The 2024 Legal Defense Fundraiser has ended early due to the Board's decision to settle the suit. Donations will go towards the creation of a legal defense fund. Discussion on the matter can be found at the RationalMedia Foundation noticeboard. Thank you for your generous support.

Information icon.svg Campaigning is open for the RationalWiki 2024 Board of Trustees election.

Rejected by their own kind

From RationalWiki
Revision as of 16:09, 30 August 2020 by Hastur (talk | contribs) (Undo revision 2220598 by DuceMoosolini (talk) apparently this was an accident)
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Style over substance
Pseudoscience
Icon pseudoscience.svg
Popular pseudosciences
Random examples

Quacks and pseudoscientists are said to be rejected by their own kind when they advance a claim so obviously bogus, even other promoters of the same pseudoscience can tell that it's bogus, and publicly go out of their way to debunk it. As Mark Hoofnagle pointed out in 2007, this is relatively uncommon; cranks/pseudoscientists/quacks tend to stand by each other and defend their claims much more often than not.[1] Such condemnation can therefore be seen as an unusual example of a crank being a stopped clock and recognizing exceptionally obvious bullshit.

Examples

  • Some young Earth creationists (notably Kent Hovind) have made claims so absurd (e.g. that there's too much dust on the surface of the Moon for the Moon to be 4.5 billion years old) that Answers in Genesis, a young Earth creationist organization, has debunked them and urged other creationists not to use them.[2] AIG has also disowned other thoroughly bogus creationist chestnuts like "How come there are still monkeys?"[3]
  • Judy Wood's "theory" about Star Wars-style directed space weapons being responsible for 9/11 (yes, seriously) was so ridiculously implausible that it was debunked by another 9/11 truther.[4]
  • The pseudoscientific claim, pushed by Mark Geier, that Lupron (used for chemical castration) can be used to effectively treat vaccine-caused autism was so bogus that even the anti-vaccine blog Age of Autism once condemned it.[5]
  • NaturalNews is deemed a quack site by other quacks.[6]
  • To some extent, when politicians condemn another politician in their own party (e.g. Republicans in the United States condemning Donald Trump or Roy Moore), this could be considered an instance of the Republican being rejected (i.e. condemned) by their own kind. Though it only counts as such a rejection if the group they're being rejected from promotes pseudoscience, which doesn't apply to Republicans… oh wait, yes it does.

See also

References

  1. Cranks are rarely bothered by other cranks, Denialism Blog, ScienceBlogs, May 29, 2007, Mark Hoofnagle
  2. Moon Dust Argument No Longer Useful, Creation, September 1993, p. 22
  3. AIG's list of arguments to avoid
  4. Scientific Critique of Judy Wood’s Paper “The Star Wars Beam Weapon”, James Gourley, Journal of 9/11 Studies
  5. Bravo Age of Autism, LeftBrainRightBrain, 2009-05-20
  6. Special Report: The Legend of Mike Adams and the Reality (Thomas Corriher and Sarah Cain, The Health Wyze Report, 06 Feb 2013)