Michael Becker wrote:
I also want to urge Tim to go forward with his plan to
get some
involvement from the skeptic community, we need some informed skeptics
to provide some balance on this issue.
I'd like to point out a number of crackpot
articles recently
contributed by the user Reddi:
<snip>
Any suggestions about what to do?
We have to keep an eye on him. Note that most of his contributions need
copyediting anyway, since his English isn't too good. Reddi seems to be
a pleasant, courteous guy, so he's never going to get banned.
The suggestion that anyone might be banned for supporting
"pseudoscience" is frightenining. Copyediting someone's English is in a
different league. It is always a great exercise in the practice of NPOV
to take an article with which you strongly disagree, and copyedit the
English without changing the substantive intent of the author.
After coming across [[reciprocal system of theory]] for
the first time
just recently, and after personally spending a great deal of time on
[[neutrosophy]] and other articles, I have a feeling we're losing the
war on pseudoscience, mainly due to an insufficient number of motivated
skeptical contributors. I've been giving serious thought to advertising
our cause on the major skeptical community forums.
Sometimes it seems that the greatest boost to pseudoscience is from
ill-informed and self-appointed sceptics. Having more of them would
only make the situation worse. They are often at such pains to disprove
something that they extract a straw man from the proponent's material,
and beat it to death. The proponent then sees the straw man taken out
of context, and feels the need to defend his views. The sceptic's
efforts end up as a parallel to feeding the trolls.
I don't really see any other way to do this, other
than plain
old-fashioned manpower. If any of these theories are truly
idiosyncratic, we'll be able to save a lot of time if we can get them
deleted. Other than that, we've just got to do the research, present the
flaws, and contextualise.
Wrong!! The burden of proof for a scientific (or pseudoscientific)
hypothesis lies with its proponent. Similarly, in a judicial
environment the person making a complaint has the burden of proof,
failing which he loses his case.and the defendant is under no obligation
to say a word. The sceptic who chooses to make a direct attack assumes
a burden of proof that did not exist prior to the initiation of his attack.
With most of these articles a simple respectful statement that the
practice or topic is often regarded as idiosyncratic or unproven, etc.
(intentionally avoiding the polemical word "pseudoscientific") is all
that is required. Any further detail adds fuel to the fire. The place
for many of these theories is as quaint and often amusing footnotes to
the history of science. If a "scientist" feels that he is wasting a lot
of time disproving these theories, he has no-one to blame but himself.
Eclecticology