Miscellanea

the study of crackpots, cranks, eccentrics, unsolicited theorists, and the elaborate intellectual systems they leave behind. psychoceramics is not a particularly serious name, and at present not much of a serious discipline either. most encounters with it amount to recreational interest in people who have developed theories of physics in which einstein made a fatal algebraic error, discovered the true location of atlantis, decoded the secret chronology of the bible, or otherwise noticed something that has somehow escaped everyone whose profession requires noticing it.

there is nevertheless a serious subject hiding inside the joke.

the interesting crank is not simply ignorant. ignorance requires very little explanation. more peculiar is the person who has worked extraordinarily hard at being wrong. crank literature can represent years or decades of reading, calculation, correspondence, annotation, and revision. its authors frequently possess enormous stores of factual knowledge about their chosen subjects. they develop specialized vocabularies and classifications, build historical narratives, produce diagrams and mathematical demonstrations, and anticipate objections. in this sense the crank has more in common with the scholar than with the merely uninformed person: both have made a discipline of thinking about something.

the obvious difference is that one discipline has acquired mechanisms for preventing thought from becoming entirely answerable to itself.

this makes psychoceramics an interesting problem for the sociology of knowledge. 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. evidence has to remain evidence when inspected by somebody who does not already accept the conclusion. methods can be reproduced. predictions can fail. an explanation must retain some conceivable relationship to the possibility that it is wrong.

the crank often preserves the recognizable motions of this process while quietly eliminating the possibility of failure. objections are incorporated into the theory. missing evidence acquires an explanation. hostile experts become evidence of institutional resistance; indifference becomes evidence that nobody has looked closely enough. eventually the theory develops the peculiar advantage of being able to explain both the existence and absence of evidence for itself. what appears to be an increasingly comprehensive theory is actually an increasingly closed one.

particularly strange is the 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 proposed. others seem to emerge from the explanatory system itself. one invented connection requires another; the second makes a third necessary; eventually the theory contains a world's worth of particulars whose abundance begins to resemble evidence.

there is something philosophically uncomfortable here because this process is not completely alien to respectable thought. imagination is required to produce explanations before they can be tested. 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. the same capacity that allows a person to discover a pattern also permits him to manufacture one.

there is an equally uncomfortable relationship between this and the archive. 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.

this website obviously participates in that impulse. miscellanea is deliberately an accumulation: thoughts, quotations, images, conversations, things read and things worth keeping. there is no claim that the collection forms a system, which is probably important. still, collecting anything produces a little cosmology. 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. the crank appears capable of performing a remarkably similar cognitive operation while experiencing each new construction as something discovered about the world. the distinction between the two cannot simply be imagination, because both require quite a lot of it.

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. 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. enough private cosmologies brought into contact with one another can begin to resemble a school of thought. the relevant question becomes not only what causes people to develop strange systems of belief, but what social conditions allow particular systems to reproduce themselves.

this is where psychoceramics becomes less amusing. strange ideas are not historically confined to strange people. sufficiently successful fantasies can migrate out of the intellectual fringe and become ordinary explanations of the world. the history of ideas contains plenty of beliefs that were ridiculous without being inconsequential. studying the production of nonsense therefore also means studying the circumstances under which nonsense acquires authority.

perhaps the value of psychoceramics is ultimately diagnostic. a broken system makes visible the structures that ordinarily disappear when everything is working. looking at a discipline that has lost its mechanisms for verification and meaningful criticism clarifies what those mechanisms were doing in the first place. the crackpot is interesting not merely as an example of failed reasoning, but as a demonstration that reasoning alone is insufficient to guarantee reason.

last edited: 11 september 2026, 1:14 am edt