upvote
My feelings about that outsider thing are pretty mixed.

On one hand I'm the person who implemented the endorsement system for arXiv. I also got a PhD in physics did a postdoc in physics then left the field. I can't say that I was mistreated, but I saw one of the stars of the field today crying every night when he was a postdoc because he was so dedicated to his work and the job market was so brutal -- so I can say it really hurts when I see something that I think belittles that.

On the other hand I am very much an interested outsider when it comes to biosignals, space ISRU, climate change, synthetic biology and all sorts of things. With my startup and hackathon experience it is routine for me to go look at a lot of literature in a new field and cook it down and realize things are a lot simpler than they look and build a demo that knocks the socks off the postdocs because... that's what I do.

But Riemann Hypothesis, Collatz, dropping names of anyone who wrote a popular book, I don't do that. What drives me nuts about crackpots is that they are all interested in the same things whereas real scientists are interested in something different. [1] It was a big part of our thinking about arXiv -- crackpot submissions were a tiny fraction of submission to arXiv but they would have been half the submissions to certain fields like quantum gravity.

I've sat around campfires where hippies were passing a spliff around and talking about that kind of stuff and was really amused recently when we found out that Epstein did the thing with professors who would have known better -- I mean, I will use my seduction toolbox to get people like that to say more than they should but not to have the same conversation I could have at a music festival.

[1] e.g. I think Tolstoy got it backwards!

reply