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What is the actual relation between heterodoxy and crackpots?
A plausibly sounding explanation is that "disagreeing with the mainstream" can easily become a general pattern. You notice that the mainstream is wrong about X, and then you go like "and therefore the mainstream is probably also wrong about Y, Z, and UFOs, and dinosaurs." Also there are the social incentives; once you become famous for disagreeing with the mainstream, you can only keep your fame by disagreeing more and more, because your new audience is definitely not impressed by "sheeple".
On the other hand, there is a notable tendency of actual mainstream experts to start talking nonsense confidently about things that are outside their area of expertise. Which suggests an alternative model, that perhaps it is natural for all smart people (including the ones who succeeded to become mainstream experts at some moment of their lives) to become crackpots... it's just that some of them stumble upon an important heterodox truth on their way.
So is it more like: "heterodoxy leads to crackpottery" or more like: "heterodoxy sometimes happens as a side effect on the universal way to crackpottery"?
Apparently, crackpots are overconfident about their ability to find truth. Heterodox fame can easily contribute to such overconfidence, but is its effect actually significantly different from mainstream fame?
Any particular examples, or statistics that might shed some light on how common it is?
If it's just, some people can think of a few really famous people, that seems to point more in the direction of 'extreme fame has side effects' (or it's the opposite, benefits of confidence). But there are a lot of experts, so if the phenomenon was common...
Sadly, I have no statistics, just a few anecdotes -- which is unhelpful to answer the question.
After more thinking, maybe this is a question of having a platform. Like, maybe there are many experts who have crazy opinions outside their area of expertise, but we will never know, because they have proper channels for their expertise (publish in journals, teach at universities), but they don't have equivalent channels for their crazy opinions. Their environment filters their opinions: the new discoveries they made will be described in newspapers and encyclope... (read more)