Crackpots unleashed!

With the Trump 2.0 regime putting RFK, Jr., a huge fan of woo-woo crackpot pseudoscience and quack medicine, in charge of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), we need good sources that debunk pseudo-science and woo-woo medicine.

One that has been doing that job for a while is Science Based Medicine.

Jonathan Howard recently offered this analysis of the current unhealthy trend symbolized by RFK, Jr.:

We here at Science Based Medicine will be keeping close tabs on our new Medical Establishment for as long as they are in power. We won’t be the only ones, however. Though they have an entirely different agenda, anti-vaxxers and crackpots of all sorts will be watching too, and their power and influence has grown mightily over the past 5 years. Mainstream doctors relentlessly shared their beliefs and talking points. In so doing, they validated and normalized anti-vaccine thought, rhetoric, and techniques. Chief of these was spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Dr. Marty Makary, for example, spent the past 4 years making common causes with such cranks and encouraging their mistrust of the Medical Establishment. In one particularly noxious speech, seated next to his fellow misinformation superspreader Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Makary said, “that the greatest perpetrator of misinformation during the pandemic has been the United States government.” He was upset that his predecessors didn’t join him in glorifying “natural immunity” and treating vaccine side-effects as a fate worse than death. (1) [my emphasis]

Howard provides links to several stories about what a collection of crackpots and cranks HHS is greenlighting now.

And he reminds us that such folks are particularly inclined to bicker intensely with each other.

Howard concludes with this observation: “There’s not going to be much to cheer about for the next 4 years. But watching MAHA turn on itself and the doctors they empowered will provide an opportunity to kick back, pull out the popcorn, and enjoy the circular firing squad.”

Another popularly accessible to substantive source on pseudoscience matters is Skeptical Inquirer. They recently noted:

On February 14, 2025, a memo from the National Institutes of Health shared the plan to cut over 5,000 employees. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration also announced mass firings. These agencies, all under the Department of Health and Human Services, were guided by the new Department of Government Efficiency to cut back on staff to save money. Days later, the National Science Foundation, an independent government agency, also announced the plan to dismiss about 10 percent of employees. The long-term fallout of these mass firings is yet to be determined, but the short-term consequences for the affected scientists are potentially devasting. (2) [my emphasis]

Notes:

(1) Howard, Jonathn (2025): Doctors Who Rose to Power Bashing the Medical Establishment Are Now the Medical Establishment. Good Luck With That. Science-Based Medicine 05/16/2025. <https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/letthemfight/> (Accessed: 2025-17-05).

(2) Huff, Stephen & Radford. Benjamin (2025): News Bites: From Earhart Plane Pareidolia to Mass Firings at Science Agencies. Skeptical Inquirer 49:3, 7.

Pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and other kinds of pseudo-knowledge

Steven Novella's blog Science Based Medicine has good information and analysis on medical pseudoscience.

His post Why People Deny Science 11/14/2018 addresses people's susceptibility to pseudoscience more genberally:

To those naïve to the challenges we face, at first the concept of science-based medicine seems obvious. Well of course you’re going to base medicine on science, what are the other options? At its core the idea is simple: medical practice should be informed by the best evidence we have available. In practice, this is complicated, because there are many ways to evaluate the evidence.

Further, people find many ways to deny the science, either a specific scientific conclusion, or science itself. We hear these various excuses all the time – there are “other” ways of knowing, we don’t need science to know what works, I am the evidence, etc. Sometimes people respect science, but just get it wrong. They might misunderstand the placebo effect, overestimate the significance of studies, not understand the nature of p-hacking, or fail to realize the potential for self deception in less-than-rigorous studies.

Then there are those who will dismiss entire swathes of science out of hand. This is commonly done through an appeal to conspiracy theories, such as references to “Big Pharma”, or the notion that doctors lie to make money, that the system is broken and cannot be trusted, or even that science itself is broken.

He gives more details on the results of a recent study of 244 subjects, Examining how people reason about controversial scientific topics (behind subscription).

There has been quite a bit of discussion recently about how people process political conspiracy theories and false or misleading reports from ideologically or politically partisan sources. One of the puzzlers has been the idea that refuting false information can make the person holding it even more convinced of the errorneous claim or conspiracy theory.

Kind of a discouraging thought for the reality-based community.

Novella, though, suggests that such a "backfire" phenomenon may not be so clear-cut as some writers suggest:

There are many studies showing that people will engage ad hoc in motivated reasoning, meaning that the conclusion comes first, and reasoning is used to justify the conclusion rather than determine the conclusion. There is inconsistent evidence for a possible backfire effect – which means not only rejecting evidence which contradicts a held belief, but strengthening that belief in the face of contradictory evidence.

He puts it even more strongly in Backfire Effect Not Significant Neurologica Blog 01/04/2018:

... more recent research suggests that the backfire effect may not exist, or at least is exceedingly rare. A recently published series of studies puts a pretty solid nail in the coffin of the backfire effect (although this probably won’t be the last word). ...

The backfire effect, however, is very specific. This occurs when people not only reject factual correction, but create counterarguments against the correction that move them further in the direction of the incorrect belief. It’s probably time for us to drop this from our narrative, or at least deemphasize it and put a huge asterisk next to any mention of it.

He focuses instead on the problem of what he calls "metacognition":

What all of this suggests is that people do not usually engage in metacognition – thinking about their own thinking. They may have a cognitive style that they tend to use, but otherwise they engage in whatever type of reasoning serves their purpose on any particular topic. They might vigorously defend the consensus of scientific opinion on one topic, then reject it on another citing a vague conspiracy, and dismiss it on a third without any real justification or by appealing to fallacious logic.

To counter this we cannot just teach science or explain what the evidence says. We need to teach critical thinking skills – which is metacognition. Critical thinking includes an understanding of all the various ways our thinking can go wrong. Just as important, however, is that critical thinking involves stepping back from our own cognitive process to examine it objectively, to make a sincere effort to consistently apply valid logic and the same fair and objective criteria for evidence. [my emphasis]