Pseudoscience Is An Infection
Imagine your reasoning mind as a city with impenetrable walls which protect you from outside invaders. Your mind is filled with resources, land, education, and prosperity… pseudoscience wants to take and pillage it.
Since pseudoscience cannot breach the wall of common sense it must devise another tactic, it must present an offering. The Greeks offered the Trojans a wooden horse, pseudoscience provides your reasoning mind doubt. This is a perfect way to allow the enemy in as they open the gates to your mind and flood it with bullshit.
You soon start to think vaccines cause autism, the earth is flat, and climate change is a myth… your reasoning mind is pillaged of its resources. Better yet your reasoning mind becomes infected.
Your reasoning mind can also be seen as a living organism, perhaps your body or the body of an animal. Pseudoscience is a vindictive virus that infects your mind, it replicates itself and eats up all the good parts of your mind. All that is left is nonsense, but now you spread the virus on to others.
This later analogy is in part inspired by Richard Dawkins, he coined the term “meme”. Like viruses, ideas are in constant competition to exist, ideas that continue to exist and proliferate do so by imitation from other people. In essence, the idea is called a “meme” and according to Dawkins a sort of “mind virus”. It also gets a bit more complicated:
A meme may improve its prospects for survival if it becomes part of what Dawkins termed a “memeplex”. This is a situation where a number of compatible memes join together in a manner that is mutually supportive, and may be seen as a roughly analogous situation to that where genes work in concert with other genes in the genome.
- Richard Dawkins
From this definition of “meme” and understanding of memeplex it is easy to see science and pseudoscience as memeplexes. Our ability to reason (I dubbed it “reasoning mind” earlier) can be influenced by the ideas we hold. If we have memeplexes which are supportive of science this can protect us from the pseudoscience memeplexes. However, the pseudoscience memeplex has ways of infecting other people and getting around the wall to our reasoning mind.
Philosopher Sven Ove Hansson can give us an idea behind the mechanisms of the pseudoscience memeplex. According to Hansson there are two main forms of pseudoscience, science denial and pseudo-theory promotion. Science denial is self explanatory-deny tenants of strongly supported scientific theories, stances, or facts due to primarily ideological differences. Pseudo-theory promotion isn’t primarily concerned with denial, but the promotion and spread of pseudoscientific bullshit like creationism, flat earth, or homeopathy.
Nevertheless, both forms of pseudoscience work in tandem in order to spread their influence. Think about it, in order to adopt a pseudoscientific theory instead of a strong scientific one you must first doubt the scientific one is entirely accurate… this is what the pseudoscientific memeplex exploits, our uncertainty.
Since science cannot tell us everything with 100% certainty pseudoscience prays upon this to legitimize itself. However, just because science has limitations does not mean the alternative is any better or more accurate, most times it isn’t.
How can you protect yourself from infectious pseudoscience?