I used to think that we’d be better off without pseudoscience, that this would prevent confusion and make our lives easier. But now I think that pseudoscience is actually good for us. And that’s what we’ll talk about today.
So the first lesson we can take away is that pseudoscience is a natural byproduct of normal science. You can’t have one without the other. If we learn something new about nature, some fraction of people will cling on to falsified theories longer than reasonable. And some crazy ideas in the end turn out to be correct.
But pseudoscience isn’t just a necessary evil. It’s actually useful to advance science because it forces scientists to improve their methods.
And this fight isn’t over. We’re still today fighting pseudoscience and in that process scientists constantly have to update their methods. For example, all this research we see in the foundations of physics on multiverses and unobservable particles doesn’t contribute to scientific progress. I am pretty sure in fifty years or so that’ll go down as pseudoscience. And of course there’s still loads of quackery in medicine, just think of all the supposed COVID remedies that we’ve seen come and go in the past year.