One of the best and most succinct explanations of the difference between real science and pseudoscience that I’ve seen.
In writing this blog, I’m trying to teach myself science. Real science. At least, enough real science to be able to write competent science fiction.
Since most news articles about science are embarrassingly unreliable (damn those shruggies!), I end up reading a lot of scientific papers. And there’s something I’ve noticed. It’s like there’s a pattern to how scientific papers are written (at least, the legitimate ones).
Science Done Right
Taken as a whole, scientific papers sort of read like this:
Hey, I (or we) just noticed this weird thing which might have implications for how we think about other things. Here’s my (or our) best guess about what’s going on here, and here’s all the details so you can check this weird thing out for yourself. Hopefully we (the scientific community) can get to the bottom of this mystery.
A recent paper on the Planet Nine hypothesis is…
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SelfAwarePatterns 
Thanks for the reblog! I’ve been dying to write something like this for a long time, but I wasn’t quite sure how I wanted to go about it. I glad you found it useful!
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Thanks James. I think you identified an important distinction. People honestly engaging in science are often eager to talk about how they came to their conclusions and to show their data and calculations. My experience matches yours. When someone obfuscates those things, it’s very much a red flag. And complaining about their whole field not taking them seriously is often a strong indication that we shouldn’t either.
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Well said. Some of this stuff can be hard to catch, but the complaining and the conspiracy theorizing really does leap out at me.
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