Well, I'm not afraid of non-scientific ideas, but I am afraid of the harms they cause. Anecdotally, I've lost a couple of family members due to secret-style law

Well, I'm not afraid of non-scientific ideas, but I am afraid of the harms they cause. Anecdotally, I've lost a couple of family members due to secret-style law-of-attraction attempts at fixing curable (by medical science) illnesses. Kind of a bummer, but it's a free country and we can't compel people to take medical treatments when they think they can wish away the cancer. I'm also afraid of the measurable societal harms caused by, e.g. the anti-vax movement, where preventable illnesses are making a comeback due to non-scientific belief in the hazards of vaccination. I don't know how to get anti-vax sentiments out of the mainstream discourse, but I think the world would not be any less intellectually rich, in any meaningful sense of the concept, if no one ever thought those thoughts, and caused harmful policies to be carried out, again. Right now, of course, I accept it as "gotta take the bad with the good" but that doesn't mean I like that things like childhood measles are on the rise in various anti-vax hotspots; especially because these aren't informed adults opting out of vaccines, but ill-informed parents making decisions for their children that do have serious impacts on childhood health and the potential for serious harms later in life. I certainly don't see the need to defend some ideas as holding promise for progress ("we could have cured your measles as a child, but some guy made up a story out of his head and that's why you have shingles now") when they are very much regressive ideas.