Baloney Detection Kit

[Wyatt Earp]

There may not be articles specific to the Ripper, but there are any number of articles about things tangential to the Ripper. I've read articles about societal views of prostitution, societal views on insanity, potential pollutants in London, Burke and Hare, Jewry in the East End... and while none of these articles discussed the Ripper, they are illuminating to the world that he lived and killed in. You read about Victorian prostitution, and you understand why it was hard for the locals to get excited about the death of a whore. You read about the polluted water, and see why so many alcoholics lived in the East End. What can you know about Jack the Ripper and his Victims if you don't know their world? And there are a lot of things we don't know about their world. There is a reason it is highly unlikely that Jack was mad. But you have to know how Victorians viewed and dealt with madness in order to understand why. You have to understand the life of a Jew in the East End to judge the veracity of Israel Schwartz's story. It's not enough to know that anti semitism was a thing back then. You have to know what they faced, every day.

Of course an academic is going to be selective in who they allow to reproduce their articles, but that can only be for the good.

Ok, I am with you then. If it was broad in scope, I think it could work.

[RivkahChaya]

1. How reliable is the source of the claim?
2. Does the source make similar claims?
3. Have the claims been verified by somebody else?
4. Does this fit with the way the world works?
5. Has anyone tried to disprove the claim?
6. Where does the preponderance of evidence point?
7. Is the claimant playing by the rules of science?
8. Is the claimant providing positive evidence?
9. Does the new theory account for as many phenomena as the old theory?
10. Are personal beliefs driving the claim?

Somebody knows how the world works?

That list is a little out of context. Shermer was directly this at People like Jenny McCarthy, and her anti-vaccine crusade, or people who support homeopathy. Shermer wasn't really talking about history.

When you are evaluating the claim of a "supplement" available and the GNC (General Nutrition Center, a chain of stores promoting pseudo-nutrition in the US), and it claims to "prevent illness by balancing your body's energy," or some nonsense, we do in fact know how the world works. Illnesses are caused by microscopic organisms, genetic factors, or toxins, usually; never, ever by "energy imbalance," unless that's a fancy way of saying a diabetic needs an insulin injection, and even then, something from the GNC won't help.

People who promote quack medicine don't "play by the rules of science" in one really obvious way, and it's called "moving the goalposts." We saw it in the vaccine-autism panic. First, people claimed that the measles vaccine itself caused autism, and when that was disproved, unwilling to drop the idea that vaccines are bad, they went on to say that it was the preservative in the vaccines. When the preservative was removed, they came up with yet another claim-- that children receive too many vaccines at once.

That is also an example of personal belief driving a claim: vaccines are bad. No matter how many specific mechanisms for vaccines causing harm are disproved, people simply invent another one-- each one less plausible-- because vaccines must be bad.

You see the latter in Ripper research a lot. Someone comes up with a suspect and a plausible scenario. Then someone else says, "No, he couldn't have done it, because he was known to in another place just a few hours before one of the murders." But instead of dropping the matter, the original theorist invents a really fanciful plan involving either some gallop through town on horseback that no one at the time noticed, or a really convincing stooge (who managed to keep silent about it forever) in disguise, so that the suspect was never in the other place to begin with.

#10 also is about religious beliefs, inasmuch as Shermer was dealing with them. Religious beliefs drive a lot of pseudoscience and quack medicine. I can't think of an example of religious beliefs driving a Ripper theory, but religious and other prejudices certainly drive the masonic conspiracy theories.

Oh, Patricia Cornwell. When you spend upwards of $5 million trying to prove a theory, it's hard to let go.

[Barnaby]

I think that there are a lot of parallels between pseudoscience and pseudohistory, and thus this list is applicable. Now if you excuse me I have to get back to watching Ancient Aliens on the History Channel!