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.
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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