In science, we tend to valorize (to the point of fetishizing) a certain kind of ability to abstractly manipulate symbols and concepts — related to, although not exactly the same as, the cult of genius. (It’s not just being smart that is valorized, but a certain kind of smart.) The truth is, such an ability is great, but tends to be completely uncorrelated with other useful qualities like intellectual honesty and good judgment. People don’t become crackpots because they’re stupid; they become crackpots because they turn their smarts to crazy purposes.
Bob Park makes the same point in his classic book Voodoo Science. Credentials and technical jargon don't prevent you from walking down the road from foolishness to fraud (as is evident by the people who populate the upper echelons of the intelligent design movement). Science has a lot of self-correcting mechanisms in place, in the form of a community of colleagues. Once you start seeing those colleagues merely as an impediment to the true expression of your own genius, once you perceive them as simply too thick-headed to ever see the correctness of your theories, and when you simply give up trying to make arguments that would be convincing to your scientific peers, you've stopped doing science and are headed down the road to fraud.
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