This is a response to Bee's post at Backreaction, "Division by Zero".

If I write to someone, I assume they will to some small extent register the first two words of the title of my e-mail, and the nature of the e-mail address, and nothing more. If I pay some attention to whether those two words catch their attention, perhaps they'll read the first sentence of the e-mail. If something about that seems interesting, to them, they may go on into the attachment, the arXiv posting, or the published paper that I ask that them to read. I equally apologize and take no offense if they want no part of it.

I write to people who write engagingly, people whose approval I think valuable. I've written to Bee once, who replied with what I recognized as asperity that she doesn't work on foundations, but I knew very well that she does. Bee writes about methodology quite often, and her thoughts on Physics go considerably beyond "shut up and calculate", often with wisdom. Bee appears to have quite broad interests, and a crank who doesn't believe fairly passionately that what they're doing ought to be interesting to someone like her isn't going to be a crank for long. The emotional costs of being publicly identified as a crank are very high. I've been politely but rightly called out by Chad Orzel in the last few days for being at least something of a crank on questions of how to popularize QM, at Continuity, Discretion, and the Perils of Popularization, and even that hurt a little, so I'm now licking my wounds, hoping that I won't become a bitter old man about it. An interesting process.

Do people who receive a lot of crank Physics find it painful to have these things arrive because of the pain the authors feel at what they think is oppression? It is sadly true that the individual desperation of pain can become very unpleasant to a community, but is it best to turn away from the leper? Happily, I've had few enough of these attempts on my time to have been able to reply to them all, but I do not expect the same of someone who receives many.

All of which is to say to well-known Physicists who get a lot of this stuff, let these things come, allow that you'll read as much as you read, that if these strangers to you don't interest you beyond the first two words of the title of the e-mail, then that's all you'll read. Every now and then you can announce that you almost never reply to such e-mails, if you like, but people who write e-mails attempting to get feedback know very well that from almost everyone their most likely feedback is no reply at all.

I suppose this post will stop me and most reasonable people who are reading along with Backreaction from sending anything to Bee in future. I think it sets a tone that says that she does her own thing in her own community. So Bee has achieved something. But I suppose also that there will still be the unreasonable people and those who come new to Backreaction, who might believe from what they see that she is the attractive curious person that she does so well.

And to this response, no answer required.