The Quest for Enlightenment

(An oldie but a goodie)

I slept with Faith, and found a corpse in my arms on awaking; I drank and danced all night with Doubt, and found her a virgin in the morning.

Aleister Crowley, "The Book of Lies"

I will tell you a pleasant tale which has in it a touch of pathos. A man got religion, and asked the priest what he must do to be worthy of his new estate. The priest said, "Imitate our Father in Heaven, learn to be like Him." The man studied his Bible diligently and thoroughly and understandingly, and then with prayers for heavenly guidance instituted his imitations. He tricked his wife into falling downstairs, and she broke her back and became paralytic for life; he betrayed his brother into the hands of a sharper, who robbed him of his all and landed him in the almshouse; he innoculated one son with hookworms, another with the sleeping sickness, another with gonorrhea; he furnished one daughter with scarlet fever and ushered her into her teens deaf, dumb and blind for life; and after helping a rascal seduce the remaining one, he closed his doors against her and she died in a brothel cursing him. Then he reported to the priest, who said that that was no way to imitate his Father in Heaven. The convert asked wherein he had failed, but the priest changed the subject and inquired what kind of weather he was having, up his way.

-- Mark Twain, "Letters from the Earth"

The inability to benefit from feedback appears to be the primary cause of pseudoscience. Pseudoscientists retain their beliefs and ignore or distort contradictory evidence rather than modify or reject a flawed theory. Because of their strong biases, they seem to lack the self-correcting mechanisms scientists must employ in their work.

-- Thomas L. Creed, "The Skeptical Inquirer," Summer 1987