http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notabene/psychoceramics.html
After all, to any rational mind, the greater part of the history of ideas
is a history of freaks.
—-E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, p. 3
That is, the study of crack-pots, a.k.a. kooks, cranks, flakes, “authors of particularly unsolicited manuscripts”, and the like. For obvious reasons, this is the golden age of psychoceramics, when a million mutant flowers bloom, and a thousand sherds of thought contend.
Currently psychoceramics is little more than recreational kook-fancying, by people like me. Some of us do it because kooks amuse us, some as a means of marking themselves as Not Normal (But Not as Strange as Those Kooks), some because they take a sympathetic interest in the fringes of human belief, and some because they take a hostile interest. I’m mostly in it for laughing at silly people and rationalist jeremiads: not very noble motives, perhaps, but there they are. Others among us are much more charitable, perhaps to excess…
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A new word for me….not personally of course…
;-)
