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It should not be about who is presenting the argument, but the weight of the argument itself. For example, for balistics: the debate falls onto whether each ind

It should not be about who is presenting the argument, but the weight of the argument itself. For example, for balistics: the debate falls onto whether each individual weapon's barrel would leave a uniquely matching trace that can be analyzed from the fired casing. The argument against this method is that machining precision today is so high that there will be no huge differences between each 2 barrels, that make any match valid as unique and as evidence. For all the other claims (e.g. polygraph), you can easily search for more information online. The point is that authority or lack there of should not be a part of your evaluation of the claims, on either side.

_gabe_ 3y ago
I can just as easily make the counter claims to all the proposed areas of pseudoscience and then make the same argument you just did: “it’s not about the authority of the person making the argument, it’s about the weight of the argument itself”. And then I can tell you how you can just look up the counterclaims and find supporting evidence (which you probably can). Just because you can find supporting evidence for your view doesn’t mean it’s right, and I like to know all sides of the story before I make a decision. The point I’m making is I’m definitely not qualified to analyze all these claims that you’re making in support of these being pseudoscience. Sure your claims sound reasonable, but people also thought the earth being the center of the universe sounded reasonable. The thing I like about hacker news is people usually don’t just make unsubstantiated claims, and when they do they usually get gut checked by opposing views, which is a good thing. And OP didn’t really make any claims, they just listed a bunch of fields and said they were all pseudoscience. I appreciate the fact that you’re at least giving an explanation as to why it’s not considered science.

_gabe_ 3y ago

I can just as easily make the counter claims to all the proposed areas of pseudoscience and then make the same argument you just did: “it’s not about the authority of the person making the argument, it’s about the weight of the argument itself”. And then I can tell you how you can just look up the counterclaims and find supporting evidence (which you probably can). Just because you can find supporting evidence for your view doesn’t mean it’s right, and I like to know all sides of the story before I make a decision. The point I’m making is I’m definitely not qualified to analyze all these claims that you’re making in support of these being pseudoscience. Sure your claims sound reasonable, but people also thought the earth being the center of the universe sounded reasonable. The thing I like about hacker news is people usually don’t just make unsubstantiated claims, and when they do they usually get gut checked by opposing views, which is a good thing. And OP didn’t really make any claims, they just listed a bunch of fields and said they were all pseudoscience. I appreciate the fact that you’re at least giving an explanation as to why it’s not considered science.