why woo is big business
Today, I came across a Newsweek article which tackled Oprah’s long record of supporting all sorts of quack cures, pseudoscience and New Age woo, making the cranks behind them millionaires and celebrities which become near instant household names. Besides giving what should be a disconcerting glimpse into how a single person can misuse her power in a way that affects millions of people, it also made me think about an interesting and cruel fact. There’s a lot of money to be made in selling snake oil on daytime talk shows or with glossy books, while being a skeptic or an expert means you’ll often be dismissed or downright ignored.
Skeptical literature is seldom a hot seller with the exception of fiery books about atheism and the culture wars which tend to dive into the political realm and use science to bolster what’s more of a philosophical case than a purely scientific one. Cranks, on the other hand, sell books by the truckload. Even a skeptical bestseller like Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion which sold over 1.5 million copies, can’t match the estimated 6 million or so copies of The Secret, a book of New Age fluff which declares that if you want something bad enough, reality will change to accommodate your whims. Oh and that’s not counting the 1.5 million DVDs of the same kind of wishful-thinking-in-a-can sold before the book was published and endorsed by the Queen of Woo herself.
And you can see why pseudoscience is so popular. Cranks aren’t limited by facts and figures like skeptics or scientists. They can make up anything to win favor with a crowd. When they’re telling people that their wildest dreams can come true if they close their eyes and think about it hard enough, anyone who dares to stand up, and point out that there’s no evidence for this claim or that reality doesn’t conform to our entitlement complex, seems like a heckler killing everybody’s joyful buzz. The public interested in the kind of stuff skeptics refute on a regular basis doesn’t care about the need for a contrarian opinion. They only care about having their wishes fulfilled, so anyone who tells them otherwise is treated as an undesirable. Even worse, when they tune in and buy the books and DVDs on a regular basis, cranks get even more exposure because their brand of snake oil generates cashflow and keeps ratings high.
But while packaging and selling woo for the mass market is good business, what signal does it send? Why should anyone dedicate the time and effort of studying science and educating the public when it’s so much easier and gainful to come up with some sort of vague New Ageism, go on Oprah’s show, sell a trillion books and attain national fame while royalty checks and speaking honorariums rain from the sky? And where should we draw the line between making money and educating the public?
