One can argue long and wide about the inconvenience of relying on pseudosciences, but the most important points could be summarized in four maxims that we offer you below .
Obviously, when we say not to trust pseudosciences, it should not be interpreted that the particular approaches of a certain pseudoscience do not end up being proven true, but rather that it should not be trusted due to lack of evidence (for the moment).
1. They do not evolve
Pseudoscientific plantations assert themselves one day and rarely evolve in the sense of self-correcting as new evidence is found. This is the case of homeopathy, for example, which was raised in the early 1800s, at a time when much of what we now know about the contagion, transmission and development of many diseases was ignored. Since then, homeopathy has never admitted being wrong in any of its claims .
2. Even children understand it
Any scientific discipline requires years of training . Some subjects are so dense that a degree is not enough to become an expert. Those who say they understand quantum mechanics probably don’t understand anything. On the contrary, pseudosciences are so simple and elementary in their theoretical plantings and pillars that anyone can understand them. Some pseudoscientists even declare themselves self-taught.
3. Dumped by individuals, not groups
The claims of science are not usually made by individuals, but by networks of scientists, by universities around the world, by meta-analyzes of studies published in hundreds of peer-reviewed journals .
That is, scientific knowledge, given its complexity, can rarely be led by an individual scientist. In pseudosciences, just the opposite happens. In general it is individual people who have made great discoveries on which the entire subsequent corpus is based.
4. No one has won any awards
Many of the more popular pseudosciences, if confirmed, would constitute a Scientific Revolution far superior to those of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Dalton, Darwin, and Einstein combined. And many of your pseudoscientists should, accordingly, receive the Nobel Prize . There must be a conspiracy on a world scale so that no pseudoscientist has entered the history books of scientific knowledge.
It is true that there are different dividing lines between orthodox science and heterodox science, but most of the pseudosciences that fulfill the previous points are quite far even from the heterodox sciences, as Alan Sokal emphasizes in his book Beyond impostures intellectuals :
It would be better to imagine a continuum where well-established science (for example, the idea that matter is made up of atoms) is at one extreme; Next would be cutting-edge science (neutrino oscillations, for example) and mainstream but speculative science (string theory); then, far beyond, poor-quality science (N-rays, cold fusion), and finally, after a long journey, pseudoscience.