Crank Profiles

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Crank profiles #4: Will Stancil's "theory" of vibes​

Stancil reinvents idealist psychologism, gets confused about chaos theory, declares the eternal question of political behavior "easy"​

Every so often I like to write about crank theories of politics, so today I’d like to look at an essay called Vibes in Politics written by Twitter personality Will Stancil. As always, I return to Martin Gardner’s classic signs of a crank from Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, and begin with the last:

Cranks often make up word and phrases that are supposed to have a special meaning.

The reason that cranks like to make up words is that it allows them to proceed unencumbered by the body of knowledge and reasoning that we’ve attached to the old ones. A physics crank, for example, might propose to replace gravity with a new force called Carlism — even though this new force is clearly just a slight modification of the theory of gravity. So why change the name? Because then if someone responds “that’s not how gravity works, and you have not shown us a single experimental result or reference relevant to all of the research on gravity,” he can respond: “but we’re not talking about gravity. We’re talking about Carlism.”

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Crank profiles #4: Will Stancil's "theory" of vibes

Stancil reinvents idealist psychologism, gets confused about chaos theory, declares the eternal question of political behavior "easy"

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