Reposted from Rational Response Myspace Blog:
Society is developing a new breed of “intellect”: the pseudoscientist. Too lazy to do real work to research a topic, the pseudoscientist is armed with a strong curiousity, an enlarged ego, and a dose of authoritian paranoia. Combined with his patchwork access to media-filtered science “facts” (if they can be called such after the media is done processing them) and his desire for profit, the pseudoscientist is likely to be tomorrow’s new danger to the preservation of knowledge.
You might be a pseudoscientist if:
1. You believe your subscription to Analog provides the necessary background to argue with PhD scientists.
2. You think “real” science is mostly developed in garages or hobby rooms.
3. You think scientists are inflexible to changing paradigms (using one of pseudoscientists’ favorite terms). See definition of “Science.”
4. You think the government, big business, or traditional scientists are in a conspiracy to prevent the pseudoscientists from showing the “truth” to the rest of the world, motivated by such movies as “Chain Reaction.”
5. You think science is purely to start a business and make money.
6. You think it’s cool to announce impossible-sounding claims to the media without a peer review process (see #4 above), expository discussion, or other legitimizing process. You may believe the US Patent Office is a legitimizing process, if they aren’t in conspiracy with #4 above.
7. You’re aiming for the Einsteinian turn-science-upside-down revolution of thought and universal understanding, based on your two years of high school physics and a copy of Omni magazine.
8. You think highly suspicious behavior is actually the way people protect themselves from intellectual theft.
9. Your ego is large enough to tell the world that its understanding of the universe has always been wrong, and your fantastic, undocumented, unverified, unrecorded, and unreproducable experiment proves it.
10. Your college degree (if you have one) and your pseudoscientist interests have absolutely nothing in common. For instance, you may be arguing about fusion with a PhD in nuclear physics (and inflating your ego by doing so), while you only have a nursing degree.
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