Want to create your own pseudoscience or guide your students? Consider these resources from Robert T. Carroll. Here’s a summary of his steps:

1. Make big promises about the scientific proof for something that most people fear (e.g. death, pain) or desire (e.g. money, health, long life).
2. Use a lot of jargon and hedge your promises with words like “may help.”
3. Reference conspiracies that try to keep the truth from the public.
4. Claim you have discovered a secret that scientists are unaware of.
5. Make stuff up and include testimonials from famous people with big names.
6. Charge for your product.
7. Wear a lab coat and call yourself a doctor.

With these seven ideas in mind, pick ONE of the video examples below and identify what pseudoscience tactics above are employed below.

Video Examples

1. Marshmallow Farming
2. Nut Milking 2: The Re-Milkening
3. Cotton Candy Farming
4. Rare Blue Strawberry Plant!
5. BBC Spaghetti-Harvest in Ticino
6. What Happened to Mike the Headless Chicken
7. Pig Rescues Baby Goat
8. Lake Superior Whales

The Silph Booster, Now Available

I decided to try my hand at creating some pseudoscience of my own. Did you know about this new booster to your health, the Silph Booster? It’s especially effective given its long history from ancient times. The original plant on which this solution was based was lost. But it has been recently rediscovered!

Ancient silver coin from Cyrene depicting a stalk of silphium (source: Wikipedia)
The “miracle” plant Silphium consumed by Ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians, which was thought to have become extinct two thousand years ago, has recently been rediscovered in Turkey by a professor, who thinks he’s found a botanical survivor (source).

Are your students having problems getting along in school? Are their grades in core content areas slipping? That may be due to commensal septimedia, a condition recently discovered in grades 5-12. It is the direct result of social media usage and exposure to digital media in schools.

While students may endure it for years without visible effect, it can manifest to bad result. To address it, you will need a powerful herb popular in classical Greek and Roman times. The herb is silphium, and it is now available as a dietary supplement, ingestible as a capsule. Five capsules a day, three at breakfast and two at dinner, will have an immediate salutary effect. Scientists at a prestigious nonprofit education organization have conducted ground-breaking, longitudinal research. The curative impact of the Silph Booster cannot be overstated.

This miracle plant supplement has been kept secret for thousands of years. Fortunately, scientists in the lab at Science Institute of Technology made a breakthrough that allows us to bring it to you in four easy payments of $35 each for a bottle of 100 capsules. Call 1-800-282-8232 and ask for Chief Researcher, Miguel Guhlin, for details. The Silph Booster is currently only available for youngsters under parental supervision. A stronger formula for K-16 educators is under development. Order now. Government agencies, like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), want to keep America dumb, so they are fighting to stop production in the United States. For a limited time, you can order the European version of the booster, which features a stronger formula. The Silph Booster is a fake product.

An Unnatural Act

“We have to keep reminding ourselves that critical thinking is an unnatural act,” says Carroll. Like anything else, the more you practice critical thinking, the better you get at it.