Quotes About Pseudoscience

Under Communism, both religion and pseudoscience were systematically suppressed—except for the superstition of the state ideological religion. It was advertised as scientific, but fell as far short of this ideal as the most unselfcritical mystery cult.

Bilimi (daha doÄŸrusu iÅŸleyiÅŸ ilkelerini) hiç duymad?ysan?z, sahte bilime kucak açt???n?z?n fark?nda bile olmayabilirsiniz.

every time we excercise self-criticism, every time we test our ideas against the outside world, we are doing science. When we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition.

reducing public education to a consumer experience for parents that allows them to "choose" to funnel taxpayer money into schools that discriminate, teach pseudoscience and fake history, and promote contempt for those who are different isn't a way to improve our system of education.

T]he problem of demarcation between science and pseudoscience is not a pseudo-problem of armchair philosophers: it has grave ethical and political implications.

The mid-eighteen-thirties marked the rise of eugenics and racialism, with phrenology emerging as just one of the many pseudosciences that sought to enact, reinforce, and restrict racial difference.

The pseudo- and parasciences are nothing less, in fact, than small pools of knowledge that are not connected to the large network of science. They are valid only in their own network.)

Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought to have been retired long before.

He sighed. 'Phrenology is where the size and shape of your skull determines whether you dunnit or not.

Order in chaos. It was science's oldest cliché. The idea of hidden unity and common underlying form in nature had an intrinsic appeal, and it had an unfortunate history of inspiring pseudoscientists and cranks. When Feigenbaum came to Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1974, a year shy of his thirtieth birthday, he knew that if physicists were to make something of the idea now, they would need a practical framework, a way to turn ideas into calculations.

Given the proliferation of pseudoscientific thinking that permeates the media, we are increasingly susceptible to thinking like a pseudoscientist-which contributes profoundly to errors in our beliefs and decisions.

Pseudoscientists typically focus on only one explanation for a phenomenon, quickly brushing aside alternative explanations. And, in their desire to support their belief, they are willing to accept flimsy, oftentimes anecdotal, evidence.

As in the pseudoscience of bloodletting, just so in the pseudoscience of city rebuilding and planning, years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense.

The pseudoscience of city planning and its companion, the art of city design, have not yet broken with the specious comfort of wishes, familiar superstitions, oversimplifications, and symbols, and have not yet embarked upon the adventure of probing the real world.

What we won't do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of "true scientific discourse." It isn't.

Critics of 'economic sciences' sometimes refer to the development of a 'pseudoscience' of economics, arguing that it uses the trappings of science, like dense mathematics, but only for show.

The paleo diet is utter nonsense - it is such pseudoscience.

I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true.

Quackery gives birth to nothing; gives death to all things.

journalist of the occult, and a firm believer in ghosts, poltergeists, levitations, dowsing, PK (psychokinesis), ESP, and every other aspect of the psychic scene. After dismissing classical astrology as pseudoscience, in his four-column entry on astrology, Wilson goes on to defend what he calls "astro- biology"-the view that positions of the sun, moon, and planets strongly influence human personality and behavior.

the boundaries separating science, nonscience, and pseudoscience are much fuzzier and more permeable than Popper (or, for that matter, most scientists) would have us believe. There is, in other words, no litmus test.

Popper rightly believed that the public-not just scientists or philosophers-needs to understand and appreciate that distinction, because science is too powerful and important, and pseudoscience too common and damaging, for an open society to afford ignorance on the matter.

science makes progress not by proving its theories right-because that's impossible-but by eliminating an increasing number of wrong theories. Pseudoscience, however, does not make progress because its "theories" are so flexible that they can accommodate any observation whatsoever, which means that pseudoscientific theories do not actually have any explanatory teeth.

One clue is that in pseudoscience, every piece fits neatly inside a theory and the scientist is never wrong.