We’ve had a new round of criticism regarding the name of our FB page, so we thought we’d clarify our terminology.
Why hate?
The definition of “hate” that we are using is very simple: “very strongly dislike”. And we didn’t make that definition up to suit our purposes. Check it out in the dictionary. We strongly dislike pseudoscience because it damages people, and we love and care about people. Pseudoscience even kills people, when it diverts them from medicine that works, as in the case of serious illness. See http://whatstheharm.net/ for more on this point.
Pseudoscience also damages people intellectually, in the sense that it fosters a willingness to form beliefs without first subjecting the tenets of those beliefs to critical evaluation. This, in our opinion, is a tragedy in itself, because to get maximum mileage out of the delectable brain-candy that is science, you have first to be able to identify it. Above all other things under the sun, Science is our solace. And it saddens us that so many people don’t know how it works, and are being prevented from experiencing the joy of knowing how it works by the propagation of obscuring-yet-superficially-appealing false information.
However, it is a tragedy in another, more sinister sense, too. In the absence of evidence as a proviso for taking on new beliefs, people can potentially believe anything. History gives testament to the diversity of malevolence to which such a relaxation of constraints on belief-formation can give rise. To reel off a few familiar examples: some beliefs result in hundreds of thousands of girls having their clitorises gouged out (without anaesthesia) every year. Other beliefs have resulted in people being tied up and burned alive. As we speak, some beliefs are causing people to miss out on their one shot at surviving cancer, or getting to age 40 before dying of AIDS-related illness. Some beliefs lead people to kill their own children. One of them led to Peter Andre eating so many bananas that he nearly died of a potassium overdose.*
We hate pseudoscience in a comparable way to that in which we hate poverty or racism and indeed all exploitative or otherwise harmful practises, creeds and phenomena. We feel, passionately, that making concrete claims without evidence to back those claims up is unethical, and we want it to stop.
It’s evident that some of you will have different mental representations of the lexical category “hate” from the one we do, because “strongly disliking” something is clearly a very good and quite uncontroversial place to start if you want that thing to stop. If you have no problem with strongly disliking then, under our definition, you automatically have no problem with the word “hate”. If you do have a problem with strongly disliking, then you won’t be one of those people who has expressed a strong dislike of our use of the word “hate”. Will you.
It is absolutely fine if you don’t want to be associated with a word that, in your brain, means something specifically more nasty than “strongly dislike”. Nonetheless, we are very comfortable with the term indeed, and would like it henceforth to be known that accusing us, in loud capital letters, of being guilty of anything more than “strongly disliking”, will be an example of your committing an informal logical fallacy. (Can anyone identify it?)
We could have called ourselves “I fucking strongly dislike pseudoscience”, but 1) it sounds shit, and 2) I doubt we would have been featured on “I fucking love science”, the exposure resulting from which has been instrumental in our growing readership over the last year.
As one final point here, we do NOT hate believers. We see believers as victims of dangerous and unsavoury yet very catchy beliefs. (The author of this note would even go so far as to say that, in a philosophical sense, she doesn’t even hate the fat-cats who make millions peddling “treatments” that they know to be ineffective. She feels deep pity for them in their tragic loss of compassion – the worst and deepest kind of impoverishment of which she can conceive.) In other words, IFHP hates pseudoscience, not pseudoscientists.
Why pseudoscience?
Every time we post about religion, we get a few people saying, “This is nothing to do with pseudoscience. What is it doing here?”, usually in much less civil terms. So, here’s our defence: as activists against pseudoscience, we feel at liberty to comment on topics related to pseudoscience. Religions (and mysticism) are very closely related to pseudoscience (indeed, the author would go as far as to argue that religion is really the mother of all pseudosciences), in that they “make concrete claims about things without evidence to back those claims up“, as per the “Why hate” section of this note. They also have a tendency to threaten eternal torment if you fail to believe these claims. Yuck!!
To be clear, the phrase in italics doesn’t represent a watertight definition of pseudoscience. Defining pseudsocience is known as the demarcation problem, and it boasts a distinguished history. There is no clear-cut rule that can determine whether something’s properties are necessary and sufficient for categorisation as pseudoscience (bear in mind that categorisation in general tends to have this property), so we use checklists, or red flags. The major monotheistic religions would fail on all 9 of Carl Sagan’s “baloney detection kit“, and fly all the major pseudoscience red flags (which are generally derived from it).
I guess we could have called the page “I fucking hate dogma”, which would have saved us having constantly to justify our discussions of religion (to people who *haven’t* spent two years making the page what it is…). But leaving aside our feeling that religion *is* pseudoscience, “I fucking hate pseudoscience” worked better as a mirror page for “I fucking love science”, which, as we have already alluded to (and are not ashamed to admit), we thought we’d see if we could use as a piggyback to get our page out there.
Why fucking?
Three words: “get”, “over”, and “it”.
The first edition of this note, written last year, left it at that. We still feel that three words says it all, but the author is one year older than she was last year and her more mature self tells her that she should pay at least some lip-service to the argument from vulgarity.
Swearing, for reasons I can’t quite get behind (…the author can’t get behind? Gosh, referring to oneself in third-person gets tiring) upsets some people. In her, my and our view, as long as you’re not swearing all the fucking time (woops), in such a way that it starts to prevent you from articulating yourself properly, there really is no problem. (Incidentally, the author massively prefers compulsive, chronic swearing to compulsive, chronic use of “like”, a language virus that afflicts most young Anglophones today and whose effects require constant monitoring by the host to quash.) However, if swearing, even in small and measured doses, really does offend you (one can only imagine the toils and tribulations you must face at the cinema/in front of the TV/during life in general), then there are plenty of other “family-friendly” sceptical pages out there. Once again, and for reasons already given, we deliberately named our page using the same format as IFLS. This necessitated our embrace of that most vile and filthy of all ‘F’ words.
Bottom line? Like it or leave it, but please don’t accuse us of being hateful** people, because in actual fact this page would not exist were it not for the fact that our compassion and our concern for people veritably spilleth o’er.
* OK, OK. So I can’t verify this rumour and perhaps it’s an urban legend. However, if it were true, it would help explain this bizarre behaviour. There’s this, too.
** Adjective
- Arousing, deserving of, or filled with hatred: “hateful letters of abuse”.
- Very unpleasant: “this hateful place”.
Image may be NSFW.
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