the gallery of anti-skepticism and anti-science

A brief survey of the six kinds of people actively ruining science for the rest of us.





Since the media started covering skepticism as a movement and its successful shots at quacks, cranks, and popular pseudoscientists, there have been more and more woo faithful taking to their blogs and woo-friendly outlets to complain about all those nasty, mean skeptics who say all those negative things about their efforts to balance and rotate their chakras while polishing their qi with all-natural, organic quantum ointments to gain omniscience, transcending into the 86th dimension. Just check out some of the fiery condemnations of logic and critical thinking from professional woo-meisters like Deepak Chopra and Mike Adams who each build an elaborate caricature of their skeptics, but prefer different approaches to ridiculing their detractors. Just like not every disciple of woo follows the same pseudosciences or religious beliefs, the skeptics’ loudest critics take their own brands of crank logic which generally tend to fall into at least one of the six categories listed below.

The Pseudoscientist. Knowing that today, people do tend to take scientific endorsements quite seriously, the pseudoscientist meets any criticism of his favorite woo with a stream of buzzwords borrowed from a number of real scientific disciplines and liberally mixes them with fictional “resonances” and “nano-crystals” that tend to be described in ways that either obviously violate all known laws of physics, or make it very obvious that the pseudoscientist clearly knows nothing about the scientific fields he tries to invoke. He can generally be found in discussions about anything quantum, or homeopathy, flailing to explain how a single molecule of an herbal extract or an exotic salt in an otherwise normal glass of water is somehow capable of curing cancers, flu, and strep throat, or how quantum entanglement manages to explain souls and past lives. Best dealt with by being forced to explain what every one of the terms he uses means to show that he’s actually just shooting blanks and trying to sound like an authority in a field he clearly doesn’t understand.

The Anti-Scientist. In stark contract to our previous defender of woo, the call of the anti-scientist consists of a litany of things that scientists still don’t really understand and invoking the Galileo gambit, trying to portray his favorite woo-meister as one of history’s great visionaries rejected by the hardline scientific establishment for being just too smart for those stupid scientists today. Usually haunting any discussion on fluffy New Ageisms, alt med, and quasi-spirituality, he blasts any refusal to believe his favorite woo as the obstinacy of people who just aren’t open-minded enough to see the world as he sees it. The fact that good science does get accepted when it comes with enough evidence, no matter how contradictory to previous beliefs and ideas it is will never register with him. Perhaps best countered by the note that were his views of scientists accurate, theories like general and special relativity, quantum mechanics, and evolution, would’ve never been adopted because they were so contradictory to the way the scientific community thought when they were first introduced, and that the scientific Nobel Prizes would’ve never been awarded to scientists who do or discover something new.

The Ancient Wisdom. Once upon a time, it was actually quite logical to believe in miasmas or imbalances in the four humors as the cause of disease while thinking that the universe ended just past Saturn. We just did not have the tools to make the right observations or measurements to know better. Today, we have medicine based on observable, quantifiable science, microscopes, telescopes, and interplanetary spacecraft. We have a much better grasp on the universe around us than the ancients by virtue of having the time to build on what discoveries and inventions they’ve made. But to the proponent of ancient wisdom, we apparently have all this backwards and it was in fact the ancients who knew better than us. To her, what matters is how long a belief or an idea was held, not whether we’ve been able to confirm it. In her world, astrology and herbal medicine is the wisdom of the ancients passed down to us through the generations and any attempt to actually confirm if people living thousands of years before us and lacking the tools, skills and knowledge civilization build over a long stretch of time and trial and error, can only be described as an act of “left-brained arrogance.”

The Perpetual Accommodationist. Often times, the real world isn’t black and white but in shades of gray. We will do things that are overly elaborate and aimed more at protecting others’ feelings than getting something right because we need to keep our jobs or get a favor in return. But in the scientific world, a whole lot of things are actually quite easily determined. Just like two and two will always equal four, many scientific concepts are either right or wrong with very little to no leeway in between. To the perpetual accommodationist however, the idea that there may be no ideal middle ground is totally alien. We’re always supposed to find a way to “give a different view consideration” even if that different view dictates that two and two actually equal five. A die-hard follower of the golden mean fallacy, the perpetual accommodationist tries to play mediator in debates with a chant that we can all get along. He never says how we’re actually supposed to do it, or what the proper steps to accommodate those “different views” should be, but he can get downright nasty and obnoxious about it if given the chance. He’s a busybody trying to please both sides and usually doing a very poor job of it.

The Conspiracy Theorist. Did you dare dismiss the latest potboiler describing how evil Illuminati/Repotoid/ Alien/Cyborg/Government/Corporate/Trilateralist cabals secretly rule the world? Then you must be working for the conspiracy! Clearly, you’re either a sheep brainwashed by the planet’s shadowy rulers, or an agent of a secret society which needs to cover the conspiracy’s tracks. To the conspiracy theorist, everything is a secret plot in action, from flu vaccinations to terrorist attacks, and because he uses negative evidence, every word you say will be instantly turned into evidence that the conspiracy is even deeper or more vast than thought. In the conspiracy theorist’s world, disagreement is just more proof that he’s right, and any scientific study, paper, or well documented and explained historical chain of events that doesn’t back up his assertions is simply an attempt to get him off track. His paranoid mind is constantly at work, trying to find Men in Black on his tail, and search engines offering those looking for his blogs built to preach to the tinfoil choir a skeptical alternative are just devious attempts by the globe-spanning conspiracy to silence and discredit him. Even though he tends to do an exceptional job of discrediting himself without any external help whatsoever…

The Fundamentalist. Plainly put, if it doesn’t say so in his chosen holy book, it doesn’t exist. Fundamentalists aren’t just immune to logic, fact, reason, and evidence, they’re proud of this immunity to them, advertising the willful ignorance in which they indulge as a sign of their undying devotion to their holy texts. Any question and any criticism of their interpretation of a religious dogma is immediately attacked as bloody oppression while a whole lot of fundamentalists around the world brutally and savagely oppress those who don’t obey them. In the fundamentalist’s mindset, everything either fits his holy book or it will be twisted to fit the holy book, then advertised as totally compatible with it. Even if the supposed compatibility is an out of left field interpretation of both real world facts and the religious text. And should someone fail to see their brilliance in clumsily trying to cram science into their religious dogmas, he will be dismissed as an ignorant heretic who needs to repent, and his criticism taken as a sign that the fundamentalist just needs to bash others over the head with a rabid chant even harder because in his mind, he’s always right and it’s only a matter of time until everyone sees it, and if they don’t, they’ll all burn in Hell while he gleefully looks down on the sinners from Heaven.