Snake oil salesmen

The term orig­i­nally came from the 19th cen­tury where uneth­i­cal and unscrupu­lous ven­dors hyped up elixirs and potions that were touted and sold as magic cure-alls.  The claims of magic-like restora­tive prop­er­ties were hyped up to a fren­zied crowd, which bought the elixirs and potions en masse only to later find the claims to be unfounded or expe­ri­enced the power of the placebo effect.  Some of the ven­dors even claimed to be doc­tors with very dubi­ous cre­den­tials.  To max­i­mize sales, often­times the ven­dor not merely sat­is­fied with pos­ing as a doc­tor would employ a shill to join the crowd and offer attes­ta­tion to the pro­pri­ety of the cure.

A snake oil sales­man tout­ing his magic cure-all

Pseu­do­sci­en­tists

This terms was pop­u­lar­ized by Mar­tin Gard­ner who in 1950 pub­lished an arti­cle in the Anti­och Review enti­tled “The Her­mit Sci­en­tist,” and again in 1952 in a book called “In the Name of Sci­ence:  An enter­tain­ing sur­vey of the high priests and cultists of sci­ence, past and present.”  In its later reprints it was titled “Fads and Fal­lac­ies in the Name of Science.”

Orig­i­nally the book had a wide-variety of top­ics includ­ing stud­ies of folks who were believ­ers in a flat Earth, a hol­low Earth, Atlantis and Lemuria, Law­son­omy, Lysenko­ism, palm­istry and other ideas. This book that was pub­lished nearly 60 years ago still has parts that apply today includ­ing UFO’s, dows­ing rods and doo­dle­bugs, sup­posed auto-generation of liv­ing forms, the power of crys­tals, the var­i­ous med­ical cults, the Great Pyra­mid the­ory, food-based heal­ing, orgon­omy, extra-sensory per­cep­tion, white noise theory.

Gard­ner writes:

• Cranks typ­i­cally do not under­stand how the sci­en­tific process oper­ates, but con­tinue to main­tain that they are true rea­soned scientists.
• They need to try out their ideas on col­leagues.  They even attend conferences.
• They pub­lish their hypothe­ses in peer-reviewed jour­nals some­times with­out data to sup­port the often­times over­gen­er­al­ized con­clu­sions they contend.
• They refuse to pro­vide you with the under­ly­ing data that they con­tend will sup­port their claims.  Of course, they jus­tify this lack of open­ness and trans­parency by claim­ing that their ideas are too rad­i­cal for the con­ser­v­a­tive sci­en­tific estab­lish­ment to accept.
• A sec­ond char­ac­ter­is­tic of the pseudo-scientist, Gard­ner writes, is a ten­dency toward paranoia.

1. He con­sid­ers him­self a genius.
2. He regards his col­leagues, with­out excep­tion, as igno­rant block­heads or out to get him/her.
3. He believes him­self unjustly per­se­cuted and dis­crim­i­nated against by a par­tic­u­lar group of folks.
4. The rec­og­nized soci­eties refuse to let him lecture.
5. The jour­nals reject his papers and either ignore his books or assign them to “ene­mies” for review. It is all part of a das­tardly plot. It never occurs to the crank that this oppo­si­tion may be due to error in his work.  Alter­na­tively, the per­son only pub­lishes in one jour­nal that con­sists of friends.
6. He has strong com­pul­sions to focus his attacks on the great­est sci­en­tists and the best-established theories.
7. He often has a ten­dency to write in a com­plex jar­gon, in many cases mak­ing use of terms and phrases he him­self has coined.

Pseu­do­sci­en­tists exist in foren­sic science

Boy, does this sound like some uncre­den­tialed foren­sic sci­en­tists that you may know???

I have blogged before on the large scale lack of cre­den­tialed sci­en­tists in foren­sic sci­ence today.

Gard­ner warns:

If the present trend con­tin­ues, we can expect a wide vari­ety of these men, with the­o­ries yet unimag­in­able, to put in their appear­ance in the years imme­di­ately ahead. They will write impres­sive books, give inspir­ing lec­tures, orga­nize excit­ing cults. They may achieve a fol­low­ing of one—or one mil­lion. In any case, it will be well for our­selves and for soci­ety if we are on our guard against them.

This is why it is right to be a mod­ern day skep­tic.  Why it is right to be a mod­ern day skep­tic: The need to con­tinue to chal­lenge sacred cows: Par­a­digm Shift