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This is in response to an article by physicist Robert Park listing "Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science". His seven, rearranged by me in reverse order of acceptability:
- Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal.
- The discoverer has worked in isolation.
- The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work.
- The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries.
- The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media.
- The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection.
- The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation.
Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal.
All sciences must begin with anecdote, though they aspire to mathematical laws and ultimately to simulations. [theory]
When the system being studied is extremely complex-- like the human mind-- the only way to start is by collecting anecdotes and sorting them, looking for patterns. [example] Some of these anecdotes may well end up being rejected as inaccurate, but most of them should be useful, and until you have a real model that accounts for the obviously useful ones, you have no business drawing rigid lines.
The discoverer has worked in isolation.
The history of science is full of lonely geniuses doing breakthru work. This is especially true for young sciences like the social sciences, where a lousy methodological paradigm can seize dominance over academia. [theory]
The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work.
Robert Anton Wilson makes an excellent case in "The New Inquisition" that there does exist a pressure group he accuses of 'fundamentalist materialism', which is as irrationally prejudiced as any of its targets. [reviews]
As Julian Jaynes argued, Western Man seems to have suffered a traumatic fall between the heroic unselfconsciousness described in Homer, and the sophistical self-consciousness of Socrates et al. We no longer trust our instincts, and we've lost that deep knowledge of who we are. William Blake offers a glimpse of how we may someday recover from that loss. [quotes]
A likely example of a successful conspiracy to suppress the truth is the JFK assassination. And another example of a powerful establishment capable of suppressing truth is the US media's perfect dishonesty about the real situation in Israel-- the genocidal racism of the settlement-policy. (So if they unanimously lie about that, what else are they willing to lie about?)
The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries.
Personally, I'm inclined to reject astrology, but this argument-from-antiquity makes me hesitate. Certainly, in regard to ESP, I think antiquity is onto something. [argument] And lately I've begun to think the popular campaign against the effectiveness of prayer is also sinister.
Park writes "Ancient folk wisdom, rediscovered or repackaged, is unlikely to match the output of modern scientific laboratories." (Obvious counterexample: the healing power of TLC, vs the greedily faked evidence of the pharmcos.)
The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media.
Park explains, "An attempt to bypass peer review by taking a new result directly to the media, and thence to the public, suggests that the work is unlikely to stand up to close examination by other scientists." But then he allows the cloning of Dolly as a counterexample.
Certainly in the social sciences, good work can be ignored by a deluded establishment.
The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection.
Not "always".
The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation.
This is only a problem if they're untestable, which is a standard criterion that Park fails to mention. Park adds "A new law of nature, invoked to explain some extraordinary result, must not conflict with what is already known." But as Blake explained in 1788:
"Reason, or the ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we know more."
Park omits one obvious test: What other work has the discoverer done? (My whole website's primary purpose is to incrementally build credibility for my more-radical views.)
And he omits two inobvious favorites of mine, for detecting domains where the academics have run off the tracks: Do the academics create websites that try to explain their domain to newcomers? (For AI the answer is a resounding NO.)
And: Do the domain's Usenet newsgroups host healthy ongoing debate? (For AI again, the newsgroups consist of conference-announcements and brown-nosing literature-citations.)
Along with AI, the academic hypertext establishment is off the track by these criteria. (I even tried submitting a paper but was of course rejected as way-off-paradigm.)
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