This is not really anything new, but it is taking on a new scope. The WSJ recently wrote about The Rise of ‘Conspiracy Physics’ (hat tip to “Quasiparticular” for pointing to this in the topic suggestions), which discusses the popularity of social media influencers who claim there is a vast conspiracy among academic physicists. Back in the before time (pre world wide web), if you were a crank – someone who thinks they understand science better than they do and that they have revolutionized science without ever checking their ideas with actual experts – you would likely mail your manifesto to random academics hoping to get their attention. The academics would almost universally take the hundreds of pages full of mostly nonsense and place it in the circular file, unread. I myself have received several of these (although I usually did read them, at least in part, for skeptical fodder).

With the web, cranks had another outlet. They could post their manifesto on a homemade web page and try to get attention there. The classic example of this was the “Time Cube” – the site is now inactive but you can see a capture on the wayback machine. This site came to typify the typical format of such pages – a long vertical scrawl, almost unreadable color scheme, filled with boasting about how brilliant the creator is, and claiming a conspiracy of silence among scientists.

With web 2.0 and social media, the cranks adapted, and they have continued to adapt as social media and society evolves. Today, as pointed out in the WSJ article, there is a wave of anti-establishment sentiment, and the cranks are riding this wave. If you read the comments to the WSJ article you will see evidence of some of the contributing factors. There is, for example, a lot of “blame the victim” sentiment – blaming physicists, or scientists, academics, experts in general. They did not do a good enough job of explaining their field to the public. They ignored the cranks and let them flourish. They responded to the cranks and gave them attention. They are too closed to fringe ideas that challenge their authority.

It’s fine to look for systemic issues that might have contributed to a problem. But I reject taking this to the point of blaming those factors as if they were the primary cause, rather than looking at the actual perpetrators and enablers. For example, one theme that crops up on the comments is global warming. Several commenters state that, well if scientists can perpetrate the fraud of global warming, it’s no wonder the public doesn’t trust them. They are on the right track, but making the wrong diagnosis.

The problem is the well-funded and deliberate campaign of attacking science and scientists, sowing distrust in institutions and scientists, in order to manufacture doubt and confusion over climate science. This then spreads to all areas of science and expertise. Political radicals then learned to use this playbook for any issue – just attack the elites and the experts, so that you can slip in your preferred narrative.

As with many things, there is a lot of nuance here and there is a spectrum of quality. Of course, with any large institution, there are legitimate criticisms and problems. People are people, and they bring their flaws and biases everywhere. The conduct of science is never pristine. Individual institutions, or labs, or researchers may have issues. In hindsight, entire disciplines may have emphasized the wrong theories or ignored viable alternatives. Can you think of a system that is so air-tight that nothing like this would ever happen? Also, keep in mind, science and scholarship are really hard. I would also argue they are getting harder. In many ways we have picked all the low hanging fruit, and further progress is getting trickier in many areas.

Physics is a perfect example of this. I love hearing people criticize current physicists because they have yet to unify relativity with quantum mechanics, or more generally that they don’t seem to be making much progress. Why don’t we have a new fundamental theory of reality every second Tuesday? You have to realize how much physicists have accomplished in the last century and a half – they figured out the solutions that were plaguing classical physics, identified the fundamental units of matter, came up with new descriptions of space time, have a working theory on the origin of the universe, and produced the standard model of particle physics (that’s all). Now they are trying to push these theories deeper – to come up with a grand unifying theory of all of reality. Cut them a little freaking slack.

Into this situation, armed with conspiracy theories and a TikTok account, comes an army of Time Cube cranks. They think they can shoot from the hip, without doing all the hard work required to make even a minor contribution to the collective scientific effort, and then whine and moan that they are not being taken seriously by people who actually have some understanding of this massive complexity. It must be a conspiracy. It can’t be me. They are given attention by the Joe Rogans of the world. They are applauded by the political ideologues who see this as yet another way to attack the establishment (even when they are a part of it), and sow distrust. There are no facts, there is no shared reality. There are just competing narratives – so listen to my narrative which says all your problems are because you are a victim of a vast and deep conspiracy. Oh yeah, and my tribe’s religious beliefs are all true.

This leads us to the notion that NASA is constantly lying to hide the flat Earth (because reasons). “They” are hiding the reality that all our modern culture derives from Tartaria, which was wiped out just 150 years ago in a global mud flood (that’s actually a real thing). They are also hiding an army of Einsteins who have actually already solves many of the most tricky problems facing science today.

The reality is quite the opposite of what these cranks claim. First, science and academia, while they may be institutionally conservative, tend to be open to new ideas as well – if you have the goods. But also – science is not monolithic. Each lab, each institution, each country has their own perspectives and biases. They are all in competition with each other. There are thousands of scientific journals. The problem is not that fringe ideas have no outlets – its that fringe ideas have too many outlets. We are being flooded with lots of low-quality science, and every whacky idea you can imagine. So what are they complaining about – that they can’t get published in a top tier journal? Welcome to the club. Almost no one can – that’s why they are top tier. That’s like a local (and solidly mediocre) rock band complaining that they cannot get booked at elite venues. It must be a conspiracy.