Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit: Tools for Thinking Critically (2025)

openculture.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 129 posts

Re: Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit: Tools for Thinking Critically (2025)

#111

Post by godelski »

kgwxd wrote: post #36
scns wrote: post #20

The article links to an article about Sagans' prediction of the decline of america. Strangely fitting nowadays. > I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one represen…

Sounds like he just read history, noticed repeating patterns, and believed his own eyes. It sucks that makes him some kind of special person, instead of "people" just being the kind of thing that commonly does stuff like that.

[dead]

Re: Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit: Tools for Thinking Critically (2025)

#112

Post by godelski »

kitd wrote: post #29

- Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. - See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will. This is good advice IME. Get well acquainted (like REALLY well acquainted) with opposing viewpoints, such that you could argue them better th…

  > Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours.
It is very similar to Feynman's

  The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that.
I'm linking my comment but if you want to skip to the source it is [5]: Cargo Cult Science.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46997906

Re: Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit: Tools for Thinking Critically (2025)

#113

Post by stefanfisk »

chistev wrote: post #5
nobody9999 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If someone claims to have a dragon that is invisible, silent, intangible, and undetectable by any means, there is no practical difference between the dragon’s existence and non-existence. “Everyone knows that dragons don’t exist. But while this simplistic formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific mind. The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact wholly unconcerned with what doe…

https://youtube.com/shorts/CEEHjtVJHYs?si=H_muwqpJTIndywr8

So gender is a strict binary but dragons kinda-sorta exist, got it (＠_＠)

Re: Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit: Tools for Thinking Critically (2025)

#114

Post by deaux »

nradov wrote: post #77
rhcom2 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always felt like Congressional debates should begin with each side trying to explain the opposing position, with debate only beginning when each side agrees with the opposition's framing of their PoV. I also recognize how naive and idealistic this sounds.

The public Congressional debates are performative, intended to curry favor with key voters, campaign donors, and media personalities. The substantive debates happen in private using completely different rhetoric. This is mostly fine in that it allows for policy decisions to move forward with compromises. The problem is that some members of Congress are unable to shut off their deranged public personas even in private…

Was this the case from day 1 in the US?

How about day 1 in Ancient Greece? Or the French Republic?

One for our political historians. I'm sure you can stretch anywhere into "yes" or "no", but what do the relative degrees look like?

Re: Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit: Tools for Thinking Critically (2025)

#115

Post by like_any_other »

zyxzevn wrote: post #16

While skeptical, he did not have much skepticism against mainstream theories. I think it needs another item in the list: For any theory/ hypothesis: how well does it stand against the null-hypothesis? For example: How much physical evidence is there really for the string-theory? And I would upgrade this one: If there’s a chain of physical evidence (was argument), every link in the chain must work (including the premi…

> For any theory/ hypothesis: how well does it stand against the null-hypothesis? For example: How much physical evidence is there really for the string-theory?

That's an unfortunate choice of example - the problem with string theory is that there is no null hypothesis. We know that our other theories are not self-consistent when unified, but we don't have a theory that is self-consistent, that could serve as the null hypothesis.

Re: Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit: Tools for Thinking Critically (2025)

#116

Post by pu_pe »

eafer wrote: post #89
BeetleB wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did he make the stuff up, or did he get them from (now considered) poor sources?

I think "made up" is fair. I can't know what his process was and everybody makes mistakes, but almost every single thing he said about history was wrong in a way that was convenient to his narrative, and it's not like he ever retracted anything. Surely if he wrote a whole book about dealing with bullshit he could have used that opportunity for some reflection about his past mistakes, now that would have been interest…

Do you have a specific source for this claim? I have read through what someone else posted in this thread (https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/02/05/carl-sagan-was-...) and while some details are indeed incorrect, a lot of it is nitpicking or common misconceptions from his time.

Re: Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit: Tools for Thinking Critically (2025)

#117

Post by janez2 »

mdelias wrote: post #47
scns wrote: post #20

The article links to an article about Sagans' prediction of the decline of america. Strangely fitting nowadays. > I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one represen…

Brian Williams reads and recites the above (2021) https://youtu.be/utjK0EtkU8U?si=vWYdumffcgxKvkFV

your link has a "si=" tracking parameter

Re: Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit: Tools for Thinking Critically (2025)

#118

Post by palmotea »

pjmorris wrote: post #81
palmotea wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> capitalism infected by the shareholder-theory-of-value and financialization > For those who aren't inside the club, those are superstitions. Come on, they are not. One is a value system, the other is a technology/practice.

Maybe I have too much imagination and stretched the rules a bit. But, if superstition is 'any belief or practice considered by non-practitioners to be irrational or supernatural', I'd argue that financialization is a consequence of an irrational belief in the power of the 'invisible hand' and that the shareholder-theory-of-value is a similar belief in the power of abstractions over actual human needs. Call it Friedma…

> Maybe I have too much imagination and stretched the rules a bit. But, if superstition is 'any belief or practice considered by non-practitioners to be irrational or supernatural', I'd argue that financialization is a consequence of an irrational belief in the power of the 'invisible hand' and that the shareholder-theory-of-value is a similar belief in the power of abstractions over actual human needs.

I think it's too much of a stretch to label anything "irrational" as superstition.

I think both the purported benefits of the shareholder-theory-of-value and fictionalization rely on plausible-but-false belief in the outcomes created by the 'invisible hand'/selfishness-at-scale, but I wouldn't call it superstition, just wrong.

Also, I think the connotations of words are pretty important, and there are a lot of words that for the most part mean the same thing with different connotations. If I had to describe the connotation of superstition, its an action believed to have an effect, but that effect is a total non-sequitur. At least with what we're talking about, there's at least a plausible basis for believing the effect will happen, even it that basis is wrong.

Re: Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit: Tools for Thinking Critically (2025)

#119

Post by jgoewert »

eafer wrote: post #56
eafer wrote: post #41

I wonder how well Sagan's own "baloney" holds up against his kit. Historians despise the guy for all the stuff he made up about the library of Alexandria, Hypatia, Eratosthenes, etc... People still repeat a lot of that to this day.

I just found out that his story about the Heike Crabs is also complete baloney. That makes me sad, it was really such a great story.

Really? I think Joel is the one full of it.

Human directed selection is a thing.

Have you ever seen a pug or do I need 58 articles with a bibliography 20 miles long to tell you they exist?

Re: Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit: Tools for Thinking Critically (2025)

#120

Post by nradov »

deaux wrote: post #114
nradov wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The public Congressional debates are performative, intended to curry favor with key voters, campaign donors, and media personalities. The substantive debates happen in private using completely different rhetoric. This is mostly fine in that it allows for policy decisions to move forward with compromises. The problem is that some members of Congress are unable to shut off their deranged public personas even in private…

Was this the case from day 1 in the US? How about day 1 in Ancient Greece? Or the French Republic? One for our political historians. I'm sure you can stretch anywhere into "yes" or "no", but what do the relative degrees look like?

There was always a performative aspect to the public debates but it really escalated after C-SPAN started televising everything. In principle citizens should be able to watch their legislature in operation but the effects haven't been entirely positive.
Post reply on HN