Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

Here are a number of fallacies, concepts, and principles that are relevant to thinking clearly and critically about pseudoscience, alternative medicine, and the paranormal.

Vague Predictions- paranormalists will make predictions that so vague that they are fulfilled by a wide range of events. Then they claim accuracy. Examples: a psychic says you will have financial challenges in the near future, or an astrology forecast says that there is an important Libra in your life.

Shotgun Predictions- paranormalists and others make multiple predictions and when one or some are right they claim success and neglect the failures. Example: a pundit makes dozens of general predictions about what will happen in the Middle East in the next year, then claims success when one of them turns out accurate.

Common Sense Predictions- paranormalists and others make predictions that anyone who reads the newspaper could make and then they claim special supernatural powers.

Hedging- paranormalists and others make predictions and then on followup they alter or revise the original prediction to make it match with what actually happened. Example: we often revise what we said before an event happened afterwards to make our claim seem more accurate.

Ambiguity- paranormalists capitalize on ambiguity in a variety of ways.

Failure to have double blind experiments- in a double blind experiment, nether the researchers nor the test subjects are in possession of information that could skew the results of the test, especially by the placebo effect.

Failure to produce repeatable results- unless an ability or phenomena repeats, there can be no way to check it and rule out accidental or outside causes.

Confirmation Bias- is the tendency to notice information that supports a believed hypothesis while neglecting or forgetting information that refutes it. We often remember the astrology forecasts that seemed accurate and fail to notice the thousands that miss the mark.

Cold Reading- Palm readers, psychics, fortune tellers, crystal ball readers, Tarot card readers, and so on take note of subtle feedback cues (consciously and unconsciously), hair style, clothes, appearance, facial expressions, body language, and so on to tell a customer insightful things about themselves. The reading is “cold” because a stranger such as the paranormalist shouldn’t know so much about you in such a short encounter with someone they have never met.

Small sample size- a small sample size in scientific testing is more subject to widely varied results due to accidents, random chance, or other third factors. A small sample population could give results that seem to support paranormal claims that would disappear if the sample was larger.

Cheating- many paranormalists simply cheat to get notoriety, make money, and so on.

Wishful Thinking- many people want paranormal claims to be true because they are exciting, entertaining, they give us a sense of control, and so on. So wishful thinking often leads us to assist the paranormalist’s project.

Improper Testing procedures-

Paranormalists test themselves- the paranormalist or the person who claims to have the special power is often the one who tests or corroborates the claim of a special power, making cheating and mistakes easy and tempting.

“Researchers” are often converts, practitioners, or not objective in their attitude about the claimed power. They readily find what they are looking for instead of analyzing results objectively.

Non-disconfirmable claims- a claim is confirmed when testing reliably corroborates or supports it. It is disconfirmed when testing shows that it is false. A claim is disconfirmable when it there are circumstances that could prove it to be false. A claim is non-disconfirmable when there are no possible circumstances at all that could refute it. So the claim that I have an invisible, intangible, undetectable fairy on my shoulder is non-disconfirmable. And since it cannot be tested or confirmed, it doesn’t really have any real world impact (and it is silly.)

Undetectable properties- paranormalists often postulate properties that are unknown to science and laypersons, but the paranormalists insist that they are real.

Hoaxes- history is filled with examples of alleged paranormal phenomena that were simply hoaxes, typically designed to get money or fame.

Anecdotal Evidence- fragmentary, testimonial stories that do not reflect rigorous scientific testing procedures are anecdotal. When a friend claims that she or someone she knows witnessed a paranormal event, that story alone is very meager evidence that it actually occurred. It is usually much more likely that someone is mistaken, lying, deceived, or misremembering.

Urban Myths- are anecdotal stories that spread and take on an air of legitimacy because so many of us have heard them. Many of these have been investigated and found to be false. See: http://www.urbanlegends.com/