Excerpt from the introduction of Zen and the Art of Debunkery:
"As the millennium turns, science seems in many ways to be treading the weary path of the religions it presumed to replace. Where free, dispassionate inquiry once reigned, emotions now run high in the defense of a fundamentalized "scientific truth." As anomalies mount up beneath a sea of denial, defenders of the Faith and the Kingdom cling with increasing self-righteousness to the hull of a sinking paradigm. Faced with provocative evidence of things undreamt of in their philosophy, many otherwise mature scientists revert to a kind of skeptical infantilism characterized by blind faith in the absoluteness of the familiar. Small wonder, then, that so many promising fields of inquiry remain shrouded in superstition, ignorance, denial, disinformation, taboo . . . and debunkery.
• Put on the right face. Cultivate a condescending air certifying that your personal opinions are backed by the full faith and credit of God. Adopting a disdainful, upper-class manner is optional but highly recommended.
• Employ vague, subjective, dismissive terms such as "ridiculous," "trivial," "crackpot," or "bunk," in a manner that purports to carry the full force of scientific authority.
• Keep your arguments as abstract and theoretical as possible. This will send the message that accepted theory overrides any actual evidence that might challenge it -- and that therefore no such evidence is worth examining.
• By every indirect means at your disposal imply that science is powerless to police itself against fraud and misperception, and that only self-appointed vigilantism can save it from itself.
• Portray science not as an open-ended process of discovery but as a pre-emptive holy war against invading hordes of quackery-spouting infidels. Since in war the ends justify the means, you may fudge, stretch or violate the scientific method, or even omit it entirely, in the name of defending it.
• Reinforce the popular fiction that our scientific knowledge is complete and finished. Do this by asserting that "if such-and-such discovery were legitimate, then surely we would already know about it!"
• Deny the possibility of phenomena for which no plausible explanations have been advanced. Ignore such contrary examples as the existence of disease prior to the discovery of microbes, the sun's copious production of energy long before the discovery of nuclear fusion, and the stubborn persistence of gravity despite our stubborn ignorance of its inner workings."
cheers,
geoff kait
