✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

Psychoceramics

bactra.org · 2,176 words · saved by 1 readers

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... This is not to say that psychoceramics couldn't play a more serious role, however. As an organized field of study, it would have a place in the sociology of science analogous to that of lesion studies in neuropsychology. A working intellectual discipline, like probability theory or Sanskrit philology, has mechanisms which keep it from going off the rails, and keep cranks from taking over; most of the time and on balance, such disciplines produce reliable knowl

Psychoceramics Notebooks Psychoceramics Last update : 03 Apr 2026 23:30 First version : 9 March 1998 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

Explore this link on the map →

related reading