Physi­cist and sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tor Richard Feyn­man came up with anoth­er cri­te­ri­on, one that applies direct­ly to the non-sci­en­tist like­ly to be bam­boo­zled by fan­cy ter­mi­nol­o­gy that sounds sci­en­tif­ic. […] Rather than ask­ing lay peo­ple to con­front sci­en­tif­ic-sound­ing claims on their own terms, Feyn­man would have us trans­late them into ordi­nary lan­guage, there­by assur­ing that what the claim asserts is a log­i­cal con­cept, rather than just a col­lec­tion of jar­gon.

~ from Richard Feynman Creates a Simple Method for Telling Science From Pseudoscience (1966)

Confronting scientific-sounding things on your own terms is actually very difficult. What he’s described is not meant to be a way to decide if something is true—that’s much harder. He’s giving you a tool for quickly spotting scientific-sounding rubbish.

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