It’s weird listening to a pseudoscientist talk. I don’t just mean the physical mechanics of his talking, that croaking voice coming out of his weirdly muscular body1. I mean the substance of his speaking and his writing. Because he often has the verbiage and the reasoning style of a scientist (or at least scientist-adjacent person), but the goals of a lawyer.
By that, I mean he often structures his arguments like he’s a truth-seeker, and he does a good job at this. He carefully lays out an argument, including his facts, speculations, and conclusions, and meticulously cites his sources. It’s only at the end that he’ll seem to come to his conclusion, noting any uncertainties, having exhausted all other possibilities. But, all of this is a farce. The conclusion is determined in advance; the facts are cherrypicked if they’re correct at all; and the citations are often in bad faith, the cited text stating the opposite of what’s claimed in the main text.
It’s a use of language to persuade, rather than communicate information, but it comes in the guise of language that’s used for the latter rather than the former. This is a dangerous strategy for the pseudoscientist and a toxic strategy for society at large. It’s dangerous for the pseudoscientist because, for anyone that notices this pattern, they can never again trust the pseudoscientist to accurately convey information.
It’s toxic for society because we have different modes of speaking for a reason. I tell my investors facts about what I’ve done with their money in a different manner of speaking than I tell jokes to my friends. My investors understand that my communication with them is factual; my friends understand my communication is facetious; neither party is unpleasantly surprised or misled. If my investors thought I was facetious or my friends thought I was being factual, there’d be conflict.
It is a uniquely powerful trick, though. Scientists, doctors, and intellectuals all have the power they do in society in large part because of their image of being conveyors of factual information. When they give recommendations, it’s not supposed to be just a person giving their thoughts or opinions, like a drunk at a bar. It’s supposed to be them as conduits for some pure form of knowledge, like they’re priests in their white lab coats and Ivy temples.
The pseudoscientist, of course, would say that this is all an illusion. Everyone, he would say, forms intuitions beforehand, and then justifies them with “facts”. In fact, he says, he has plenty of examples right here, in his pocket, of priests of the Ivy temples doing this exact thing. The only difference between him and them is that he’s better at persuading than they are, and his intuitions are right. It’s impossible to persuade him otherwise, like the thief who’s convinced everyone’s stealing as well.
And it can be difficult to stop him. As I said, society relies on norms like truthfulness and intellectual humility. Sure, we have some policing power for this, but not a lot, especially once we get into the realm of science or policy. At that point, we have referees at best, but asking the referees to stop a pseudoscientist can be as hopeless as asking a tennis judge to stop a raging bull on the court. The bull might lose in the referee’s eyes, but it’s guaranteed his opponent will retire from the match before he does.
The inherent weakness in the system that the pseudoscientist exploits is that, at the end of the day, we are forced to rely on form over substance for almost everything we can’t check ourselves. Yes, engineering makes planes fly and careful science makes medicines work, but the average person isn’t going to go testing their planes or their medicines. They just make sure that the people flying the plane look like pilots, the people giving out the medicine look like pharmacists, and then trust that those people know what they’re doing. If they don’t, well…it’s a rough time.
This can’t go on forever. At some point, when the planes start falling out of the sky, people go back to demanding substance. They want to know that the planes are actually checked for rusted bolts, and aren’t satisfied with the pilots just looking spiffy in their uniforms, especially if it turns out the pseudoscientist has been firing all the pilots who call out his sophistry. The question is whether this can be stopped before then, or if planes have to actually crash before we can take action.
It’s funny, you know: aliens and military men think we live in worlds of steel and concrete, and that the only thing that can destroy them are space beams or atom bombs. They never seem to realize that the modern world is really made up of ideas and communication. They’re much more resilient than metal, and yet, somehow, so much easier to smother under a pillow.
The path we walk is so narrow.
To give a strangely specific description of nobody at all.
We do also have pseudo-engineers -- see Theranos, or OceanGate.