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Pseudoscience is fake science. The surest way to spot a fake is to know as much as possible about the real thing. Knowing science does not mean simply knowing scientific facts, it means understanding how science works: the criteria of evidence, the design of meaningful experiments, the weighing of possibilities, the testing of hypotheses, the establishment of theories, and the many aspects of scientific methods that make it possible to draw reliable conclusions about the physical universe. Many pseudo-masters use pseudoscience to convince students that their style of martial arts is valid. Pseudoscience often strikes educated, rational people as too nonsensical and preposterous to be dangerous; they consider it a source of amusement rather than fearing it. Unfortunately, this is not a wise attitude. Pseudoscience may be extremely dangerous, especially to the under-educated.

The following are indicators of the presence of pseudoscience. The presence of even one of the indicators should arouse suspicion, but pseudo-masters who use none of the indicators might still be using pseudoscience.

• Indifference to facts. In the 1960s television show Dragnet, Jack Webb's "Sergeant Joe Friday" LAPD detective character used to say "All we want are the facts, ma'am" when question a female witness. Over the years since the show went off the air, the quotation has been misquoted to say, "Just the facts. ma'am." For pseudo-masters, the quote should be "Adjust the facts, ma'am."

  Instead of consulting reference works, pseudo-masters simply spout bogus "facts" where needed. These fictions are often central to their argument. Moreover, pseudo-masters rarely revise their ideas. The first edition of a martial art book based on pseudoscience is almost always the last one, even though the book remains in print for centuries. For liars, the technique is to standby you original lie, no matter what. Even books with obvious mistakes, errors, and misprints on every page may be reprinted over and over.

• Research is invariably sloppy. Pseudo-masters clip newspaper reports, collect hearsay, cite other pseudoscience books, and pour over ancient religious or mythological works to prove there theories. They rarely, if ever, make an independent investigation to check their sources.

• Begins with a false hypothesis. The hypothesis pseudo-masters start with is usually one that is appealing emotionally, and spectacularly implausible. Then pseudo-masters look only for items that appear to support their hypothesis; conflicting evidence is ignored. The aim of pseudo-masters is usually to rationalize their strongly held beliefs, rather than to investigate or to test alternative possibilities. Pseudo-masters specialize in jumping to conclusions, grinding ideological axes, appealing to preconceived ideas, and to spreading misunderstandings.

• Indifference to criteria of valid evidence. The emphasis of pseudo-master research is not on meaningful, controlled, repeatable scientific style experiments. Instead, it is on unverifiable eyewitness testimony, stories and tall tales, hearsay, rumor, and dubious anecdotes. Genuine scientific literature on the subject is either ignored or misinterpreted.

• Relies heavily on subjective validation.  The pseudo-master said he would touch the student's head and she would fall backward; he touched the student's head and she fell backward. To pseudoscience, this means the pseudo-master has a death touch that will topple any person. To science this means nothing, since no experiment was done. A controlled experiment would use many non students and compare the results. Many people believe in astrology since a newspaper horoscope describes them perfectly. However, the description is general enough to cover virtually everyone. This phenomenon, called subjective validation, is one of the foundations of popular support for pseudoscience.

• Depends on arbitrary conventions of human culture, rather than on unchanging regularities of nature. For instance, the interpretations of astrology depend on the names of things, which are accidental and vary from culture to culture. If the ancients had given the name Mars to the planet we call Jupiter, and vice versa, astronomy could care less but astrology would be totally different, because it depends solely on the name and has nothing to do with the physical properties of the planet itself.

• Avoids putting claims to a meaningful test. Pseudo-masters never carry out careful, methodical experiments themselves, and they also generally ignore results of those carried out by others. They never follow up. If one pseudo-master claims to have done an experiment, no other pseudo-master ever tries to duplicate it or to investigate the pseudo-master's claims, even when the original results are missing or questionable. Further, where a pseudo-master claims to have done an experiment with a remarkable result, he or she never repeats it to check the results and procedures. This is in contrast with science, where crucial experiments are repeated by scientists all over the world with ever-increasing precision.

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