I have a pet theory on this. Smart people tend to go in depth on things in a way the average person doesn&#x27;t (generally more to laziness rather than capability). The one trait I noticed in smart people is they never just stop at the convenient answer, it has to fit into a coherent world view, and they tend to integrate ideas into larger wholes.<p>Lets say you try to explain quantum physics to a lay person. We know quantum mechanics is basically correct, but it sounds batshit insane if you try to go directly to the conclusions of quantum mechanics without starting at the first principles. You can&#x27;t just go from A-Z, you have to go A-B-C...Z. The average lay person just goes from A-&gt;&quot;wow quantum physics are weird, murdering cats and stuff&quot;<p>The thing is, we can believe some of the more outlandish claims of physics because physics is a trusted institution and we know claims are checked, etc, so we don&#x27;t need to check it ourselves.<p>So that works for science; because smart people made it work, but what happens with things that aren&#x27;t science? The same people smart enough to study quantum physics might also be just as interested in politics. So maybe their thoughts start at the mainstream, but they keep growing sideways off it in their own unique branch. In science, these branches get clipped when they&#x27;re falsified by the community, but other areas don&#x27;t really have a bar for determining the correctness of a theory, those branches don&#x27;t necessarily get trimmed.<p>Anyway, I guess my point is that if you know a very smart person and they&#x27;re saying something seemingly insane, what you&#x27;re probably hearing is step Z in their thought process, but for it to make sense you have to hear the preceding chain of thoughts A..Y that led to that. Not to say their theory is <i>right</i>, it probably is loony, but since they probably haven&#x27;t gotten anyone to critique their A..Y coherently, when they get called a crackpot they probably rightly assume that nobody quite understand what they&#x27;re getting at.