Hawking, Musk, et. al. are highly successful people with objectively valuable contributions who are known to be about to think deeply and solve problems that others have not.
They are as far from cranks as anyone could possibly be.
Anyone can find non-argument related reasons to suggest anyone else is crazy or a cultist, because no human is completely sane.
What someone cannot do (credibly), is claim that real experts are non-expert crazies, over appearances while completely ignoring their earned credentials.
Those were not the people used as an example. The example was real cultists, with robes and rituals that make no sense. And it's not an ad hominem to dismiss them outright based on their appearance. If someone I clearly perceive to be a cultist walks up to me in a mall, I'm not interested in hearing what they have to say, because the odds are empirically large that they will be wasting my time.
Hawking, Musk, et. al. are highly successful people with objectively valuable contributions who are known to be about to think deeply and solve problems that others have not.
They are as far from cranks as anyone could possibly be.
Anyone can find non-argument related reasons to suggest anyone else is crazy or a cultist, because no human is completely sane.
What someone cannot do (credibly), is claim that real experts are non-expert crazies, over appearances while completely ignoring their earned credentials.