Dangerous malice

In the N region, scientists and journalists went on an expedition to search for the Yeti. A conference dedicated to traditional medicine and alternative treatment methods was held at the Research Institute of Road Construction during the Transitional Period. The three-time honored professor of the Russian Academy of True Sciences presented a new project for a torsion bar engine. These or very similar headlines appear in the tabloids all the time and are usually accompanied by scary pictures with poor typography.

But sometimes notes about the capture of Bigfoot or a congress of neurosurgeon magicians leak into serious publications designed for an audience with a higher education or at least developed common sense. Most often, reports about such events are presented with the sauce “look at the horror and obscurantism,” although sometimes the irony is so veiled that doubts arise as to whether it exists.

Readers who believe that they look at life judiciously and balancedly love such articles very much and actively discuss them on the publication’s website or in their blogs. Commentators savor individual details, list the laws of physics that are violated by yet another invention of yet another unrecognized genius, and are condescendingly amazed at how people can believe in such nonsense, and whether they really learned nothing at all from school. Readers call the authors of the revealing notes well done and urge them to continue in the same spirit.

Personally, I have an ambivalent attitude towards such articles. On the one hand, ridiculing openly pseudoscientific activities and exposing scammers is certainly useful. Having laughed at sorcerers and manufacturers of miracle drugs “for everything,” readers will remember that those specifically mentioned in the article and others like them, Mother Euphrosyne and doctors of unknown sciences, are deceiving people or, at best, are deeply sick people who firmly believe in the miraculous power of what they have discovered laws of nature. And having remembered, they will be more careful about dubious drugs advertised everywhere, the services of clairvoyants with thick stacks of diplomas and messages about new technologies that allow you to obtain energy from nothing.

But on the other hand, when there are too many malicious notes miserably debunking a new pseudo-discovery, people simply stop paying attention to them. People get used to the caustic words and elitist contempt of the authors, and some even begin to get terribly irritated by their arrogance. As a result, people stop reading such articles, which means that all their healing power is wasted. Moreover, one of the readers may decide that since a certain idea is so strongly criticized, then it is highly likely that it may contain a grain of truth (after all, as usual, everything good is criticized in our country).

Perhaps journalists who seek to point out to readers some dangerous pseudoscientific trends should be more careful in choosing an event to expose. Of course, when torsion fields or mind reading appear somewhere at the state level, you need to write about it as much as possible. But is it necessary to waste ardor on pseudoscientific events, let’s say, on a regional scale? Many people, especially those who are not used to thinking often about the structure of the world, like to read about Bigfoot and UFOs, and if you regularly laugh at their favorite articles, they will simply begin to avoid criticism. Even worse, critical articles can be an excellent source of information for them about a variety of terribly interesting events and activities.

It is certainly necessary to write about sorcerers, pseudoscientists and other adherents of the unknown and to reasonably prove that their activities have nothing to do with science. Sometimes only the activity of the press makes it possible to stop the presumptuous savior of humanity who manages to obtain funding or who finds a weakness in the human good of rationality and extracts money from gullible clients by playing with their health. But very often journalists who choose such topics do so because it is easier to ridicule outright nonsense and, accordingly, improve their reputation in the eyes of readers than to write about a new discovery in the field of quantum mechanics.

Pseudoscientists, like quantum mechanics, are part of the global scientific and pseudo-scientific environment, and it is necessary to write about them. There is no need to give in to the temptation to show off and emphasize your intelligence by using targets that are too easy. Sometimes the harm from such a seemingly win-win move can be much more than good.

Iryna Yakutenko