[lbo-talk] a different kind of pseudoscience

Tommy Kelly tkelly15450 at charter.net
Fri Jul 1 07:53:46 PDT 2005


Jim Devine writes: Bauer likes a lot of Shermer's work, but rejects his scientism, his dogmatic rejection of all pseudoscience. Bauer sees what's normally called "pseudoscience" as often being frontier science (and often being hoaxes,etc.) He sees a lot of it as simply harmless (like astrology columns in the newspaper), not something to be campaigned against the way Shermer does. In general, he sees Shermer and pseudoscientists as having a lot in common.

Although I cannot find the issue, the Skeptical Inquirer had an article about Ronald and Nancy Reagan not only believing in astrology but using an astrologer for important decisions. It's situations like that, that make me worry about the level of trust people have in it and other forms of pseudoscience (e.g. Intelligent Design, flying saucers abducting people and raping them in their labs on spaceships, etc.). But since I'm not an atheist anymore I tend to distance myself when some - but not all - of them try to aim at religion which should be held in another section of skepticism. Unlike Michael Shermer's Skeptic magazine, the CSICOP wisely divide the two areas into two magazines, one being Skeptical Inquirer, and the other being Free Inquirer (which is not a bad magazine to read, it just that I don't belong to that community anymore).



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