Thank you @k9bfriender for your post (I am just making sure you know I am not just ignoring it). @digs A couple of things. As I said, someone posted links to my old threads. No, I am not saying I am famous or well-known on these boards. But I after all have been around for a while, and some people have claimed familiarity with me in the past. But I really wanted to say: No, I don’t send mail directly to people’s homes. Or rarely, in any event. I send it to their college office, their organization post, and so forth. In any event, if at all possible, I try to send to to any place but their home. In fact, one time, I had the option of sending it to someone’s home, because it was listed on the internet, for some reason. But I still chose to send it via another location, for the reasons I just gave. 
@Telemark All science begins with hypotheses.
Its my job as a scientist to research hypotheses and scientific questions. But, @Jim_B, its not my job to research YOUR crackpot theories.
I’ve never been sent anything worth consideration beyond a few yucks. Not because I’m closed minded, but because, without fail, the letters I get sent are 1) crazy, 2) idiotic, 3) naive beyond question (often all 3 at once).
@mozchron I perhaps should’ve said this earlier. But I never said the vast majority would take my theories seriously. In fact, I’ll even tell you. As I mail it, I imagine the vast majority of people just tossing it in the trash. But there always is that one person who will take it seriously. And as I have already said, once in a while, I do get a positive reply.
Yes, and the next step in science is to show why your hypothesis is wrong.
Only after you have tried pretty hard to show why it is wrong does it stand any chance of having any value.
I really do recommend that you start listening to Carroll’s Mindscape podcast. He’s probably the highest level scientist who is willing to tackle some of the more out there ideas. He get some interesting questions and ideas sometimes, and goes into a fair amount of detail as to where they have something of value, and where they have gone wrong.
And it’s not just science, he has guests on that are in all sorts of different fields.
He does a monthly Ask Me Anything podcast, and if you become a patreon, just like $10 a month, then he will try to get to your question. From what it sounds, you spend at least that much on postage and envelopes.
He’s pretty out there himself, many of his ideas are not well accepted by “the establishment”, but he is willing to be wrong, as you have to be wrong sometimes in order to learn anything new. He will intentionally tackle areas that he doesn’t think are likely to pan out, specifically because no one else is willing to.
I listen to it mostly because it is almost exactly as long as it takes me to cut the grass.
Let me know if you submit a question that he answers, I’ll be interested to hear that.
My homeless younger brother regularly sends crackpot theories to people. He’ll corner people wherever he can and will go on and on about about whatever he’s thinking that week.
What he won’t do is any rigorous research. He also believes that coming up with questions is useful and that others should spend time doing the real work.
He calls himself an idea man.
Eons ago, some guy on some forum, somewhere, asked if the (pretty benign on their faces) compliments that he was paying to a female co-worker were inherently inappropriate.
I remember saying something along the lines of: you might say something that makes her feel horribly uncomfortable – threatened, even.
But if the hypothetical person of her dreams said the exact same thing, it might be much more okay.
And since it appears that you can’t figure out which one of those you are to her by her reactions, stop doing and saying these things immediately.
The OPs actions strike me this way: I don’t know how the recipients of these letters feel about you or the letters themselves. You’ve mentioned the odd favorable response, but …
To me, that would matter a great deal.
Then certainly not a barrel and heap…are you talking in your sleep?
I’m a musical comedy geek that got your reference🙂
First of all, I wasn’t here 20 or 15 years or 10 years ago. Why are you assuming that everyone responding was here and reading your posts all that time? I’ve read some of your theories but didn’t realize that you were sending them to people via snail mail. But sending them–assuming it’s only once–is odd but not creepy. The creepy part is WHY you sent them via snail mail:
You seem especially perturbed that needscoffee listed all/many of your posts pertaining to you sending these letters. They were merely pointing out a pattern of behavior. I actually read the posts in that list and noticed that you’ve mentioned before this supposed Constitutional protection, including once when you cite the Fourth Amendment instead of the First. The fact you feel the need to have and cite such protection speaks to your mindset and motivation. Whether that’s due to the content of these letters or some sort of undue suspicion on your part, you’re clearly worried that these letters could somehow get you in trouble or that some entity–the recipients, the government, USPS–might want to stop you were it not for that supposed Constitutional protection.
And then there’s the whole issue of your concern that the USPS had some interest in reading your mail and the fact you’re so concerned that the letters “went through” that you routinely send one to yourself when you mail batches of these letters.
So, yeah, there are logical reasons some people might be concerned.
@nelliebly As I already stated, on message boards, moderators (no reference to anyone here), they can censor your posts for some of the most ridiculous and asinine reasons that I have ever seen. Nothing that would be banned, in really any other human forum or context. I made that point already clear. But I will repeat it again.
And asking why they opened my mail was partly humorous. That is why I put in in MPSIMS (get it, now ?). If it were a serious question, or even a serious matter, I surely would have put it some place else. IMHO at the very least.
Have I made everything clear now ?
No, it doesn’t. Humans are innately extremely good at inventing hypotheses. They did so for thousands of years before we had any science, yet remained in benighted ignorance because they had no way to distinguish good ideas from bad ideas. An archetypal example is medicine. Before the development of evidenced-based medicine, people took all manner of folk remedies. More often than not sick people get better anyway, so every purported remedy was a hypothesis. But we had no way to distinguish the few treatments that were effective against disease from the vast amount of useless nonsense.
What characterized the Enlightenment and the emergence of modern science was not imagination, it was not radical new hypotheses about the way the world works. It was the development of a rigorous methodology of critical thinking, to examine which ideas stood up to rational analysis and could be validated by empirical study. The key to the Enlightenment and to subsequent immense progress in our understanding of the world was a scientific method that enabled us to discard bad ideas.
The notion that your unique imagination might grant some key insight that has not already occurred to thousands of experts in the field is false. Your ideas are not novel. If you don’t see them put forward in mainstream science, it’s not because there’s some blinkered orthodoxy, it’s not because nobody has thought of them before. It’s because people already know through rational analysis and experimental scrutiny that such ideas are not consistent with what we know about the world.
The key to progress is not finding new ideas, that part is easy. It’s the critical thinking skills and empirical methodology to distinguish a good idea from a bad one. If you really want to contribute to our understanding of the world, work on that part.
If it was meant to be humorous, it missed. You went on the defense right from post 1 asking why they’d open your mail when it was simply harmless theories.
The fact that you felt the need to defend the contents of the mail suggests you feel that people may have a problem with it.
Think about it, why wasn’t your OP something more like this:
Or so it would seem. I’ll give you the details.
I sent out some letters, I also sent a letter to myself just to make sure it went thru. (Or if I mail in a mail box, to see if the letters were rain-damaged and so forth.)
Sound strange? Apparently not. Because I got one of these letters-to-myself today. And it was opened! The envelope was opened on three sides, and (get this), stapled in the center. The mail carrier had just dropped it off. So no one else could have touched my mail.
Why would the post office have opened it? And then stapled it shut?
Any thoughts?
Same question but leaves out the contents of your letter.
You lack insight into your own behavior, into the fact that “sending scientific theories to people whose job it is to research them” is indeed inherently odd behavior. Science does not work that way, this is the kind of behavior associated with someone usually described as a “crank” or “crackpot”.
You lack insight into the fact that it’s quite preposterous to imagine that your letters are important enough that somebody would be tearing them open to read them - then stapling them together and sending them on to you.
The fact that you lack this insight is a valid reason for people to be concerned that you lack broader insight into what kinds of behavior might make the recipients of your missives uncomfortable. The concern is bolstered by that fact that you don’t understand the significance or applicability of the First Amendment, you seem to think that it’s some kind of carte blanche to say what you want in the way that you want without any social responsibility to consider whether what you are doing is appropriate.
But only a small percentage of hypothese become actual theories. What percentage of what you sent out are actually theories?
Francis Bacon said that science begins with observations. (or something similar)
@Joey_P I read my OP, and I can see it was meant to be lighthearted. What did I miss here ?
@Czarcasm I haven’t sent any theories yet. That is why I send out hypotheses letters. I want other people to get interested and them, and if they like it, investigate and test .
Have you considering bypassing postal costs(real) and censorship(highly unlikely), and just create a blog?
Or your could post your ideas to a science forum (or here) to get some feedback. If your ideas have any merit, it’s really not hard to get people’s attention on the internet.
But of course you’ve tried that… and you don’t like the feedback. Hence the persistence with the practice of sending personal letters to people, while mumbling about the First Amendment and imagining that this is not a weird and creepy thing to do.