Are you sick of always failing to convince us scientific skeptics that GM crops kill people, that homeopathy cures cancer or that climate change is a socialist myth? Do you feel frustrated by being asked to provide peer-reviewed scientific papers to support your position? If this matches your experience and you still do not know why, see how many of the following statements match your behavior to see if you qualify as a pseudoscientific crank.

You denigrate the knowledge of scientific experts, but compare yourself with Galileo and Einstein.

Just because you are criticized by knowledgeable people who provide scientific evidence to back up their arguments does not mean that you are an oppressed genius. Sometimes, you are just a rebel trying to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. In the end, the flawed notion that criticism means that you are actually right is a pathetic defense mechanism to avoid responding to objections or backing up your claims with evidence.

You are not Galileo or Einstein. They convinced their peers with evidence. You have no evidence whatsoever.

You claim mainstream medical treatments are unsafe and ineffective, while promoting quack treatments that are dangerous and untested.

There is a lot of hate towards modern medicine by proponents of quack treatments. This may be based on envy from quacks who never got into or failed medical school or because of postmodern belief that everyone is an expert. This is yet another example of confirmation bias and selective thinking.

You oppose multinational pharmaceutical companies while failing to understand that companies producing quack treatments are also multinational and predatory.

For instance, NBTY (formally known as Nature’s Bounty) has a revenue of 3 billion USD produces a lot of alternative medicine, such as products containing Echinacea.

You rant about unspecified “toxins” in vaccines, but you smoke a pack of cigarettes per day and ignore real toxins, such as heavy metals, in Ayurveda.

This is a curious combination of excessive anxiety about vaccines (that do not contain toxins) coupled with complete ignorance about the harmful effects of smoking or heavy metals. It is like walking against red over a heavily trafficked road, but being highly concerned about accidentally using “who” instead of “whom”. It is difficult to find more messed up priorities.

You claim that there is no consensus on evolution, yet refer to the “consensus” of alleged creationist “experts” that have done no real evolutionary research and instead just signed a petition.

Because, apparently, you believe that relevant scientific training makes you less qualified to discuss scientific research. Just because you make a big deal about a couple of hundred non-biologists does not mean that you can ignore hundreds of thousands of qualified scientists.

You assert that scientific consensus is just an argument from popularity at the same time as believing that alternative medicine must work since it is so popular.

Scientific consensus is not an appeal to popularity because it is a proxy for the position currently best supported by the evidence. Scientific consensus can sometimes be wrong, but cranks are wrong far more often.

You think that scientists are biased by their beliefs, yet you use your “mommy instinct” to back up your claims.

Scientists are trained to not let their personal beliefs or wishful thinking get in the way of their work. Sure, scientists are humans, but cranks do not have adequate training to avoid e. g. confirmation bias.

You fearmonger about GMOs for not being “natural”, yet you have no problem eating vegetables that have been genetically modified for 10 000 years.

The only difference between using traditional breeding and biotechnology is that the latter is faster, safer, more precise and can use genes from organism that are more distantly related. In traditional breeding, you shuffle thousands of genes into combinations that you do not test for safety. Using biotech, you can make extremely small changes that you have intimate knowledge of and do ten years worth of ecological and toxicological tests.

You support physical punishment of your children, yet you would never do the same to a misbehaving adult.

You punish your children physically? Would you ever do the same to an adult or an older person? Of course not! You think that there is no other way? That is just your own ignorance about child-rearing. Also, no, this is not a correlational fallacy as they have controlled for aggressive behavior at baseline.

You believe that just because someone has a medical degree does not make them an expert in medicine, but your PhD in English literature makes you qualified to deliver medical diagnoses on the Internet.

Just because you have a non-relevant degree does not mean that you are an expert in medicine. Just because you know how to Google does not mean you have the scientific or medical expertise to evaluate research papers with complex methodologies and statistical analyses.

You consider homebirth safer than giving birth at a hospital, yet your low-risk birth supervised by an unqualified and untrained crank gave you a dead baby.

You are completely deluded. You need to break out of your isolated bubble before you end up having another dead baby.

You firmly hold that HIV is just a harmless passenger virus and does not cause AIDS, but you would never allow yourself to be injected with HIV.

Research have shown that infecting tissues removed from patients or animals leads to a decline in CD4+ T cells. This effectively disproves the flawed notion that HIV is not a harmless passenger virus. If you still believe this, go ahead and inject yourself with it.