Comment by jstanley

> Crackpots can be filtered out using logic, though. But people don’t do that;

For an excellent argument of why most people shouldn't do that, I recommend the essay "epistemic learned helplessness": https://web.archive.org/web/20180406150429/https://squid314....

The gist is that most people are so bad at evaluating logical arguments that they are more likely to be swayed by false arguments rather than correct ones, so the winning strategy is to simply ignore everything that sounds strange.