A.k.a. The King of woo wooThe arch-bishop of woo himself, and probably one of the most influential (and flaky and zealous) crackpots chugging along today. A prolific author of New Age/self-help books (and a regular contributor to that absolutely abhorrent cesspool of anti-science, Huffington Post), Chopra is famous for using poorly understood (or not understood at all) vocabulary from physics, particularly quantum physics, mixed with “Eastern knowledge”. His writings are usually centered around woo-y claims along the lines of “recognize your inner beauty and the quantum entanglement will cure you”. Ardent opponent of “materialistic science” which hasn't yet recognized the ancient wisdom of Eastern spirituality, reincarnation, homeopathy and such. Earns a lot of money.
His most common inference rule is The Galileo Gambit (“scientist uniformly reject my ideas, but hey! Remember Galileo; his ideas were also reject by the scientific community [well, the church, in fact] back in the days; therefore I am right and everyone else are close-minded). An antidote is available here.
Some examples of his style: Chopra bashing skepticism (that is, Chopra fighting against logic and scientific inquiry – spot the fallacies): ; Chopra being taken on by Michael Shermer; Chopra on ”only spirituality can save the world” (and as Myers points out, Chopra neglects to tell us how); Chopra failing to deal with criticism; Chopra ”proving” that there is an afterlife; Chopra in general (this is part 3; links to the earlier ones); Chopra failing critical thinking yet again.
Well, I guess you get the point. This is a guy so utterly unable to grasp the foundations for critical thinking, so completely out of touch with reason, rationality and the ability to distinguish evidence from wishful thinking, that he must set some kind of record.
Diagnosis: This guy is seriously dangerous; he’s been claimed by Time magazine to be one of the 100 most important people of the 21st century; he has a huge following (Mikhail Gorbachev referred to Chopra as "one of the most lucid and inspired philosophers of our time"). His grasp of reason, critical thinking and reality is more tentative than Jack Chick’s, however, and the lunacy he represents might in the long run be even more dangerous than the Discovery Institute.
In short, he is probably the most influential loon in our Encyclopedia, and among the most dangerous (with Cynthia Dunbar and David Barton and some others).
This is a decent, recent example of total Chopra failure.
ReplyDeleteThis one is marvelous.
ReplyDeleteA most hilarious parody of Chopra, the "DBag Chopra" twitter account, is found here.
ReplyDeleteA rather thorough piece on Chopra’ abuse of terminology from quantum physics can be found here.
ReplyDeleteFor a while, I was worried that Deepak Chopra was not featured here in this blog. As a fellow Indian (at least, Chopra was India born, right?), I even felt that the decision to leave out Chopra might be prompted by a racial motive.:) Thank God, I was wrong. He is in, making India and me proud.
ReplyDeleteChopra feels persecuted by the facts and try to argue that Wikipedia should promote his stuff rather than pointing out that his claims fail to line up with reality. He is also persecuted by the skeptics, exactly like conservative senators, congresspeople and governors are currently being persecuted by transgendered people.
ReplyDeletebefore I go on believing your bashing on this man, I ll have to check his teachings and philosophy and let my OPEN MIND decide if this is yet your another bashing on someone you simply don´t like or are your words the truth...
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DeleteThe criticisms of Deepak are pretty much justified, especially as he is a hypocrite, as he preaches inner peace, yet gets angry at random people such as Neil DeGrasse Tyson on Twitter.
Delete“recognize your inner beauty and the quantum entanglement will cure you” wft does this mean? Nothing, I guess, which is why he's included on your blog. Loving this site.
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