Subject: Top 10 traits of the pseudoscientist 
From: Jeramie.Hicks@mail.utexas.edu (Jeramie Hicks)
Newsgroups: sci.physics.fusion

Society is developing a new breed of "intellect": the pseudoscientist.
Too lazy to do real work to research a topic, the pseudoscientist is
armed with a strong curiousity, an enlarged ego, and a dose of
authoritian paranoia. Combined with his patchwork access to
media-filtered science "facts" (if they can be called such after the
media is done processing them) and his desire for profit, the
pseudoscientist is likely to be tomorrow's new danger to the
preservation of knowledge. 

YOU MIGHT BE A PSEUDOSCIENTIST IF:

1) You believe your subscription to Analog provides the necessary
background to argue with PhD scientists. 

2) You think "real" science is mostly developed in garages or hobby
rooms.

3) You think scientists are inflexible to changing paradigms (using
one of pseudoscientists' favorite terms). See definition of "Science."

4) You think the government, big business, or traditional scientists
are in a conspiracy to prevent the pseudoscientists from showing the
"truth" to the rest of the world, motivated by such movies as "Chain
Reaction." 

5) You think science is purely to start a business and make money.

6) You think it's cool to announce impossible-sounding claims to the
media without a peer review process (see #4 above), expository
discussion, or other legitimizing process. You may believe the US
Patent Office is a legitimizing process, if they aren't in conspiracy
with #4 above.

7) You're aiming for the Einsteinian turn-science-upside-down
revolution of thought and universal understanding, based on your two
years of high school physics and a copy of Omni magazine.

8) You think highly suspicious behavior is actually the way people
protect themselves from intellectual theft.

9) Your ego is large enough to tell the world that its understanding
of the universe has always been wrong, and your fantastic,
undocumented, unverified, unrecorded, and unreproducable experiment
proves it.
 
10) Your college degree (if you have one) and your pseudoscientist
interests have absolutely nothing in common. For instance, you may be
arguing about fusion with a PhD in nuclear physics (and inflating your
ego by doing so), while you only have a nursing degree.

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