I'm gonna post this here, and hope that it's the right place. Use it as a check list or "Bingo Card" to determine how deep the woo-woo has become.
Pseudo-Scientists:
- Accept claims and reports that describe well-understood objects behaving in strangely as literally true, when those same reports turn out to have been deliberate frauds, honest mistakes, garbled accounts, misinterpretations, outright fabrications, and stupid blunders.
- Aim their literature at the general public, rather than at educated professionals.
- Always exposed by a reduction to absurdity of their claims.
- Appeal to distrust of established facts and authority.
- Appeal to emotion, or make claims that have emotional appeal.
- Appeal to false authority, or claim that established authority can not be trusted.
- Appeal to novelty, believing that the mere newness of the claim validates the claim itself.
- Appeal to sentimentality.
- Appeal to the human interest in "Magic" and "Miracles."
- Appeal to the scientific criteria of truth while simultaneously denying its validity.
- Are fond of imaginary conspiracies.
- Argue from alleged exceptions, errors, anomalies, strange events, and suspect claims.
- Argue from ignorance (they don't know what they don't know, and expect others to be the same way).
- Argue from irrelevancies.
- Assume inexplicable influences and connections between things from the beginning ("Spurious Similarities").
- Attempt to imitate the jargon of scientists, engineers, and technicians by usuing "technobabble" gibberish that sounds as if it may be scientific to non-scientists.
- Attempt to persuade with meaningless rhetoric, propaganda, and misrepresentation.
- Avoid putting their claims to any meaningful tests.
- Base their claims on an incomplete understanding of natural laws.
- Claims that statements by scientists are open to alternative, equally valid interpretations.
- Treat scientific literature as one might consider a novel or a painting ("Subjective Interpretation").
- Claim that the results of their experiments appear only under certain vaguely specified but vital conditions.
- Deliberately impose mysteries where none exist.
- Depend upon arbitrary conventions of human culture (customs, names, labels, traditions, et cetera) to validate their claims or to provide the basis for their claims.
- Discourage calls for review, adherance to standards, pre-publication verification, accuracy, and precision in their published studies.
- Display indifference to established facts.
- Display indifference to the validity of evidence.
- Do not progress beyond their claims.
- Emphasize unverifyable accounts, such as anecdotes, apocrypha, hearsay, legends, myths, rumors, stories, "tall tales," and testimonials to validate their claims.
- Expect belief in spite of the facts, not because of them.
- First claim a theory, then look for evidence to support it.
- Ignore all findings that contradict their conclusions.
- Ignore or rationalize away their own contradictions
- Invent their own ambiguous and imprecisely defined vocabulary, and use words that have no definition at all.
- Make claims and advance theories that contradict what is known about nature.
- Make up pseudo-facts as needed to support their claims (Straw man fallacies).
- Offer no practical advantage to believing their claims.
- Provide no evidence that their claims are true.
- Publish studies that are so vaguely described that one can't figure out what was done or how it was done.
- Publish studies that ignore simplicity in favor of complex explanations that are often convoluted and self-contradictory, as well.
- Rarely, if ever, abandon their original idea or revise their claims, in spite of evidence to the contrary.
- Rarely, if ever, carry out careful and methodical experiments themselves.
- Rarely, if ever, check their sources.
- Rarely, if ever, correctly interpret or apply genuine scientific literature.
- Rarely, if ever, discard or modify old concepts in the light of new discoveries.
- Rarely, if ever, discover or study natural processes.
- Rarely, if ever, discover something new.
- Rarely, if ever, follow up on their own experiments ("It worked once, and that's good enough!").
- Rarely, if ever, make an independent investigation.
- Rarely, if ever, propose new theories.
- Rarely, if ever, refer to genuine scientific literature.
- Rely heavily on anachronistic thinking (The older the idea, the more attractive it is, especially if the idea is transparently wrong and has long been discarded by science).
- Rely heavily on circular reasoning.
- Rely heavily on subjective validation (coincidence and false cause fallacies).
- Rely on the research of others while simultaneously down-playing its validity.
- Shift the burden of proof to the dissenting side ("You can't prove me wrong, so I must be right!").
- Take a casual approach to evidence.
- Try to convert people to their point of view, rather than convince them that their point of view is valid.
- Try to rationalize their beliefs.
- Uncover little or no new information.
- Use "Science can't explain everything" to justify their pseudo-science in the light of inconvenient facts.
- Use stories or parables to explain events, without a description of the underlying physical processes.
- Usually, if not always, expound on phenomena well-known to scientist, and little-known to the general public.
- Usually, if not always, ignore the results of genuine scientific research.
It usually takes only one of these assertions to be true to expose a claim as pseudo-science, fraud, or "woo-woo." Unfortunately for 28K, Robinson, and their ilk, once is never enough.
-Fnord of Dyscordia-
(PS: I know some of these statements are redundant repetitions of others, and that some seem to contradict others, as well. Please review and correct; or feel free to add a few observations of your own. -FoD-)
