AES253 The Dragon in my Garage

In this world, there is a lot of deliberate misinformation floating around everywhere, particularly on the internet. There are countless people who are willing to lie for the purpose of selling a product or convince you of something untrue. 

Now, one of the most important scientific principles is falsifiability. It means that any claim or theory put forth can be open to be refuted by an empirical test. We can verify the strength of the hypothesis by trying to contradict it and even prove it wrong. This is one of the main differences between real science and pseudoscience. While real science always tries to verify and prove their own theories to make sure we have the best, most accurate view of the world possible, pseudoscience will actively avoid any empirical proofs or tests, and always make up excuses whenever challenged. They’re always moving the goalposts, rendering any attempts at disproving them pointless.

One good example of this was put forth by Carl Sagan. Imagine that your friend tells you that they have a real, fire-breathing dragon living in their garage. Being naturally unconvinced of this, you visit your friend’s house to see this dragon. When you go into their garage, there’s no sign of the dragon anywhere. Confronting your friend about it, they say “Oh well, it’s an invisible dragon, I just forgot to tell you.” So then you suggest spreading some flour on the ground, so you can see the footprints of the dragon walking around. But your friend tells you that “The dragon floats in the air…” Alright then, you suggest setting up an infrared camera, so you can detect the dragon breathing fire, but again your friend tells you “No, the fire it breathes is heatless” No matter what experiments you propose in order to prove the existence or non-existence of this dragon, your friend keeps making excuses on why trying to test it will not work.

Carl Sagan concludes this story by asking "Now what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists?     Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true."