Not Even Wrong

"Physicist Wolfgang Pauli dismissed a muddled theory with this single, scathing line: "That is not only not right; it is not even wrong." It sounds pedantic, but Pauli's point is an important one. Some claims are wrong not because they contradict evidence, but because they can't be tested at all. And that distinction is just as relevant when debating on social media today as it was when applied in the field of 20th-century physics."

"But other claims seem immune to contradiction. Even when said claims don't hold up, they still manage to slip through scrutiny. You know the ones: A conspiracy theorist might say, "The government is run by aliens," or a wellness coach might say, "Your energy is blocked." You can't exactly disprove these statements, but that's not because they are true. It's because they were crafted to be impossible to test."

"Even if people make these statements with good intentions, the statements themselves are not harmless. Unfalsifiable claims waste time, make people anxious, and generate debates that divide families. In an age where attention is currency, the unfalsifiable claim is a weapon that we need armor against. The good news is that there is such armor. We don't have to disprove every wild claim. Instead, we can start with a better question: "What would it take to prove this wrong?""

Some claims are falsifiable and can be tested, corrected, and debated, while other claims are deliberately constructed to be immune to contradiction because they cannot be tested. Unfalsifiable claims include conspiracy assertions or vague wellness statements and often evade scrutiny by design. Such claims waste time, increase anxiety, and provoke divisive debates, especially on social media where attention is valuable. A practical response is to ask what would prove a claim wrong; if nothing could, the claim is not a genuine argument. Intellectual strength requires recognizing epistemic limits and having the humility to say "I don't know."

Read at Psychology Today