Save us from earthquake predicting frauds, people who prey upon our fears of the unknown and unpredictable. They tell us their star charts and moon calendars and fanciful calculations can predict earthquakes. Bullshit, they can’t. How they work is like this:
They try to sound scientific and use charts, numbers and terms which make them look like they are experts to be listened to. The funny thing is they also slag off any real scientific expert because, wait for it … you can’t believe experts. Makes sense doesn’t it? They are no better than fortune tellers and psychics – yes, they are speaking crap too – but like them they are very good at manipulating human behaviour. Picking up on deep seated fears and letting us do the work for them: they supply a vague unsubstantiated ‘prediction’ like there will be a big earthquake soon, sometime, somewhere … eventually. Sure enough one hits and you say ‘yes, they predicted it!’ If you looked a bit deeper you might find you live on a bloody great fault line and earthquakes are happening all the time. You’ll probably also find the predicted date was one of many, many predictions so chances are one of them will get close. Predict a magnitude 8.5 on the 15th of August in the middle Australia and get it right, well, okay you might be on to something. What they’ll actually say is ‘somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere an unexpected earthquake will happen in the second half of the year’. Not quite so clever.
Their other tactic is to discredit science by saying it’s not always right. Of course it isn’t always right, science deals in probability and objective observation. In other words it accepts the models it comes up with to explain the world are only approximations and accept they will be modified as new information becomes known. Inevitably science gets it wrong from time to time, if you want ‘never wrong’ join a nut-bag religion.
Put it this way: if you have enough confidence the brakes on your car will work and the plane you’re in won’t crash or the machine in the operating theatre will keep you alive then you’ve already put more faith into science than you’ll ever put into some ego-centric loon trying to tell you they can predict earthquakes. They might even tell you they can tell you your cat’s personality from it’s paw prints and offer to sell you a book on it – oh wait, one already does.
obnoxiousrant 