Not even wrong
Physicist Wolfgang Pauli once dismissed a muddled theory with a single line:
“That is not only not right; it is not even wrong.”
It sounds pedantic—and to be fair, it sounds like the kind of insult only a physicist can deliver with a straight face—, but Pauli is making an important point here.
Some claims are wrong not because they contradict evidence, but because they can’t be tested at all. And that distinction is relevant, both in the field of 20th-century physics, as well as when you’re debating on social media today.
Falsifiable statements are easy enough to handle: we can test them, debate them, and make corrections if necessary. But other claims seem immune to contradiction. Even when said claims don’t hold up, they still manage to slip through scrutiny.
You know the ones: A conspiracy theorist might say, “The government is run by aliens”, or a wellness coach might say “Your energy is blocked.” You can’t exactly disprove these statements, but that’s not because they are true. It’s because they were crafted to be impossible to test.
Conspiracy theories take this one step further even, where the lack of evidence becomes part of the proof: “A secret group controls everything, and the reason there’s no evidence is because they’re powerful enough to hide it.” Any document disproving the claim is clearly disinformation put out by the group. The idea can’t ever be challenged because it absorbs the challenge into itself.
Even if people make these statements with good intentions, unfalsifiable claims aren’t harmless: they waste time, make people anxious, and generate debates that divide families. In an age where attention is currency, the unfalsifiable claim is a weapon that we need to armor against.
The good news is that there is such armor. We don’t have to disprove every wild claim.
Instead, we can start with a better question: “What would it take to prove this wrong? And if the answer is “nothing could,” then you’ve found the tell: It’s not an argument. And not only is it not an argument, but it’s a mere smokescreen from which you’re free to step away.
Knowing when not to engage in debate is a skill in itself, so spotting the unfalsifiable helps us conserve energy for conversations that actually require our attention.