Sunday, October 12, 2014

Star Talk Radio Episode: Pseudoscience

Neil deGrasse Tyson's "Star Talk Radio" show recently conducted an episode on Pseudoscience.  Most of the topics discussed were rather 'garden-variety' pseudo-science, not much overlap with the topics discussed on this blog, but it might be of more general interest.

Star Talk Radio: Cosmic Queries, Pseudoscience

One of the topics discussed was an online list of cognitive biases or failures - a list of ways in which people fool themselves. 

Wikipedia: List of Cognitive Biases
RationalWiki: List of Cognitive Biases

The best scientists are pretty good about checking their ideas against such biases, which is why they often devote a large part of some of their potentially more controversial papers to checks on their methodology.

Meanwhile, pseudo-scientists usually just accuse mainstream scientists of group-think, and other items on this list, while never doing a serious check of their OWN biases. 



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