Unfalsifiable but favorable propositions invite baloney. For example, one might want to believe in life after death, without being interested in evidence for it. However, one shouldn’t validate the pretensions of mediums on such a belief.
Skeptical questions is an antidote to such baloney. For example, why don’t channelers give verifiable information that is otherwise unavailable?
Why don’t healers go to a hospital and heal there, saving people from medical bills? There should be a decent number of the faithful in hospital beds.
Commercial culture has misdirections and evasions at the expense of consumers. For example, why should it matter that an antacid contains calcium if the calcium is for nutrition and irrelevant for gastritis?
Discussion on military-grade items
Baloney can harm. Cancer victims may trust psychic surgeons over oncologists. Politicians may eschew critical thought and consult astrologers instead.
Insert your neighborhood fancy algorithm that’s hard to interpret, but is used to arrive at real life conclusions, e.g. policing.
There are a couple of tools for skeptical thinking:
- Seek independent confirmation of the “facts”.
- Encourage substansive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
- Spin more than one hypothesis and systematically disprove each alternative.
- Quantify. The vague and qualitative are open to many hypotheses.
- If there is a chain of argument, every link must work.
- Occam’s Razor: If multiple hypotheses explain the data equally well, choose the simpler.
- Propositions that can’t be tested and falsified aren’t worth much.
describes various logical fallacies. See notes from Almossawi’s Book of Bad Arguments
Some parties have conflicts of interests in the conclusions. For example, the tobacco industry impugned research on cancerous effects of tobacco as “correlation does not imply causation”.
- The Fine Art of Baloney Detection. Sagan, Carl. www.inf.fu-berlin.de . 1996.
The LeftOvers (TV Series) explores this a bit. John pretends to be a medium, but actually has a hidden mic and earpiece to Laurie, who then searches the internet for details on the person of interest. Sure, the medium part is baloney, but it helps other characters in the show get closure.