Given the science fiction that enthralled me as a teen, you might wonder how I escaped infection with delusions like:
- Dean drives
- population paranoia
- libertarianism
- Wilsonian occult conspiracies
…and all the other nonsensical crap to which SF authors turned for plot (or, in some cases, sincerely believed). How is that I emerged with a glimmering of skepticism and rationality?
Any tendency towards libertarianism is of course easily cured simply by spending time with libertarians1. Immunization against the other nonsense, however, was greatly facilitated by my reading of Martin Gardner’s classic 1957 Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. The title says it all. The book is a brief and necessarily incomplete survey of all the pseudoscience, cult lunacy, and all-around bonkers notions with which the world is too well supplied.
Now, Gardner had harsh words for science fiction, or at least the sort that appeared in Astounding:
“Judging by the number of Campbell’s readers who are impressed by this nonsense, the average fan may very well be a chap in his teens, with a smattering of scientific knowledge culled mostly from science fiction, enormously gullible, with a strong bent toward occultism, no understanding of scientific method, and a basic insecurity for which he compensates by fantasies of scientific power.
However, this was not the caustic approbation of an outsider for a genre about which he knew little. Gardner was an SF fan. He read the stuff. He wrote the stuff. He appeared in Asimov’s! His was the critique that flowers from familiarity. In any case, most of his examples came from outside the pages of Astounding… despite John W. Campbell, Jr.’s best efforts to promote every crackpot idea that crossed his desk.
Gardner provided an abundance of case studies—on flat and hollow Earths, Velikovskyism, contra-relativity, scientific racism, creationism, Lysenkoism, occult nonsense, pyramid woo-woo, and all that jazz—detailed with humor designed to undermine the gravitas of the various pseudoscientific prophets. While he is clearly aware that there is a human cost to this stuff—ineffective medicine is an obvious example, but Soviet-era crank agricultural theories made what would likely have been unpleasant lives even worse through famine—Gardner seems to have known that laughter is far more caustic to reputation than rebuke. It is hard to present oneself as a heroic iconoclast when everyone thinks of you as a punchline.
Even more usefully, Gardner presented a theoretical framework to unify what might otherwise have been a collection of anecdotes. In particular, he concluded that the various eccentrics he featured tended to have two common elements:
- Cranks tend to be isolated from the scientific community.
- Cranks tend to be paranoids with delusions of grandeur.
Having spent decades on talk.origins2, I would add a third:
- Cranks almost never settle for a single eccentric belief.
Put together, this is a useful lens through which to scrutinize iconoclastic models. Sure, a novel proposition might be the 21st-century answer to continental drift, and maybe the resistance it meets could be analogous to Sir Arthur Eddington kneecapping Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar—but if the person proposing it is uncredentialed, has no contact with the field in which they’re dabbling, replies to constructive criticism with insults and rants, and furthermore believes that the Moon is a turnip, that the metric system was invented to sterilize white people, and that Montana is a Coca Cola ad campaign that got out of hand, it probably isn’t.
Gardner’s lens is especially useful when what you’re hearing is something you really want to believe. Gullibility is directly proportional to appeal. Wouldn’t it be delightful if this novel suggestion were correct? More reason to peer closely, prod a bit, and hold that notion up to a bright light.
It’s no surprise that despite being the product of a previous millennium, Fads and Fallacies remains in print. Pseudosciences come and pseudosciences go… but their general form remains the same.
Of course, it would be a mistake to rely on a single source of skepticism, and seven decades is long enough for an abundance of books akin to Fads and Fallacies to appear. Which of them would readers recommend?
- See also my exposure to back-to-the-land hippies, as well as to the Enver Hoxha-loving baby communists who once used a procedural loophole to take over a campus newspaper. ↩︎
- A USENET newsgroup. USENET is a thriving medium of communication that is even healthier than Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and the West Indian Federation combined. ↩︎
Usenet was crippled by Google buying the main gateway and eventually shutting it down, but it yet limps along thanks to a handful of people on old Linux servers or using sites like Eternal September. It’s mostly a few dozen die-hards refusing to stop posting, but that’s enough that there’s usually some stuff to read while I eat breakfast. (I have never subscribed to talk.origins, and only ever saw posts from that group when they found their way to the MST3K groups for riffing.)
It goes almost without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, that Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World is right up there with anything Gardner wrote. And perhaps better, as it seems to exhibit less of the absolute certainty of which Gardner was often guilty. But they’re both brilliant, and I wish more people would read them.
We have to be careful to not just be gatekeepers–take the Channeled Scablands for instance. That sounded like Young Earth rot, after all. Impact theory supporters were on the outside looking in for quite awhile. That someone is on the outside does not automatically make them wrong.
Peer review and sacred cows don’t go together.
Another example:
https://phys.org/news/2026-02-rethinking-climate-natural-variability-solar.html
It is easy to say it is right-wing rot–but is it?
This story about how light alone–not-heat–allows the evaporation of water was stunning to me:
https://news.mit.edu/2024/how-light-can-vaporize-water-without-heat-0423
As it turns out–the wavelength where light is most effective—is the green part of the spectrum where light interacted with water the least—or so we thought. This find alone helps explain roads clearing after ice events even if the air temperature remains below freezing
Gatekeeping destroys peer review.
“It is hard to present oneself as a heroic iconoclast when everyone thinks of you as a punchline.”
There are some who take laughter as a badge of honor, mistakenly. It reminds me of the Carl Sagan line: “Yes, they laughed at Galileo, they laughed at Einstein. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”
John Sladek, known primarily for his science fiction, also wrote the excellent ‘The New Apocrypha: A Guide to Strange Science and Occult Beliefs’, a thoughtful, rational analysis of many of the fringe or new-agey beliefs of the era (late 60s, early 70s.)
It’s not a book, but Dan Olson aka Folding Ideas’s YouTube video ‘In Search of a Flat Earth’ is a great dissection of the recent (as of five years ago) state of flat eartherism, and provides some insight as to why so many cranks tend to also be antisemites. (The subtitle of the video is ‘Clickbait Title: The Twist at 37 Minutes Will Make You Believe We Live In Hell’ which is accurate.)
Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology (1990) by Kenneth L. Feder jumps all over hackneyed BS about human past and potential (and aliens….oh, yes, aliens). As an archaeologist, I’ve had to nod at True Believers too many times but this book is as thorough and systematic a rebuttal of persistent stupidity as could be constructed. Feder gets extra points for snark.
Feder has repeatedly updated this book as new frauds and delusions have appeared. The 11th edition came out last March.
Shamefully, I don’t even remember the statement, but I nominated something you said a while ago (one year? two?) as Nicol’s law. I think you may have demurred at the time, but can this be Nicol’s law? I will definitely be quoting you on this one!
I’m trying to think of a gentle way of pointing out that you don’t even spell his last name correctly, and not really succeeding.
“Nicoll” is very hard to spell, and as evidence I submit the fact one of the times I made the Hugo long list is not in my ISFDB file because the Hugo people misspelled my name. In fact, they’ve misspelled it at least two different ways over the years.
“Cranks almost never settle for a single eccentric belief.”
“UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED” may cause an old-time denizen of USENET² to twitch a bit. Robert E. McElwaine “B.S., Physics and Astronomy, UW-EC / 2nd Initiate in Eckankar” was not so bad as net.kooks went. (He wasn’t Serdar Argic [twitch], after all.) A long article about when Soviet Cosmospheres smashed a sneak nuclear first strike by submersible-aircraft from the Bolshevik-controlled United States … yes, I just rechecked, I put the Bolshevik in the right place … turned out to be actually kind of harmless compared to others.
Bergstrom and West’s Calling Bullshit is one I’d recommend looking at.
James Hogan’s later fiction (or his non-fiction, for that matter) constitutes an excellent survey of fringe science and politics. The Last Velikovskian – and it was clear that he took it seriously.
And of course, he was a Libertarian.
And a Holocaust-denier.
Thanks, forgot about that.
So he went for the trifecta.
It’s a long time since I last read it, but I recall Sladek’s The New Apocrypha (1974) as being pretty good. John Grant’s A Directory of Discarded Ideas (1981) sums up a lot of crackpot ideas very succinctly. Also, Sir Patrick Moore’s Can You Speak Venusian? (1974) – there’s an interesting 1969 video which was a predecessor of the book.
https://archive.org/details/CanYouSpeakVenusianBBC
Forgot to say that I mined all of these for ideas for the third Forgotten Futures RPG worldbook, which was based on Doyle’s Professor Challenger stories – now there’s a REAL crackpot…
Montana is well known as the state where they grow all the dental floss.
Wilson delusional? I would be absolutely crushed if it turned out the Illuminatus! trilogy is not entirely factual.
A lot of the sources that are mentioned in the Trilogy are in fact real, historical books about secret societies, subversive groups, and conspiracies.
If you don’t mind TV programs, there’s Penn and Teller’s excellent Bullsh*t!
Speaking of libertarians…
See also “Scams From The Great Beyond” and “More Scams From The Great Beyond” by Peter Huston. He debunks ESP, UFOs, and various forms of New Age woo while showing how you, the reader, can make money by faking evidence that this stuff is real (provided, he mentions, that you do not have a conscience or empathy for the people you’re ripping off).
Facts & Fallacies: A Book of Definitive Mistakes and Misguided Predictions – by Chris Morgan and Dave Langford
https://ae.ansible.uk/?t=fandf
Gardner also wrote Did Adam and Eve have navels? Debunking pseudoscience. This was dealing with the latest fads and fashions in pseudoscience. Many of which had emerged after he published Fads and Fallacies. Tackling the specific area of parapsychology in his book How not to test a psychic: ten years of remarkable experiments with renowned clairvoyant Pavel Stepanek.
I’ve never read Martin Gardner (well, not that book; I’ve read some of his ones on mathematics), but I did spend several months in undergraduate university pouring over Robert Todd Carroll’s Skeptic’s Dictionary and making myself quite insufferable, which I feel had a similar effect.
The libertarian one is somewhat complicated, I think–not because I think they’re right, but because they’ve spent quite a bit of time and money buying themselves the appearance of legitimacy. The Koch Brothers basically bought out the economics department at George Mason, and a number of think tanks act as sinecures for credentialed pro-corporate cranks. Even worse, if you came of age in the 2000s, the public face of movement skepticism was libertarian, from Michael Shermer (last seen writing Trumpist apologia in the hilariously misnamed Reason magazine) to Penn & Teller Bullsh!t, which would rather sleazily sandwich episodes “disproving” global warming or second-hand smoke in between episodes debunking pyramid power or penile plethysmographs.
Paul Krugman observed that there are professional economists of all political leanings, and professional conservative economists, but no professional liberal economists.
My go-to is older, from the mid 19th century: Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay. I, too would love to find more current analogs. Otherwise, I might be forced to write one.
People should take responsibility for having a basic understanding of science and technology since it shapes so much of their lives. It’s funny how an educated person would never admit to being NOT literate (in terms of books read, media consumed etc…). However, many people will admit to be scientifically illiterate and even laugh at their lack of scientific knowledge and literacy. They think that science is beyond them.