User talk:Derwos

Discretionary sanctions

This is a standard message to notify contributors about an administrative ruling in effect. It does not imply that there are any issues with your contributions to date.

You have shown interest in pseudoscience and fringe science. Due to past disruption in this topic area, a more stringent set of rules called discretionary sanctions is in effect. Any administrator may impose sanctions on editors who do not strictly follow Wikipedia's policies, or the page-specific restrictions, when making edits related to the topic.

For additional information, please see the guidance on discretionary sanctions and the Arbitration Committee's decision here. If you have any questions, or any doubts regarding what edits are appropriate, you are welcome to discuss them with me or any other editor. Tgeorgescu (talk) 05:53, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

Yes. We are biased.

In the section above an editor says that he wants "allow the various competing viewpoints to speak for themselves". presumably he is talking about some "competing viewpoint" other than the viewpoint shared by most scientists and philosophers -- that quantum mysticism is pseudoscience and quackery.

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, once said:

"Wikipedia’s policies around this kind of thing are exactly spot-on and correct. If you can get your work published in respectable scientific journals – that is to say, if you can produce evidence through replicable scientific experiments, then Wikipedia will cover it appropriately.

What we won’t do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of 'true scientific discourse'. It isn’t.[1][2]"

So yes, we are biased.

We are biased towards science and biased against pseudoscience.
We are biased towards astronomy, and biased against astrology.
We are biased towards chemistry, and biased against alchemy.
We are biased towards mathematics, and biased against numerology.
We are biased towards medicine, and biased against homeopathic medicine.
We are biased towards venipuncture, and biased against acupuncture.
We are biased towards quantum entanglement, and biased against quantum mysticism.
We are biased towards cargo planes, and biased against cargo cults.
We are biased towards crops, and biased against crop circles.
We are biased towards laundry soap, and biased against laundry balls.
We are biased towards water treatment, and biased against magnetic water treatment.
We are biased towards electromagnetic fields, and biased against microlepton fields.
We are biased towards evolution, and biased against creationism.
We are biased towards medical treatments that have been proven to be effective in double-blind clinical trials, and biased against medical treatments that are based upon preying on the gullible.
We are biased towards astronauts and cosmonauts, and biased against ancient astronauts.
We are biased towards psychology, and biased against phrenology.
We are biased towards Mendelian inheritance, and biased against Lysenkoism.

And we are not going to change. --Guy Macon (talk) 14:41, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

A person with a PhD in physics performing ESP experiments may have a more valid opinion about whether his/her research is pseudoscience than you, me, and perhaps other physicists. Such qualified people do exist. Scientific consensus almost always implies truth, the key word being "almost". You don't know ESP isn't real, you've merely made a probabilistic determination.

Therefore I will not retreat from the position that ESP might be real, even though I won't bother trying to edit any articles on the topic. Derwos (talk) 23:31, 21 February 2019 (UTC)