovations in the history of science. They did their work oftentimes in the face of intense daily ridicule from authority, friends and even family. I’m skeptical that we’d even be having this conversation right now if there was a more widespread awareness of those stories, because these tend to be stories of people overcoming extreme adversity in order to make the world a better place.
The problem of the crank has been improperly defined. The problem of the crank is not that they exist and annoy others; the problem of the crank is that they are cognitive explorers who have yet to find their digital homes. While others choose to spend their time watching television or Facebook’ing, these people get bored if their mind is not engaged in some idea. To become annoyed with them misses the larger picture that they simply need a place to go online where their talents can be perfected; where they can collaborate with one another and basically learn from others who have a similar interest; and where they can be molded into people who can make useful contributions to the world of science.
Put in other words, we need knowledge technologies which are designed to produce economic benefits as well as job creation, using the pre-existing pool of resources. Oh wait, that would seem to more-or-less be the definition of a knowledge economy …
The problem with science education which we are finally (seemingly) emerging from is that of education based upon one-way communication. The role of computers in science education is already undergoing a significant transformation: The traditional notion of teachers giving a one-way monologue which focuses almost entirely upon how to solve the homework problems is probably at this point on the way out as a model for science education.
Notice that this is largely being imposed upon the universities. If the existing professors had their way, they would continue to focus upon generating more research papers instead of better teaching – and that is in spite of the fact that there are already too many papers for people to review (There is a lesson to be learned here).
If science education research and big data trends are any clue, instruction is going to trend towards lessons that are customized to the students’ existing knowledge and skills. In theory, these sorts of systems could turn cranks into specialists.
Instruction based upon teaching scientific modeling in public school science programs is proving to double conceptual comprehension (as measured by force concept inventory testing). We’ll likely see more of it, and I predict that this will ultimately have a very grounding influence upon peoples’ beliefs about modeling and its role in science. It will also help people whose goal is to create new theories – such as cranks.
Concepts-based instruction has a very strong track-record. The edupreneurs will eventually notice the work of Joseph Novak, and there will accordingly emerge a competition to visualize the concepts and controversies of science. This will be especially helpful to those who wish to do interdisciplinary synthesis or theory creation.
Science education has a very bright future, largely because these force concept inventory (FCI) tests finally give education researchers a quantitative measure for determining whether or not a particular pedagogical technique is actually having a positive effect. Much time has been wasted debating various approaches to science education. It’s now finally possible to simply compare competing pedagogical systems using a uniform standard (the FCI).
Every single one of these changes portends a terrific future for cranks.
Cranks are simply people that are not willing to leave their educations up to others to figure out. For whatever reason, they believe they can do better. As a society, we’d be wise to simply help them out. This is free labor, people. Let’s create spaces online that take this cognitive energy and convert it into new and better scientific theories. It’s obviously a challenging problem to solve, but if just 1 of 10,000 cranks online turned out to be right, then a system designed to help them to elaborate their ideas, which scales, would be completely worth the effort – and in short time.
In one of Charles Ginenthal’s books, he told the story of the “Village Venus”. It’s basically the idea that a small boy living in a remote village will tend to consider the single girl his age the most beautiful girl on the planet. Then, one day, he’ll for the first time go to the city, and realize that he was being silly.
In this current incarnation of the Internet, we are all living with Village Venus syndrome in some regard. There is just far too much information out there for each of us, as individuals, to wade through it all. And these ideas are oftentimes in cryptic, highly mathematical formats, or dispersed in a thousand different places online. We are desperately seeking out ways to filter the bad and save the good. The problem is that if we aren’t conscientious with how we do this filtering, we can easily filter out the science which people do because they love it, leaving nothing but the science which corporations and governments do because we’re paying them money. Those two different approaches tend to generate very different science and technology.
The cranks do it because they love it. Be very wary of just throwing that away.
