How to spot pseudoscience

Pseudoscientific ideas – and the hacks and hucksters who often benefit from them – are certainly nothing new. But in the age of AI slop and unregulated social media platforms, ideas dressed up in the language of science but lacking its methods and rigour have perhaps never been so ubiquitous. Defining what makes an enquiry scientific, and therefore demarcating it from pseudoscience, has actually proved quite difficult, even for scientists and philosophers of science. However, in this TED-Ed animation, Siska De Baerdemaeker, a researcher and philosopher of cosmology at Stockholm University, argues that there is a fairly simple, three-pronged approach that pretty much anyone can adopt to test if a claim is truly scientific, or merely trying to sound the part. Three handy tools for separating pseudoscience from the real deal Video by TED-Ed Director: Eoin Duffy Writer: Siska De Baerdemaeker Producers: Anna Bechtol, Abdallah Ewis videoPhilosophy of science ‘Falsification’ ruled 20th-century science. Does it need revision in the 21st? 2 minutes videoPhilosophy of science What toddlers can teach us about how the human brain does science 10 minutes videoEthics BBC producer John Lloyd argues against the cult of knowledge and information 2 minutes videoGender When aggression is viewed as brilliance, it hurts women in science, and science itself 5 minutes videoAstronomy Finding alien life demands real imagination – not recycled sci-fi tropes 5 minutes videoTechnology and the self Algorithms are opinions, not truth machines, and demand the application of ethics 3 minutes videoSpace exploration How do you message an alien? Carl Sagan offers some simple suggestions 8 minutes videoKnowledge Why David Deutsch believes good explanations are the antidote to bad philosophy 10 minutes videoAstronomy The history of astronomy is a history of conjuring intelligent life where it isn’t 34 minutes