This is the most obvious and maybe the most important one. Many authors have documented and decried public resistance to scientific consensus on subjects like global warming, evolution by means of natural selection, psychic powers, ghosts, homeopathy, and vaccination. The lay public is willing to see scientists as authority figures, but no more. They see scientific opinion as nothing more than an opinion, giving no credit to the research that went into it. If their personal experience seems to contradict such opinions—if they vaccinate their child and their child develops autism—then of course they're going to believe what they saw with their own eyes in favor of mere testimony. Similarly, if a friend's child is vaccinated and develops autism, a typical person is going to believe their friend before they believe a bunch of academics they've never met.

While most targets of my criticism in this essay are left-wing, an emphasis on knowledge through feelings and personal experience also frequently appears on the right when it comes to religion and traditional values. For example, people may insist God exists because they feel his presence. Or they may decry homosexuality as immoral because of a feeling of disgust. Often these ideas are not psudeoscience per se because they don't make empirical claims, like "vaccines cause autism". But religion, in particular, is anti-scientific in a more abstract sense because it requires the existence of the supernatural (that is, phenomena that don't behave according to consistent rules), and one of the core assumptions of the scientific method is that the supernatural doesn't exist (that is, that everything behaves according to consistent rules). If the supernatural were allowed in scientific thinking, no empirical reasoning would be possible because any observation could be compromised at will by supernatural influences; the supernatural, by definition, need not be consistent. So it's not that science has shown or can ever show that no gods or ghosts or fairies exist; it's that the scientific method has empiricism as one of its foundational assumptions, and empiricism means not even entertaining the idea that such things could exist. (More precisely: it only allows us to entertain notions of God, ghosts, etc. that are falsifable, hence not supernatural, and in practice, most aren't.) If we want to understand the world, we can't take no for an answer (I mean "no" as in "No, you can never understand this thing").

As a rule, the closer a domain of human life is to personal experience, the more likely people are to take a relativist rather than empiricist stance on it. So mathematics, being as far removed from personal experience as a field can be, is only treated relativistically by the canniest of philosophers. Physics is slightly more approachable, since it's about the physical world directly rather than pure abstractions, and so a few more people are willing to believe weird things about it: there are more crank physicists than crank mathematicians. By the time we get to psychology, though, laypeople are barely aware of the concept of treating human behavior as part of objective reality, let alone willing to believe empirical research about behavior over their own everyday experiences. In sociology, the relativist disease has infected a sizable number of researchers themselves, and in cultural anthropology, few empiricists are left in 2014. Empirical research that would have been conducted under the auspices of cultural anthropology in the early 20th century would now be in sociology or social psychology.

The cruel irony is that the closer a field is to personal experience, the more important it is to stick fast to empiricism, because the deluge of personal experience is liable to mislead us. (If you have any doubt that all those personal experiences do in fact mislead us, rather than happening to agree with research, look no further than Nisbett & Wilson, 1977.) In the case of algebraic geometry or something, at least we don't have many prejudices that apply.