How would you rate the importance of cultivating one's ability to discern a scientific proposition from a pseudo-scientific one? Many well known claims in the public sphere, though promulgated in the guise of science, reason and logic, are practically religious beliefs.
There is nothing wrong with religion per se, but there is arguably something wrong with selling religion as science.
At best, the conflation of such polar opposites qualifies as grave disservice to informed consent or dissent. At worst it is deception harboring tyranny. If the government calls on you to take perilous action for the perceived greater good, such as risking life and limb in war, playing Russian roulette with your own health to ostensibly safeguard that of others, trading liberties for presumed communal safety, and so on, would you not want to know if the compulsion is predicated on testable theory versus categorical decree?
The century-old tool of choice for making that differentiation is philosopher Karl Popper's acclaimed falsifiability axiom, which asks a simple question: Does a given theory admit a test of its own falsity? The challenge is that real world ideas can be convoluted, esoteric, fraught with hidden assumptions and may even be tainted with deliberate obfuscation. They may seem falsifiable when in fact they are not, or may be falsifiable but difficult to recognize as such.
In this book I develop a set of criteria to determine the practical falsifiability of virtually any proposition and demonstrate the surprising falsity of some prominent theories, without requiring deep expertise in the associated disciplines.
