FacultyMemeticsFesterDraftsPseudoscience

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UncleFester hasn't actually sat down to write this one yet. He just thought, made the space and thought some more. He had an idea of what to plant here but before he started on the job, he looked in one afternoon and something else had started growing in the space.

[edit] This is what grew:

Perhaps the same principle as tarot cards. There's too much information in the world and people filter according to predetermined patterns, as Beau Lotto shows. Science is one of those patterns. Some scientifically-developed conclusions work better than others. Plenty of non-scientific conclusions work. Some exercise a reciprocal effect through having been conceived and thus come to work. Tarot card readings often come true on this basis.

In a nutshell, science is not very scientific.

There are two kinds of pseudoscience: the first bolsters dodgy conclusions with apparent adherence to objectivity and the scientific method, thus playing on lay people's slavish adherence to faith in its truth and intrinsic virtue. The second is pseudoscience proper, which uses the scientific paradigm to implode its own rules. One example is pataphysics, the 'science of imaginary solutions'.

In conclusion: false or dodgy pseudoscience abuses faith in the scientific paradigm as a means of exercising power. Real pseudoscience is a fractal construct that fuses the discourse of 'truth', 'falsehood' and 'integrity' to provoke feedback loops in its own self-satisfaction.