How I learned to love pseudoscience

“There are many hypotheses in science that are wrong. That's perfectly alright; it's the aperture to finding out what's right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny.”
Carl Sagan

The most important pseudoscience nowadays isn't just "pseudoscience", it's corporate financed pseudoscience with a purpose. It's usually to either avoid corporate consequences or to keep making more and more money.

Just found this channel, loving everything about this! Sabine is a dose of sanity on multiple levels 🎉🎉🎉

“Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”
― Werner Heisenberg

"Did you hear about the man who forgot to take his homeopathic medicine?"
"No. What happened?"
"He died of an overdose!"

Carl Sagan was what was called a wet skeptic, which meant that he saw every expression of pseudoscience as an opportunity to teach why a pseudoscience was false. This most vigorously expressed in his article of Velikovsky's views , written of in Sagan's Book, "Broca's Brain," in which he deals carefully and methodically with Velikovsky's silliness in mathematical detail.

Sabine is on another level. It's truly a blessing to have her share her views here on this platform.

I am totally mesmerized by the way you explain complex topics and your clever use of editing. great work!

Dear Sabine, You are both an excellent physicist and teacher, so I request that you give us a one of your excellent lectures explaining why imaginary numbers and their derivatives ( like imaginary mass ) are, helpful to physicists in understanding reality. I, as a typical non-physicist, have no understanding of how numbers, which are based on the non-existent square root of negative one, can be any useful in understanding reality.

As a lover of etymology, and a lover of the scientific method, this made my day.

Its really interesting to see this view on pseudo science, as in history where I study, I dont see many 'pseudoscience' leading to good historical methods BUT I would agree with the part "the fight isnt over" that it really helps to sharpen the tools of historians, to also work on cases maybe not really relevant for the scientif community, but for lots of people and learn how to communicated more educational

Can remember a psych professor saying he took a daily multivitamin because a placebo effect is still an effect! With all of the caveats around it that you'd imagine of course

At the time that he was promoting them, Mesmer's theories would have sounded much more plausible than those of that crazy Frenchman claiming that microscopic creatures caused disease.

And pseudoscience can capture the imagination which may lead to learning actual science. For instance when I heard we may be holograms I learned a ton about actual physics through science communicators. My science teacher in highschool was so, so very boring. He was so bad it effected my development as a person. Today I respect science and math.

Thanks for the insight. Don't forget that not everyone has your background. Your perspective enables a lot of people to find/identify historical and modern sources of information that they can be inspired by.

I love your work. Thank you so very much. I am 69 years old and retired, but your kind of stimulating and informational discussions keep me young.

Dear Sabine, once again, I need to state, you're doing a brillant job sharing your insights! So much appreciated!

Absolutely loved this history of psuedoscience (and the scientific method), so much I didn't know. Sabine is amazing. Share this far and wide, guys!

Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (1962) is obligatory reading for those interested in this topic. One also should note that many scientists are unwilling to give up what they learned in grad school. Among these are the Clovis-firsters in anthropology and the geologists who reject catastrophes. I am old enough to have been ridiculed by a smug grad student because I suggested that the coastlines of Africa and South America looked like they fit together. That was in 1961!

I love your style of communicating science to regular people.

Once again, a super presentation that makes even fairly complex and per se uninteresting topics just so engaging!

This whole video shows how open you are to the others' interpretation that you gladly assert your experiments and definitions to challenge them and you seem like a person when if something's wrong doesn't justify the end of something as there are a lot more to observe.

Sabine, I must say I do enjoy your talks...even though my knowledge extends to watching grass grow...however I've always been interested in the subject, space flight etc. The more I've listened the more it seems to be sinking in !! Your manner and delivery is great!!! I intend to follow your channel!!! You also have a good voice for singing . I believe you would be a very interesting person to converse with!!

Sabine: My favorite science teacher I never had as a student, although, she's probably 5-10 years younger than me, so it would have been weird back then, so I'm glad I've chosen to be a lifelong student.

One of the major issues since the onset of the internet is that pseudoscience and quackery is far easier to disseminate than ever before thus fighting it has become a far more daunting task.

Pseudoscience has one huge benefit that science does not have: It can be very lucrative for people who know nothing, or even less than nothing.

Sabine is fabulous! Thank you for making me feel like there is hope in the madness.

Thanks for sharing! I hadn't really thought about the positive aspects of "pseudoscience". I agree with your views.

I have just started reading a new book (Rutherford & Fry's, 'Complete Guide to Absolutely Everyhing'.) which suggests in the introduction that science is the art of being wrong as a starting point to being less wrong. It seems to ring a chord with what you are saying in this video. 👍 Love the hat. 😍

It's an interesting perspective with some valid points though I'd add that one thing missing in lower grades would be teaching critical analysis to younger students; with today's access to the internet and the reach of media/news that could also make a huge difference.

Your moral support and sense-making network is great - Hossenfelder, Keating, Weinstein - I feel sanity pouring back into popular science. Humanity needs you guys ; )

I do enjoy learning of such myself. I like that people question, but some really do have biases and logical fallacies that are a habit more than desire to learn it seems. Physiologically humans are interesting how they join groups and would say wrong answers if many people do so in a group often...some don't though many follow the crowd no matter what. It is not easy being a scientist that is actually proscience without biases

Love watching you and learning new ideas about the world.
Sometime I pause your videos that I might process the breadth of what you have said fully .

She is so good that when she pronounced the word con-se-CUTE-ively it made me question my own con-SEC-utively for a moment. And English is my first language.

Sabine...love your videos. You are a very good communicator. You seem to have a way of taking the grey areas of science and turning them in to a well balanced understanding. I'm a big fan of you and your channel.

Pseudoscience aside, it's absolutely amazing to have a word named after you 🤩

Kudos for pointing out that some "homeopathic" stuff can be a bit like a façade for things other than pure shaken water that nevertheless can allow to legally evade stricter FDA/analog regulation.

Love your talks, Sabine. Many years ago, just to the north of me in Missouri, was an "science" institute, The Institute of Lawsonomy. The director was Alfred William Lawson. His theory was that the universe worked on suction and pressure and the south pole was the earth's anus. A textbook of his had a photo of him standing on the cowcatcher of a speeding locomotive. With one arm he held on, the other stretched out with his palm facing into the wind. The caption was, "Alfred William Lawson studying atmospheric resistence to motion." This text, the title of which I've long forgotten was one of a large collection of quack works I once had. One of my books was, ":The Einstein Delusion," by the president of a leading eastern US university. A small booklet was titled "The Moon Has No Rotation." It's author said that his knowledge was certain because of the fact that he was born at the headwaters of the Yellow River.! And I had a very detailed article titled, "The Mathematics of the Golf Swing

Excellent as usual although you missed one aspect of scientific fraud whereby large sums of money interfere with the process which is then also surrounded by secrecy making it difficult for others to debunk.

Love this, yes, Cantor was very poorly regarded in his day, yet his research gave us the vocabulary for multiple types of infinities in use today.
This is one of the things that I find so fascinating about Martian canals and so on which were found not to exist. Still, what would they be like? Similarly old science fiction writing had Martian, Venusian and Jovians fighting for dominion over planet earth... I wonder, what conditions did they envision for our neighboring planets? What if they actually had turned out to be true?
Now there are additional reasons for this. One simple simple reason, is how often pressure for publication can lead to interedt driven publication and replication. A simple historical example of this is Hilberts program.
Besides even scientifically unsiund ideas can make for great mental playgrounds, create great art and lay the foundations for healthy logical arguments within its little sandbox that might find their place elsewhere later on. Also, by labeling an idea fringe, you allow people to explore it and develop it shielded from the rigor of scientific debate until it has enough standing to slowly piece itself together and shed those ties to invalid arguments, poor measurements, outdated data, etc that allowed generating that image in the mind of those driving such an idea.
Its a happy place for mental adventuring. Hiking for one's lobes

This was really good for me, because I am one of those armchair science enthusiast who has a bromance with science but it's not my job.
And frankly, pseudoscience makes my forehead veins dance. Truth be told we learn much from failure.
We prove our ideas by trying to debunk them not prove them directly.
So ya in a indirect way, that which is not falsifiable, can lead to narrowing down what does work given the rigors of the scientific method.
TLDR this video helped me lighten up in a good way, thank you,
Ultimately we would be lost without some degree of failure.

Thank you for a constructive (if not too generous) view on the role of a big part of the videos on this platform. Not being a scientist myself, I am faced with the following questions:
1. I believe that the problem with pseudo-science is, that it is presented in a way that makes sense to those not trained in identifying fallacies. Your videos make sense to me. How can I be sure that they are not pseudo?
2. I assume that we are not more intelligent than the generations before us. For them, proof within a specific framework would suffice. We use a different framework. As the framework has changed before, how can we be sure that it will not change again?
P.s. - I am a musician and have watched your music videos as well. Those, I prefer not to comment though 😊

Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20-20 hindsight. It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. It’s good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can’t tell you where you ought to go, unless where you ought to go is a continuation of where you were going in the past. Creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition, imagination-“unstuckness,” in other words-are completely outside its domain.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintence

Always keep your mind open!!! Im with you on pseudoscience , i useg to be against it too.
As long as we could be living in a simulation "and I believe we are" then anything could be possible!!!

I love pseudoscience too! It holds novelty value like no other

I think your thesis is what doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger? Slowly listening to all your videos, good stuff.

I read an interesting book called Lithium: A Doctor, A drug, and A Breakthrough. The development of what drug trials are now is really interesting. People thought Mogens Schou was full of it so he had to work hard to improve his data. It's the last part that helped him break away from the Lithium Water snakeoil of old.

@Sabine Hossenfelder as a flat earther, you never fail to surprise me :) thank you for keeping it honest ;)

Surprisingly flawless Dutch! Often hard for foreigners. What a great video again, worth sharing.

It's sometimes a fine line between fighting pseudo science being a genuine pursuit versus being an excercise in paradigm and ideology gatekeeping.

I definitely improved my own understanding of things by engaging with pseudoscience-proponents. It forces you to revisit the basics and to properly formulate why the state of science offers the better explanation.
That said, pseudoscience clearly causes far more harm than good and even has power to endanger democracies by estranging people from a shared reality. Democratic dialogue requires people to at least agree on the basic facts, which won't work with pseudo-scientists.

Thank you for your channel, you have the most informed and level headed descriptions of all the rest.

It's not the pseudoscience that you love, but, rightly so, the fight to challenge pseudoscience.

Dear Sabine, I'm in awe of your precise presentations, attention to detail and patience when explaining matters. You are a brightly shining star in the firmament of scientific knowledge, and long may you shine forth your wisdom.

I did that! I guessed the random card!
Once, my step-brother was playing with a deck of cards, and he thought it would be fun to test my psychic ability. He chose a single card from the center of the deck and held it up with its back to me. He said he'd give me one-million dollars if I could identify the card.
I knew it was an impossible challenge, high odds but, hey, no real pressure. So, I asked myself, “what's the most unlikely card it could be?” Then, with as much confidence as I could muster, I said, “the five of diamonds.”
I will never forget the look on his face. It was absolutely priceless, which is good because I'm never going to see that million dollars.

Sabine is amazing!!! Thank you for making your videos!!!

Interesting view on pseudoscience. Id love to see you talk about Penrose’s Cyclic Conformal Cosmology. It’s such a clever idea.

Wow you are very open because you see that a lot of the science of today
Could have been classified impossible less than a 100 years ago and been classified as science fiction. Please keep educating us.
Wish you could have been my science teacher at school

Wonderful video! But I'm hoping that some form of multiverse theory ends up being one of the rare one's elevated from pseudoscience. Loved the hat :).

I don't know if it's the algorithm trapping me in my own bubble of interests but I do feel like there are indeed more and more very high quality scientific channels on Clip-Share, a big thank you to all of you!

A basic debunk of mesmerism is in his own description of it. The fluid flows into the hands and out the feet, the lack of it causing discomfort. By this description, the head would always be broken as the flow would never get to it.

Great that Brian sponsored this. Great video. I like his stuff too.

Thank you so much. This makes me feel better about humanity. Maybe we should make fake pseudoscience institutions which come up with progressively harder to debunk ideas. That way we'd no longer have to rely on real quackery.

Dear Sabine, you mention in the video (in reference to Popper) that falsification isn't the best method to do science. Maybe you could do a video about scientific methods and explain what is the "gold standard" used in science today (if it isn't falsification).

If kings and queens took serious advice from astrologists in state matters, wouldn't that mean that the alignment of stars and planets in fact DID influence human affairs? 🤔

This is one of the best shows I saw this month on youtube. Many thanks for your great work, Sabine.

Psychology is also a science that is almost in the field of pseudoscience in many aspects because how hard it is to study human mind and behaviour.

Very excellent & thought provoking. Thank You again.

random ideas --> some level of filtering --> more filtering --> more tests --> more filtering --> knowledge
I believe you are correct that pseudoscience is important. Its' the essential raw material in the distillation process to get to knowledge - it provides both the raw material and also allows for the process to develop allowing for more complex distillation.

Fortunately, there are - and will continue to be - little physicist saying « hey wait a minute… «
Thank you Sabine

Sabine has a lovely thick accent. It is cute. And I love her channel. It's so good. I like pseudoscience because it helps me understand the world a bit better. It helps me putting things in perspective. It is a shame YT tries to censor pseudoscience. I'm going a bit political here. But Sabine is asking the 'right' questions.
Anyway, as a dutch I can assure you that pronunciation was pretty good. It made me chuckle a bit, but it was really good. 8:31
And yes, I remember Popper. Very very relevant 10:02 Especially today. I'm glad she mentioned him! We should all talk about Popper today!

Thank you for this nuanced video. Today two categories of people are harming science : people believe that everything from the establishment is right and everything else is pseudo-science and people believing that everything from the establishment is wrong and that truth is out there. Scientists must bring their nuanced methods to a greater audience.

I'd read that Popper's objection was quantum mechanics and the coopenhagen interpretation. I hadn't heard that he objected to Freud. I'll have to check that out.

Hello Sabine. I have an interesting question for you to ponder. In your opinion what is the more difficult undertaking. Is it understanding quantum gravity, coming up with a valid unified field theory or giving a cat a bath. Thanks.

Your brave attempt to pronounce the Dutch noun kwakzalverij is highly commendable.

Speaking of pseudoscience it would be very useful and interesting to hear you (or one of your excellent colleagues like Dr.Keating) talk about the ideas-i won’t call them theories because they are just arguments-of Dr. Donald D. Hoffman of U Cal, Irvine. I haven’t read his new (2019) book, The Case Against Reality; I’ve just seen his Clip-Share video and read a short paper written for general audiences, but It seems as if he is saying we can’t know anything at all because we can’t really have any experience of what is real.

Oh Sabine....what I like about you most is how you are willing to call out undiscovered particles and unobservable parallel multiverses for what they are....pseudoscience...
And it's funny too...because real science...is about to get a whole lot stranger....as we are already sorta seeing...
You already know what I mean.

Many thanks for all the research that goes in to this videos; and I mean thinks like going to the original documents, looking for the relevant parts, etc. You set a very high standard for diligence.

I gotta say, those drawings of Mesmer with rays coming out of his fingertips looked pretty cool.

Rupert Sheldrake is an interesting case. My History and Philosophy of Science course covered his work back in the eary 80s when he was a useful stirrer, coming up with crazy alternative explanantions for physical phenomena as a challenge to mainstram science to firm up their methods. Sadly he later came to start believing his own bullshit and has become a foundation for much of the predatory new-age nonsense we see today, so he has done vastly more harm than good, as these characters usually do.

Its crazy how mesmer and the people who used his methods weren't legal liable. Oh wait im thinking of someone else

The part about Mesmer is really mesmerizing.

Thanks for another great video Sabine ❤️

Excellent video, Sabine! Thanks a lot! 😊
I participated in an event against homeopathy a few years back, I don't know its name in English... Either way, what I took wasn't homeopathy, but Bach's floral... 😬
The result is that I almost got drunk! 😂
Anyway, stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊

We need critical thinking more than ever now, since it is coming out that a lot of the most authoritative strategies for dealing with covid are mere quackery too. We MUST be able to question these things!

When I was young, I was taught pseudoscience in school. IT was all about this undetectable being that wrote a book and laid out rules everyone had to follow. If you loved/worshipped this undetectable being, you went to paradise after you died, otherwise you went to eternal torture. It was amazing how strongly this was pushed on me when I was young, and how much it was hammered into people by black robed men who insisted people pretend to be cannibals while simply eating small bread slices.

I was expecting some mention of Clever Hans, the mathematical horse of 1907 Berlin. His master, Wilhelm van Osten, showed him around and demonstrated his seeming skill in arithmetic. A psychologist, Oskar Pfungst, experimented with this horse, and discovered that the horse was only knowledgeable when hes questioner knew the answer to the question that he was asked. The horse was observing subconscious cues.
Oskar Pfungst then went on to demonstrate that he could act like that horse, observing subconscious responses. The "Clever Hans effect" has been well-established ever since.
Poker players often attempt to avert the Clever Hans effect by making a "poker face", an expressionless facial appearance.

The anterior fornix zone, have you wired it up yet? Will it take long to activate? Have you tried face resting? Sabine's homework: Use your electronic devices, get Mesmerated.

I have to agree that intuitive ideas can often be correct and those found wanting can provide excellent teaching moments, however for every person exposed to unproven and sometimes unprovable ideas that is cured and enlightened by the infection 10 go undetected, not treated and not cured.

Great video as usual! Maybe you could discuss the deviations form the scientific method some philosophers of science are proposing. I'm thinking for instance about the book "String theory and the scientific method" by Richard Dawid. I understand there have even been meetings on the subject.

Sabine, is there an example of some thing that was perceived as pseudoscience at the time which was later determined to be a true phenomenon?

I'm a big fan of how Brian Keating explains science.. along of course with Sabine and ZDoggMD. BTW, I assume Nassim Haramein's Resonance Science 7 module Unified Science Course is pseudoscience?

I was taken aback by the comment about Popper's falsification not being the go-to method anymore.
I must have missed a class in scientific theory - can anyone (perhaps even Sabine) elaborate about the abovestanding (with sources or googlable terms, please :-)

Wow! I didn't know they boiled snakes for snake oil. I thought it was petrol that was leaking naturally into the Snake River in Pennsylvania. It was kind of useful as it had petroleum jelly.

I love to study the pseudoscience that is ALMOST science.
For example, the idea that the mind influences particles. It has some theoretical and empirical support but no conclusive evidence, yet that does not stop parapsychology. It is interesting to see how they consider statistical fluctuations and how they *may* find something useful.

Sabine and team you always expand my mind in subtle and thoughtful ways. Keep up the amazing work!

Pseudoscience can definitely be an important stepping stone to the truth; if ancient peoples didn't think the positions of the planets and stars affected their daily life and weren't so mesmerized by phenomenon like eclipses they wouldn't have been as incentivized to study them so closely and figure out what all those things really were and make advances in technology like telescopes to observe them better and math to predict their orbits

I also think it's interesting to consister holism in testability when discussing whether a hypotheses are even falsifiable.

I agree with you that pseudoscience has helped science to perfect its method, that sometimes there's a blurry line between pseudoscience and speculative science and being inquisitive or a bit skeptic about both (establish science too) can be healthy and lead to new scientific breakthroughs...
...but I'm also afraid many pseudosciences are thriving in the last decades. Homeopathy was debunked two centuries ago, but it's sold by pretty much all pharmacies in my country (Spain) and has a lot of supporters that also support other non-approved meds.
...and antivaxxers , despite the paper that originated all was fully debunked and all the evidence defending the vaccines, it remains strong.
...and the COVID-deniers...
All those pseudoscientific stands has negative effects on society in form of human lives, and yet despite all our efforts of debunking them they remain strong with a pretty high number of acolytes. I think the modern information society with its open social networks and mass media controlled by lobbies are like fertilizer for conspiracies and pseudoscience, which requires less effort to understand and they're more thrilling than old boring science.
Scientists, philosophers of science and authorities must develop something to counteract its expansion... taught children the proper scientific method, statistics, bias, logical fallacies, critic analysis of topics... outside the schools too.