stevestory
Posts: 13407
Joined: Oct. 2005
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On some imaginary day in the future when I have a lot of free time, I'm going to write a long essay contrasting the basic features of scientific revolutions with those of fraudulent pseudoscience. I've read quite a bit about scientific revolutions, from Relativity to H. Pylori to The Barker Hypothesis, and a fair amount about quackery. In the meantime, here's the summary:
Revolutionary Science:
*(Usually) Expert in the field has great idea
*Expert faces lots of hostility and even gets papers rejected
*Expert works hard to gather more data or convince community
*In a few years community rapidly converts
*Tons and tons of normal science is made possible and done in a few short years
Quackery:
(Usually) Non-Expert has idea
*Non-Expert faces lots of hostility and gets papers rejected
*Non-Expert babbles for a long time, no one is convinced
*Non-Expert figures out a way to sucker a bunch of laymen, and claims conspiracy
*Years go by, the scientific community's still not remotely convinced
*No normal science is made possible by quack idea
anybody familiar with science can tell which one ID resembles.
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