Customer Reviews

Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience

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Here's a book designed to fill a real need for worshipers of true science. It's an encyclopedia that discusses many of those shameful heretical theories, and includes biographies of those villains who propose them. But wait a minute. Why are there articles in here on Louis Pasteur, the big bang theory, biofeedback, continental drift, and Sir Isaac Newton? Half the book is filled with supposed charlatans and groundless theories while the other half reads like a who's who of science. Sir Isaac Newton? One brief sentence in a long biography of him mentions that he was interested in alchemy. Continental drift and Big Bang? The author states that when first proposed these theories were thought to be nonsense. Well, isn't that the case with a lot of theories? Alfred Wegener had a lot of evidence to support his 1915 theory of continental drift. You don't have evidence in pseudoscience (that's what makes it pseudoscience). The author praises biofeedback as effective, stating that it is based on sound scientific principles. So why is it in this book?

Rest assured there are articles on pseudoscience in the book. You'll find sections on Theosophy, lycanthropy, kickapoo oil, the I ching, Hoxsey's cancer treatment, Our Lady of Fatima, fairies, dowsing, Madame Blavatsky, and Immanuel Velikovsky. I found almost all of the articles interesting to read regardless of subject.

There is suggested reading material at the end of many articles, and, at the end of the book, an immense bibliography of books. I do wish that Mr. Williams had left out the articles on subjects that admittedly are real science, and used the space for more material on pseudoscience. In his discussion of parapsychology, for example, he mentions that experiments in the field have become more rigorous in recent years. Yet he says nothing either about the design problems of older experiments, or the results of the newer, better controlled studies. He also doesn't comment on the vast amount of material critiquing parapsychology - the 1987 study by the National Academy of Sciences, for example.

I should stress that this is a book for true skeptics. If you believe in homeopathy, reflexology or astrology you will need your blood pressure medication when you read this. If you believe in all three of those above theories, well, you might suffer a cerebrovascular accident (stroke) by the time you reach page 46.

This book is very good. It tackles a variety of topics and attempts to explain them in a straightforward and balanced manner. The book deals with many topics in pseudo science, from the standard Bigfoot and UFO faire, through the crazy explanations of crop circles and hypnosis on to things that may be legitimate science in some cases, but where pseudo scientists latch onto them and turn them into something that isnt as much science as an aspect of some kind of crazed religion. It also covers several religious and historical topics where they have been known to intersect with pseudo science over the years, such as The Church of Scientology and the stone megaliths of Europe.

The largest flaw this book may have is at times it comes off as being too understanding of the topics it is attempting to, for lack of a better word here, debunk.

It is a more scholarly version of what Robert Todd Carroll did with his excellent The Skeptic's Dictionary.

I disagreed with parts of this book and agreed with other parts....I like looking at different points of view. This book lists the controversial aspects of parapsychology, paranormal events, and new age studies...I was happy with my purchase

In argumentation (even marital ones) the one who feels insecure will tend to attack the opponent on the basis of the other's past mistakes, ignoring any of the opponent's (however successful) attempts to correct them. So I could attack the times when this book makes little silly mistakes, or clearly and intentionally tries to hurt the feelings of those who have opinions that differ from the author's. But that'd be cheap. So let's take the case of one serious example of the author's pretending not to know that some of his objections have been addressed. Or maybe the author is unfamiliar with the material. Or maybe he's so irrevocably biased that no evidence would be good enough, so he doesn't read anything that might disturb his previous opinion. (In which case, it doesn't make much sense to pretend you can write a volume and call it an encyclopedia. It'd be better to call it something like Stuff I Like to Suppose.) The problem is that nobody who's innocent enough to accept the author's sweeping generalized denunciations is smart enough to read the book. (Not being smart probably is just as satisfying, wouldn't you guess, as deciding a case before you've studied the evidence?) Thus the bibliography for the section on parapsychology indicates a clear wish to slant the argument, since it fails entirely to cite any material from the Journal of Parapsychology or the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, even though he must know that useful data for any rational discussion would be there. (He also fails to notice that a not inconsiderable part of the literature of psychical research, by the way, was composed of cautious attempts to debunk the mountebanks of the early seance-room period. It wasn't particularly, for example, the reason that W. F. Prince went to the Boston Society for Psychic Research that he disagreed in some petty way over the "Margery" case when the ASPR appointed J. M. Bird to be his colleague. More significantly important was that Prince had seen Bird try to find out in this investigation how well he could catch a trickster when he saw one. He thought that it was a studied insult to appoint a second-rate person to work with him. No false modesty: WFP probably did know more about the techniques of mediumistic fraud than any American then living. I spent more than 20 years trying to study Prince's work, and today I just realized I've probably misunderstood or forgotten 19 of them. My life would have so much more clarity if I didn't know that I didn't know for sure.) In mentioning Radin's The Conscious Universe, which might summarize the case for recent discoveries and theories, the author dismisses the substantial work in a few lines. This indicates that he hasn't read the book thoughtfully and honestly, but has already arrived at conclusions that are different from the arguments of the book. This seems a particularly simple way to address difficult issues, and election campaigns do enough of this sort of thing to satisfy all of us. But our author has apparently intentionally made an effort to simplify all problematic issues in this area. In deciding to do so without actually confronting at least most of the questions that are complex, the author is bound to give the reader a very incomplete picture of the situation he's no doubt sincerely trying to clarify. How is this different from the guy who's sure there are vampires in the closet or monsters under the bed, and who can't be calmed by the attending nurse's efforts to comfort him? I haven't time to deal with all the distorted material in this book, but I guess I'd warn the reader that if the author's treatment of all the topics is as thoughtful and honest as his treatment of a century-and-a-half of parapsychological research, then you don't need to read this book. If the volume might appeal to you at all, you already know what you want to be true, so just go on thinking what you are currently thinking. Certainly don't read it if you have to make an address or write an essay, hoping to use the author's evidence in any kind of debate, because if you were to do so, your opponent will make you look pretty simple-minded. It's maybe better just to keep on thinking what you already think, because you probably don't want to spend the next several decades reading in your university library's periodical section just to unsettle yourself. Skepticism is such childlike, innocent fun.

This so-called encyclopedia is biased, poorly-researched, unscientific -- well, I could go on, but you get the idea. Instead of being written by objective scientists, it was written in part by several PSEUDOscientists! It lauds various previously-debunked methods. It gives large amounts of space to pro-UFO organizations and people while lumping most of the good scientists and skeptics together in short spaces. On top of everything else, even when they are being fairly even-handed, it's poorly researched and documented.