Peter Kirby

Anatoly Fomenko pushes forward the history of the first century by about a millennium (making them based on events of the 12th) and compresses that history into a span of a few hundred years by way of saying that certain patterns that repeat themselves in the classical history happened just once. The system is really quite elaborate and internally coherent, as my reading of his book History: Fiction or Science? has shown to my mind.

(I read the book a couple years ago. It is in storage at this time.)

If Anatoly Fomenko is a crackpot (as most would be wont to claim)...tell me, how is it that we sniff out the crackpot in a historical endeavor?

Toto

Michael Shermer has made a career out of studying crackpots. But I think that my books on the question are all in storage.

The real problem is to distinguish the crackpots who are right from the ones who are not.

Peter Kirby

Does the status of certain writers as 'crackpot' have no proper influence on the minds of those happy amateurs, such as we are, trying to make sense of the various opinions in the historical sphere?

Steven Avery

If Fomenko reduces Kasparov's world championship reign to only a few months or weeks will he distance himself from the theories ?

Peter Kirby

Explain.

Have you read Fomenko?

youngalexander

Which is generally a good deal easier than distinguishing the non-crackpots who are right from those who are not.

gurugeorge

There's a danger here of forgetting that the "source" of knowledge has no bearing on its truth or falsity (that, for instance, is part of the reason why we avoid ad hominem in discourse). It has to be remembered that the distinction "crackpot" is grounded in pragmatism and convenience rather than epistemology - i.e., in fact some "crackpot" out there might well have the answer to all the questions of Life, the Universe and Everything, it's just that experience shows that certain elements of style, content and psychology usually go with theories that turn out, on inspection, to be wrong.
There are only so many hours in the day, and it's just not cost effective to sift through the midden heap of stuff that has the hallmarks of being likely to be a waste of time, to find the gems that just might be hiding there.

That said, and freed from the burden of having to think that we must discover some arcane epistemological criterion of crackpottery, we can relax and admit that it's simply elements of style and content, as I said above: monomania, capitalised stuff, exclamation marks, self-comparison to previous misunderstood geniuses, untestability of ideas even in principle (or tests so practically impossible it amounts to the same thing), "epicycles" (by which I mean lots of hemming and hawing to preserve coherence in the face of anomalies pointed out by critics), etc., etc.

So long as we don't expect those marks to be a guarantee of crackpottery, they're a good enough guide for the purpose for which the term "crackpot" (and the like) was invented.

EthnAlln

Although the Communists had their own loony side, I will give them credit for this: When Kolmogorov and Alexandrov were running the mathematics section of the USSR Academy of Sciences, the kind of drivel that Fomenko writes would never have been published. (That isn't just my statement; I'm echoing the sentiment of Vladimir Arnold and others, who find Fomenko an embarrassment in the proud tradition of Russian science.)

As for how you sniff them out, just look at the claims that they make and compare them with the evidence. Here's a sample: Fomenko's methodology is to look at the regnal years of a succession of kings of ancient Israel and compare them with the regnal years of the Holy Roman Emperors. He claimed to have done so and found that the sequence of numbers was exactly the same. Ergo, he concluded, the Hebrew Scriptures were not 3000 years old, only several hundred years old, and the history of "ancient Israel" was really a codified version of the history of the Holy Roman Empire.

First of all, the claim is so outrageous that it hardly rises to a level where it is worth refuting. (WHY would hundreds of historians and annalists all decide to disguise the events they are recording in such an arcane imagery, and all independently use the same arcane image?) To defend it, Fomenko has to indulge in the usual creationist garbage about the worthlessness of radiocarbon dating, and has to find anecdotal coincidences in the events described. Second, I took the trouble to find a list of regnal years of the Holy Roman Emperors, and I found that in order to get his fit, Fomenko had to put one emperor's reign INSIDE the reign of another, in other words, make him disappear.

He further claims that the "Tatar yoke" in Russia never happened, that this myth was invented by the Romanovs to justify their absolutism. So the decades Klyuchevskii spent painstakingly searching the archives of monasteries for records of "Udel'naya Rus'" are simply dismissed, and Klyuchevskii's magnificently detailed three-volume history of Russia is confined to the ash-heap of history just off the top of Fomenko's addled brain. The mind boggles!

I reviewed Fomenko's Khronologia Bibleiskikh Sobytii (Chronology of the Events of the Bible) for Zentralblatt für Mathematik. I tried to be kind, since this was only supposed to be a quick summary for people deciding whether to read the book, but I couldn't just ignore the fact that it was garbage.

If I post again on this thread, I'll go into what was wrong with Velikovskii, another proponent of crackpot history.

Solo

A crackpot cannot be right, but detractors can certainly be wrong. The issue here - if there is an issue - is deciding a minimal set of requirements for a historical theory to be considered a historical theory. The problem with Fomenko's "theory" is that it is so "clever" that "it" knows that it cannnot withstand scrutiny by the standard, scientific dating methods. Ergo, "it" proposes to banish them. At that point however, a reasonable discussion ceases. We are dealing with occult.

I note that there is a certain risk of crank theorizing in individuals with highly developped capacity for abstract thought, i.e. mathematicians and theoretical physicists, as the process of verifying a theory is itself highly speculative and therefore prone to errors. Some of you may recall that Edward Teller, who later became a hydrogen bomb enthusiast, originally believed (in 1943) that the process of nuclear fission, once started, could not be stopped. People who deal with highly abstract concepts do not always gauge correctly the "external view" of their theories. They become caught in closed systems operating on internally sustained set of suppositions.
The other side with the Fomenko (or Velikovsky) syndrome, is a known problem of well-known scientists dabbling in some area outside his/her field of expertise and being taken seriously simply because they have established themselves as "savants" elsewhere. This creates the classical "halo" effect which shields them from the initial scrutiny and allows sometimes bizzare ideas to see publisher's ink.

Jiri

EthnAlln

And they can go to excess. At the time Velikovsky first wrote, the USA was in one of its brief periods of sanity, when people were actually embarrassed to talk about their religion, because believing in the supernatural marked a person as "not quite sane and balanced." Some professors (many of them European refugees from Hitler and used to making authoritative pronouncements) threatened to boycott Macmillan's textbooks, claiming they needed a publisher with reliable scientific standards to hold up to their students. That gave Velikovsky martyr's points and was perhaps the first pebble in the rockslide of popular defiance of scientific expertise (not to mention logic and commonsense) that has become the norm in the USA over the past 50 years.

More recently, just consider the huge amount of ignorant e-mail generated by Heidi Cullen's remark that meteorologists who publicly dispute global climate change ought to have their certification revoked. Excessive? I'm not sure. There are such things as professional scientific standards to be maintained. I'd certainly expect the AMA to go after the credentials and license of an MD who took it upon himself to deny a link between cigarettes and illness.

Very good points. And Fomenko's reputation as a geometer has now been disputed by Arnold and others, who are asking what was so great about his papers. I think he's going to be the next one to claim martyrdom, if he hasn't already. Like Velikovsky, he has his own retinue of devoted disciples, who go on quibbling and quibbling with ever weaker logic and facts at their disposal.