Editing Pseudoscience (section)

===Absence of progress===
* Failure to progress towards additional evidence of its claims.<ref name="Lakatos_1970"/>{{refn|name=fredb|group=Note|"We can now propose the following principle of demarcation: A theory or discipline which purports to be scientific is pseudoscientific if and only if: it has been less progressive than alternative theories over a long period of time, and faces many unsolved problems; but the community of practitioners makes little attempt to develop the theory towards solutions of the problems, shows no concern for attempts to evaluate the theory in relation to others, and is selective in considering confirmations and non confirmations."{{sfnp|Thagard|1978|pp=227–228}}}} [[Terence Hines]] has identified astrology as a subject that has changed very little in the past two millennia.{{sfnp|Thagard|1978|pp=223 ff}}<ref name="Hines1988">{{cite book|author-link=Terence Hines |last=Hines|first=Terence|year=1988|title=Pseudoscience and the Paranormal: A Critical Examination of the Evidence |publisher=Prometheus Books|location=Buffalo, NY|isbn=978-0-87975-419-8 |url=https://archive.org/details/pseudosciencepar00hine}}</ref>
* Lack of self-correction: scientific research programmes make mistakes, but they tend to reduce these errors over time.{{sfnp|Ruscio|2002|p=120}} By contrast, ideas may be regarded as pseudoscientific because they have remained unaltered despite contradictory evidence. The work ''Scientists Confront Velikovsky'' (1976) Cornell University, also delves into these features in some detail, as does the work of [[Thomas Kuhn]], e.g., ''The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'' (1962) which also discusses some of the items on the list of characteristics of pseudoscience.
* Statistical significance of supporting experimental results does not improve over time and are usually close to the cutoff for statistical significance. Normally, experimental techniques improve or the experiments are repeated, and this gives ever stronger evidence. If statistical significance does not improve, this typically shows the experiments have just been repeated until a success occurs due to chance variations.