Comic #5672: demarcation

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Panel 1: Philosophers carp about whether there’s a well-defined difference between hard and soft science. But it’s easy to pinpoint!

Panel 2: Just put the word “mad” in front of a practitioner of the discipline and see how scared you are.

Panel 3: “Mad chemist.” Yikes! Definitely hard. “Mad geneticist”? Probably making killer frog-men or something. Way scary. Hard science.

Panel 4: Mad conservation biologist? Okay, maybe they’re bringing back the T-rex for ecological reasons or something.

Panel 5: A mad anthropologist might be, I dunno, sabotaging venerated cultural beliefs?

Panel 6: Then, you can easily separate out pseudoscience because the mad versions are funny. Mad astrology? What’s their crazy plan? Making astrology actually work?

Panel 7: What’s mad homeopathy? Trying to drown people?

Panel 8: I can’t tell if this is true or just stupid.

Panel 9: That’s because I’m a mad epistemologist!

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