Talk:Pseudoscience

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Finding appropriate and serious tone

Good article overall, but in order to be taken seriously, the tone must be appropriate.

One of the pictures has a caption "Creationist William Dembski. (Yes, his head really is that shape.)" This is not appropriate. In a debate, respect your opponents even if you do not respect their ideas.

The following is present in the article: Evolution and Mendelian genetics, meanwhile, were declared to be "bourgeois pseudoscience", and their supporters were sent to the gulags, which is exactly the way science's peer review process works.[14] The reader does not expect sarcasm, so the statement becomes confusing. In general, sarcasm does not belong in a serious scientific/academic debate. Even if this is an accurate quote from Lakatosz, his comment on the peer review process is not relevant to the topic of pseudo-science.

The "sound science" subsection overflows with author's anger/impatience. -Unsigned by Cogito

1) Please sign your posts. 2) The man looks like a gigant finger wearing clothes. This must be acknowledged. Reverend Black Percy (talk) 22:55, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

Random comment by new dude

Please remove all inappropriate tones!^{— Unsigned, by: Avatarlegend / talk / contribs}

Which tones do you find untuenful? You might also wish to read RationalWiki:What is a RationalWiki article? Cheers. Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 16:00, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

Perfect description of the AGW Religion

I cannot understate how well this article underlines the problem with the people (ie. Those that fashion themselves as Scientists) that are trying to prove the postulation known as AGW. So in this light, I will give a rare kudos to the spirit of the article, albeit done in the same pathetic and subjective (non-Rational) manner as the rest of this site. ^{— Unsigned, by: 65.190.30.2 / talk 15:32, 14 February 2018 (UTC)}

AI cranks

Hi, I coined the term "Deep Crank" for the variety of pseudoscience that originated when deep learning did. Proponents claim that deep learning can be used to predict and in some cases invent new ways of solving problems such as condensed matter physics. In a slightly more wingnutty variety they even claim that NASA or some other organization is using deep learning to simulate faster-than-light travel methods with the intention to build an actual prototype. While NASA did at one point have a laboratory to study FTL they concluded that the energy usage was far too high and no amount of wishful thinking or clever software would solve that.

The mere possibility of DL solving anything apart from revenue creation for companies selling expensive TPU chips whuch ironically end up being used for crypto-currency mining in many cases is laughable. Yes there are uses for the chips and modules but in most cases a conventional graphics card will work just as well though be less efficient. Yes its possible that one day advanced AI may *eventually* solve problems but we are more likely to reach the wall well before sentient computers become possible: 3nm chips seem to be a theoretical limit set by the laws of physics. ^{— Unsigned, by: 91.190.161.223 / talk}

Social sciences aren't science?

The section on social sciences misses the point. Like the hard sciences, people use and misuse the scientific method. Unlike many hard sciences, there is often no clear testable cause-effect relationship (like "Chemical X interferes with Pathway Y in Organism Z"), just evidence that doesn't definitively differentiate between multiple models. Further, there's rarely an instrument like, say, a barometer, that provides clear unambiguous measurement of something. That doesn't make it NOT a science, just science that much less likely to be able to fully explain the underlying phenomenon. However, these factors do mean that pseudosciences and untestable models are more common and harder to dispute in social sciences. Fortunately, they're also often a bit less harmful than, say, homeopathy as the sole treatment for cancer. DerFluchtPlan (talk) 16:12, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

Falsifiability

I've noticed a tendency on this site to really emphasize falsifiability. Current philosophy of science is not exactly greatly concerned with the demarcation problem, but the idea of demarcation strictly by a Popperian falsifiability criterion has been largely, perhaps entirely, rejected for decades. I'm not exactly prepared off the top of my head to delve into an in-depth critique, but off the top of my head the Duhem-Quine thesis already deals a serious blow to the notion that scientific hypotheses can be falsified in isolation (i.e. demonstrates that this is untenable), and paves the way to a critique highlighting a symmetry between falsification and the verifiability criterion, such that the problems with verifiability have mirror problems that crop up for falsification. One serious problem coming out of Duhem-Quine is that an apparent falsification can be redirected against some auxiliary hypothesis, effectively allowing the researcher to shield a pet theory from disconfirming evidence. As on off-the-cuff example: "it's not that my chemical synthesis doesn't work, it's that the spectrometer isn't working/there was a contaminant in the reaction vessel/the reagents were insufficiently pure or had degraded/the hot plate malfunctioned/the product was unstable to the method of purification or the quench or the workup/etc". In practice, some amount of shielding is reasonable; if your hypothesis predicts that two variables be perfectly linearly correlated, but you get an r^2 value of merely 0.98, you probably shouldn't conclude on that basis that your hypothesis is wrong. 𝒮𝑒𝓇𝑒𝓃𝑒 ^talk 21:42, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

I was glad to see that this is already mentioned on the falsifiability article, at least. 𝒮𝑒𝓇𝑒𝓃𝑒 ^talk 00:10, 7 October 2022 (UTC)