It’s both really.

When I was publishing my first paper after sending it in to a professor for review a few times he called me in and went line through line of the whole paper for about 4 hours explaining to me what I needed to fix and why.

A lot of it were things that came down to experience and that no book education could have given me.

People that believe they can make significant contributions need to go through the proper process. But ridiculing them before they even attempt is not the way to go.

A good point that Angela made in her video from what. I remember. I watched it a while ago was that these crackpots always have grand theories. It’s never a small contribution. In that sense. A good filter is just asking them to show why we should listen to them before putting effort into it.

You think you found a way to make warp drives work ? Show us a prototype.

Edit. I did live in the midst of academia for a while. But from my experiences. Reaching out to people in other universities. They had no real way of verifying a priori that I was who i said I was. And.no one ever told me to fuck off and very few people ignored me. From memory no one did. So it does make me wonder what kind of insane message that person is sending and to whom.