A thread through the archive
Essays tagged “pseudoscience”. Follow an idea across the archive.
Scott Alexander critiques therapy books, highlighting their exaggerated claims and questioning the validity of their approaches, based on his clinical experience and historical misdiagnoses in psychology.
Scott Alexander argues that non-empirical reasoning, based on principles like simplicity and elegance, is a necessary and legitimate part of scientific practice, even for evaluating seemingly untestable theories.
Scott Alexander examines a pseudoscientific claim about the Great Pyramid of Giza to illustrate how coincidences can appear more significant than they are, relating this to challenges in evaluating scientific studies.
Scott Alexander explains the 'motte and bailey doctrine', a rhetorical fallacy, providing examples and comparing it to the 'weak man fallacy'.
Scott Alexander critically examines the Institute of HeartMath, exposing a mix of misused science and pseudoscience in their 'heart coherence' claims and practices.
Scott Alexander proposes a utopian scientific system using prediction markets and impartial researchers to eliminate bias and efficiently resolve controversies.
Scott analyzes why people are more curious about pseudoscience than real science, arguing that our sense of mystery is an evolutionary algorithm that responds to solvability, worldview-altering potential, social status, and human-level problems rather than actual importance.
Scott uses Littledale's satire proving Max Muller was a solar myth to show how comparative methods can prove anything, and asks how to tell true correspondences from false ones.