Ultra-Ultracrepidarianism
I wear this hat when I’m feeling ultracrepidarian.
HOBOKEN, MAY 21, 2026. What do you call someone who opines on ultracrepidarians? An ultra-ultracrepidarian.
I’m compelled to blather a bit more on ultracrepidarianism, the subject of my last column. An ultracrepidarian is an ignorant know-it-all, a crank, who disdains mainstream expertise.
ULTRACREPIDARIAN CONVENTION. I amuse myself imagining a convention of ultracrepidarians. It would be like an anarchist convention. No one agrees with anyone, everyone yells at everyone else.
In her excellent book Physics on the Fringe, science writer Margaret Wertheim describes attending a conference of physics cranks, the kind who think they’ve proved Einstein wrong.
The meeting reminds Wertheim of a psychiatric monograph, The Three Christ of Ypsilanti, about three schizophrenic patients, each of whom believes he is Christ, the savior of humanity. When they are brought together in a mental hospital in Ypsilanti, Michigan, each Christ concludes the others are crazy. Funny.
What’s the difference between the Christs of Ypsilanti and Republicans? Serious question, to which I’ll return.
DOUBTING CHOMSKY. Ultracrepidarians adhere to the old counter-culture slogan: “QUESTION AUTHORITY.” I urge my students to doubt authorities, including me. But challenging authority can lead to paradoxes.
I once asked linguist and political critic Noam Chomsky to define his politics. He said he’s “antiestablishment,” adding, “Whatever the establishment is, I’m against it.”
I replied, Oh, that’s ironic, because in linguistics, you are the establishment. Annoyed, Chomsky insisted, absurdly, that he is not a major figure in linguistics. Chomsky was so antiestablishment he disdained himself.
I’ve cited Chomsky as an authority, scientific and moral, but I doubt I will anymore. Chomsky, The Guardian reports, was on chummy terms with Jeffrey Epstein. That’s not funny, it’s sad.
THE KUHN PARADOX. If science journalists are ultracrepidarians, so, I propose, are philosophers of science. Thomas Kuhn said scientists are brainwashed into embracing the dominant “paradigm” of their era and are slow to reject “revolutionary” ideas, like heliocentrism and quantum mechanics.
Cranks think Kuhn gives them the right to challenge scientific experts. What’s funny is that Kuhn was quite conservative. He was horrified that he had become the patron saint of kooky would-be revolutionaries. Kuhn told me, “I've often said I’m much fonder of my critics than my fans.”
THE POPPER PARADOX. Another ultracrepidarian favorite is Karl Popper. He liked to say, “In our infinite ignorance, we are all equal.” He meant we should be humble and modest, because all our knowledge is tentative, subject to change.
When I interviewed Popper in 1992, he struck me as arrogant and dogmatic. He dissed other philosophers, and he bragged that he understood the implications of physics better than Nils Bohr and Einstein.
Last fall, I attended a conference of people who embrace “critical rationalism,” Popper’s philosophy. These Popperians fancy themselves free thinkers, and yet they cite Popper as if he were infallible. So funny.
HARD EXPERTISE VERSUS BULLSHIT. I teach humanities at a tech school, and I like to spout the platitude that the humanities are more about questions than answers. That’s a nice way of saying humanities “expertise” is soft compared to the expertise of engineers and physicists. If engineers and physicists don’t know what they’re doing, a bridge might collapse, an H-bomb might not blow up.
You can rank professions, it occurs to me, according to how easy it is to bullshit your way to success. It’s hard to fake the hard expertise required to be an aerospace engineer, auto mechanic, plumber, electrician, orthopedic surgeon, chef. If you don’t know what you’re doing in the kitchen of a big-time restaurant, your incompetence will be quickly exposed. So Vicki, a veteran pastry chef, informs me.
In contrast, being a bullshit artist can take you far in the humanities and even farther in politics. You might become the most powerful person in the world!
NAKED EMPERORS. I don’t mean to imply that anything goes in the humanities. You can be a smart critic of the arts, or a stupid critic. Biologist turned anti-woke curmudgeon Richard Dawkins recently announced that Kafka’s story “The Metamorphosis” sucks.
Dawkins’s larger point seems to be that the literary canon is a scam foisted on us by pseudo-experts. This is a common ultracrepidarian schtick. If you don’t get something, like string theory or Proust, you sneer at it.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk is bashing the casting of a black actress as Helen of Troy in an upcoming flick. Musk says woke folks would freak if a white actor played Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela. Anyone who opposes a white actor playing MLK and supports a black woman playing Helen, Musk says, is guilty of a double standard.
Musk’s analogy is idiotic. MLK and Mandela were historical figures, whose skin color defined their lives. Helen of Troy is a mythical character, whose skin color is irrelevant to her tale.
Dawkins and Musk cast themselves as brave truth-tellers, like the boy who says the emperor has no clothes. What’s funny is that Dawkins and Musk have merely drawn attention to their own nakedness—that is, their aesthetic and moral cluelessness. They are the naked emperors.
RIGHT-WING COUNTERCULTURE. I just read an essay in The New York Review of Books about Walter Lippmann, big-time 20th-century pundit, confidant of kings and presidents. Lippmann thought ordinary citizens of a democracy cannot make informed decisions, the issues are too complex. Voters need experts—like Lippmann himself—for guidance.
Um, yeah, but Lippmann and other experts gave us the Cold War, Vietnam war, nuclear arms race, rat race, yada yada. No wonder many of us in the Sixties turned on, tuned in, dropped out.
Back then, ultracrepidarianism, telling experts to fuck themselves, was a hippy thing. Now it’s a right-wing thing. A right-wing ultracrepidarian, the most successful bullshit artist of all time, occupies the White House. If a counterculture seizes power, is it still a counterculture?
CRANKS AND VISIONARIES. Years ago, my friend and fellow science writer Mike Lemonick taught a class at Princeton called, as I recall, “Cranks and Visionaries.” Mike invited me to talk to the class because I’ve interviewed lots of scientific cranks and visionaries, and I’m a bit of a crank myself. Yeah, I’m a cranky expert on cranks, an ultra-ultracrepidarian.
Back to my question about the difference between the Christs of Ypsilanti and Republicans. The Republicans think Trump is our savior.
Further Reading:
Ultracrepidarianism and The End of Science
Conservation of Ignorance: A New Law of Nature