psychoceramics: the study of the crackpots, cranks, eccentrics, unsolicited theorists, and the elaborate intellectual systems they leave behind. for most, it is a hobby, a recreational interest in people who have developed, say, theories of physics in which Einstein made a fatal algebraic error, found the true location of Atlantis, decoded the secret chronology of the bible, invented theories that there are cameras in every bathroom...

it is notable that the crank is not merely ignorant. cranks can be explained as individuals who work incredibly hard at being incorrect about a matter; crank literature can cover decades of reading, calculations, and correspondence. the authors can develop diagrams and mathematical demonstrations, and they can anticipate objections. thus, we can say that the crank has more in common with the scholar than with the merely uninformed person. the very clear difference, though, is that one discipline has acquired mechanisms for preventing thought from becoming entirely answerable to itself.

science and scholarship do not produce reliable knowledge merely because intelligent people participate in them. intelligent people are perfectly capable of producing nonsense, and in fact can produce considerably more sophisticated nonsense than everyone else. intellectual disciplines instead surround individual thought with methods for testing it and other people capable of challenging it. claims have to survive criticism.

the crank often preserves the recognizable motions of this process while quietly eliminating the possibility of failure. objections are incorporated into the theory. eventually the theory is able to explain both the existence and absence of evidence for itself. 

it is also particularly strange that there is density of detail in psychoceramic writing. crank theories tend not merely to contain conclusions but enormous architectures of supporting facts. some details are taken from legitimate sources and rearranged into relationships their sources never proposes, while others seem to emerge from the explanatory system itself. one invented connection requires another; the second makes a third necessary, and, eventually, the theory contains a world's worth of particulars whose abundance begins to resemble evidence.

this process is not completely alien to respectable thought. imagination is required to produce explanations before they can be tested, and pattern recognition allows relationships to become visible before their significance is known. analogy, inference, abstraction, suspicion, and synthesis are indispensable intellectual activities. the mind has to exceed what is immediately given to it in order to understand anything at all.

accumulation has an appearance of authority. a sufficiently large collection of fragments begins to suggest that the fragments belong together, even when their only real relationship is that somebody decided to keep them. an archive can preserve relationships that existed, but it can also produce new ones simply through proximity. two things placed beside one another invite comparison. ten things begin to look like a pattern.

ironically, perhaps my website engages in this impulse given that it is deliberately an accumulation. i will note that i do not claim, though, that my collections form a system. however, selection gives unrelated things a common property: they passed through the attention of the same person and survived it.

perhaps this is part of what makes psychoceramic collections so compelling. the problem is not merely that the crank has gathered bad evidence. gathering itself can become a method of persuasion. once enough material has been preserved, classified, cross-referenced, and placed beside other material, the collection begins to imply that there must have been a reason for collecting it. quantity quietly becomes coherence. the question of where all these details come from is consequently more interesting than determining whether each detail is true. psychoceramics sits somewhere near the boundary between discovery and invention. a novelist constructs a world and knows that he is constructing it, whereas the crank appears capable of performing a remarkably similar cognitive operation while experiencing each new construction as evidence. 

individual cranks may not even be the most informative cases. between established scholarship and the person mailing a hundred-page proof to a physics department exists an enormous intermediate territory of pseudosciences and other communities organized around their own standards of evidence. these complicate the reassuring idea that error is corrected simply by exposing a person to other people. communities can stabilize false beliefs as easily as they can destabilize them. peer criticism is useful only insofar as the peers share some mechanism by which criticism is allowed to matter.

the internet makes this intermediate territory unusually easy to produce, unfortunately. eccentricity no longer has to remain private long enough to die with its author. an obscure belief can locate an audience and eventually a community.

the crackpot is interesting not merely as an example of failed reasoning, but as a demonstration that reasoning alone is insufficient to guarantee reason.