Stumbleupon Review of : http://www.zompist.com/arguing.html
- From the page: How do you diagnose crankery? The surest telltale is unfalsifiability. Cranks are often tireless researchers; but they only accumulate positive evidence. They cherry-pick mainstream sources for factoids that support their position and ignore everything else. The linguistic ones, armed with dictionaries, amass mountains of ‘evidence’. But they never contemplate a test that might reject their hypothesis. A skeptical professor I know has a simple test for people who want to argue with him: “What would it take to prove you wrong?” For a crank the answer is “Nothing could.”