The scientific community must formulate more direct countermeasures to address the “societal mental disease” of pseudoscience that Sadri Hassani discusses. Scientists are often perceived as condescending and dismissive of others’ points of view. To effectively penetrate the passionate claims of pseudoscientific beliefs, it’s our duty to dust off our neglected tools of scientific rhetoric.
To constructively counter pseudoscience, I suggest, first, that we not denigrate or belittle its merchants or consumers, and second, that we take time to understand perspectives of the pseudoscience and antiscience audience.
Belittling others with names like “idiot” and “kook” as found on the informational website suggested by Hassani contributes nothing to any conversation. It feeds into the “they don’t respect us” narrative of pseudoscience purveyors. Each person comes to us as they are. They may ask, “How does a photon know there’s only one slit and not two?” in the double-slit experiment. If we snicker at their apparent notion of sentient photons, we miss the fact that they’ve visualized themselves riding alongside photons as Albert Einstein did in his famous gedanken experiments. We earn respect as educators by treating questions as catalysts of intelligent conversations and by empathizing with each person.
Most pseudoscience consumers believe that they’ve adequately applied the scientific method and that their intuition is subsequently correct. Many are simply misled by rhetorical use of colloquial language. Rather than worrying about misuse of the word “energy” as Hassani does, I’d worry more about the word “wavefunction.” The fact that nearly everything in quantum theory derives from this purely nonphysical entity will eventually go viral. We must clearly emphasize that because the physical world is complex and difficult to comprehend, our models and theories shouldn’t be carelessly misconstrued.
Let’s fine-tune our rhetoric skills. I recommend reading Plato’s lively dialog Gorgias, in which he concludes that bare rhetoric serves no educational purpose—it merely persuades. Pseudoscientists are talented rhetoricians exploiting natural human frailties such as the desire to be right. Rhetoric cuts to the quick. In the arsenal of pseudoscientists it opens floodgates to dangerously misleading beliefs. Our rhetoric as scientists must be based on meaningful facts and feed into natural human instincts, such as curiosity.
In the 2014 “debate” between Bill Nye, the Science Guy and CEO of the Planetary Society, and Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis, Ham’s rhetoric was well-packaged: “Well, there’s a book for that!” Ham’s audience vibrantly applauded. Nye’s facts were met with unwavering silence. Behind Ham’s curtain is the false narrative that science is divided into “observational” and “historical” knowledge. In his consumers’ minds, events of the past cannot be known if we were not there to witness them firsthand, and the Bible represents the firsthand account. We could exclaim, “Well, there is the universe for that!” but what compelling narrative does it support?
We must counter the rising tide of destructive pseudoscience by engaging in penetrating scientific rhetoric in public spaces.