It’s a mystery to me how tenaciously someone can hold on to a scientific proposal after it has been rigorously demolished, as happens with cranks, crackpots, woomeisters, quackademics, etc. Even after you separate out the charlatans who are trying to scam a few spacebucks out of somebody, and the ones driven by some ideology, there’s a whole host of folks who won’t let go if their pet hypothesis that disproves relativity or quantum mechanics or whatever.<\/p>\n
The process of science is to disprove things, and most things get disproven. Benjamin Schumacher has written a nice little summary<\/a> of it, and how it tends to pervade our thinking.<\/p>\n On occasion, some idea of ours turns out to be right, and then we’ve made a discovery. These occasions are wonderful and gratifying, of course. They are also rare, because most new ideas are wrong. The trick is to be verifiably<\/em> wrong most of the time. If our ideas are verifiably wrong, then we can eventually get rid of them<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The main factor that distinguishes the behavior of scientists is that scientists tend not to take it personally when contrary data is presented that slays our pet theory, while a crank takes it as a huge insult. They don’t like<\/em> getting rid of their wrong ideas, except when somehow it doesn’t affect their conclusions at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s a mystery to me how tenaciously someone can hold on to a scientific proposal after it has been rigorously demolished, as happens with cranks, crackpots, woomeisters, quackademics, etc. Even after you separate out the charlatans who are trying to … Continue reading