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3. In any serious discussion of a scientific issue, the crackpot will usually offer polemics rather than reason, invective rather than fact, and a harangue that he's a "revolutionary" against an "establishment". Sometimes he makes accusations of a [[conspiracy theory|conspiracy]] against him. At other times, the accusation is of "social control" of the minds of scientists. He appoints himself as the avant-garde of a [[paradigm shift]]. However, this often represents a  basic philosophical failure in the crackpot to understand that "paradigms" and "paradigm shifts" are usually recognized ''de post facto'' by historians and almost never while the shift is occuring, and that significant paradigm shifts are almost always the work of younger scientists who come up with innovative and significant ideas early in their career, and not of older scientists whose ideas have already been examined and rejected.

3. In any serious discussion of a scientific issue, the crackpot will usually offer polemics rather than reason, invective rather than fact, and a harangue that he's a "revolutionary" against an "establishment". Sometimes he makes accusations of a [[conspiracy theory|conspiracy]] against him. At other times, the accusation is of "social control" of the minds of scientists. He appoints himself as the avant-garde of a [[paradigm shift]]. However, this often represents a  basic philosophical failure in the crackpot to understand that "paradigms" and "paradigm shifts" are usually recognized ''de post facto'' by historians and almost never while the shift is occuring, and that significant paradigm shifts are almost always the work of younger scientists who come up with innovative and significant ideas early in their career, and not of older scientists whose ideas have already been examined and rejected.