Seven Rules For Spotting Bogus Science

keynet writes "Robert L. Park is a professor of physics at the University of Maryland at College Park and the director of public information for the American Physical Society, wrote a list of warning signs to help federal judges detect scientific nonsense. (OK, so it hasn't worked and the Patent Office sure hasn't got a copy.) As he says, 'There is no scientific claim so preposterous that a scientist cannot be found to vouch for it'. What he doesn't say is that there are plenty more who will invest in it or base legislation on it."

Comments

Re:Only need one rule, but not this one.

[Uninvited Guest]

"Too good to be true" is heavily related to the evaluator's background in the subject matter. That's part of the problem: judges are not steeped in the evidence they must weigh. They need a more thorough guideline of what "too good" would mean to a knowledgeable expert.

Teach it in your schools

[Raindeer]

At university I was given several courses in Methodology, not all of them fun unfortunately, but all of them relevant. Certainly in my current work as a government employee I continuously see claims being made by government and private sector alike which are shaky at best. I still value what I learned in Methodology to judge those.

Methodology or anything that teaches kids to discern right from wrong should be taught in schools, so that we can protect ourselves from wrong ideas based in nothing. This could be by just explaining kids how you can know something is true and when something hasn't been proven yet, but might be true and when things are real BS. (BBC's Panorama had an illusionist who debunked the claims of homeopathy. Entertaining and educational)

I also have one fundamental rule I adher by: Never trust data given by the person that is going to benefit from the decision you make upon it.

I'm particularly stuck by this one

[Daniel Dvorkin]

6. The discoverer has worked in isolation. The image of a lone genius who struggles in secrecy in an attic laboratory and ends up making a revolutionary breakthrough is a staple of Hollywood's science-fiction films, but it is hard to find examples in real life. Scientific breakthroughs nowadays are almost always syntheses of the work of many scientists.

This one is important because "big science" is a favorite villain of both pseudoscientists and cost-cutting lawmakers. What the lawmakers don't get -- and the pseudoscientists, I suspect, know but choose to disregards -- is that big science is the way most science gets done these days because the small science has been done. Alexander Fleming leaving a couple of dishes next to each other and discovering penicillin, or Robert Goddard and a team of dedicated fanatics working day and night to build the foundations of space flight, are powerful images; the "Eureka!" moment is every scientist's dream. But in well-established fields such as microbiology and aerospace, those moments have all pretty much happened; we need the big expensive labs with bunches of people working on expensive equipment, because that's how new discoveries and inventions get made.

The only real exception to this is in new fields, such as computational biology; sometimes a whole new way of looking at the world comes along, and for a few years -- even decades -- the frontiers are wide open. Quantum physics was an example of this in its early years. At that moment, individuals and small groups and big organizations are roughly on a level playing field. But once the easy discoveries in the field have been made, the balance tilts back toward big science. That's just the way it is.

Evidence of macroevolution

[spanky1]

Most anti-evolution people are simply religious folks too afraid to face the facts. I suggest reading 29 Evidences for Macroevolution. I still do not see any objective evidence PERIOD for the existence of a supernatural deity. But objective evidence for evolution is abundant.

Think about it: man has invented various Gods all throughout history. The ancient Gods (Greek/Roman mythology, etc) were easy to disprove... (no Atlas dude holding up the Earth). The only reason the Christian God has hung around so long is because he is defined as untestable. News flash: You cannot invent something, make it untestable, and put the burden of proof on the opposing side to disprove it.