ThirstyFish

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back", wrote Carl Sagan. He was particularly annoyed with pseudoscience. In one of his essays, The Fine Art of Baloney Detection, he even prepared a "Baloney Detection Kit".

It's simply too painful for me to acknowledge that so many people I know have been "taken". Not always by pseudoscience, but definitely by charlatans. These days, charlatans come with big and formal titles like journalist, doctor, professor, economist, judge, expert and even scientist.