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.
Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit: Tools for Thinking Critically (2025)
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Re: Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit: Tools for Thinking Critically (2025)
#42Acclaimed science author Carl Sagan illustrated this challenge with his “dragon in the garage” analogy. 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. Similarly, without verifiable evidence, the existence of an immortal soul remains unproven. https://www.rxjourney.net/the-possib…
The dragon in the room is the hidden qualifier for "undetectable by any means" is "that is currently known to humanity". That makes Carl Sagan's claim some what Balonish. Not sure why the smart Sagan fell for it.
I think you missed his point. In that exercise, the justifications for the dragons existence are always shifting.
“Oh, it doesn’t show up on thermal? That’s because it doesn’t emit heat. It has special fire”
“Oh, when you spray flour in the air nothing sticks to the dragon? Well that’s because it is also incorporeal”
Skeptics keep asking questions. That’s the point. If you are never satisfied with any answer, you have no reason to believe the claim. There is literally nothing there to believe in.
His point is that skepticism and wonder go hand in hand. One without the other is dangerous. What a fascinating claim, an invisible dragon! It should not be dismissed outright as obvious quackery, but let’s see how much scrutiny it can take
We start with an invisible dragon and the more we look into it we now have to explain fire without heat, bodies without form, etc. gee, it seems that for this to be true our entire understanding of the world is wrong…or is the simple answer that someone is trying to trick us would answer this better.
Then the skeptic starts asking why someone would want to trick us…
Re: Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit: Tools for Thinking Critically (2025)
#43The people for whom this stuff isn't glaringly obvious, relatively early in life, will never get it. Except, maybe, specific instances that directly affect them in a bad way. Switch "brands" and they'll be fooled again. They'll probably even double-down on it.
Hard disagree. I grew up with parents who LOVED science; my earliest memories in the 80s are my mom checking out Cosmos from the library on VHS and binging it. It is a big reason I have an engineering PhD. At the same time, they were 60s hippies and into meditation woo-woo, as in "visualize a beam of light coming from your stomach and you can instantly travel to Jupiter!", being able to walk through walls because of…
Another anecdote: Ann Druyan (Sagan's wife and collaborator) was into the wu herself!
Re: Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit: Tools for Thinking Critically (2025)
#44The 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…
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So openClaw bots are now even infesting HN with absolutely non-sense phrases ? WTF. Would be interesting what the recent stats on this say @dang / e.g. % new registrations since the claw-debacle, profiles with claw in their username , etc.
Re: Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit: Tools for Thinking Critically (2025)
#45Acclaimed science author Carl Sagan illustrated this challenge with his “dragon in the garage” analogy. 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. Similarly, without verifiable evidence, the existence of an immortal soul remains unproven. https://www.rxjourney.net/the-possib…
Doesn’t silent, invisible, intangible also apply to software? You can’t really tell a particular piece of hardware is running software by a direct physical measurement. You can only infer that indirectly.
As others are pointing out, this isn't true. You can absolutely infer the software state of a system via physical measurement.
But what's interesting isn't your mistake, it's why the mistake was made. The abstraction stack in software is really, really really thick. You don't normally "measure" your software, you add a log statement or run a debugger, and that's more software. And those debuggers aren't written over hardware, they're software too.
But eventually, you get down to the point where there really is hardware in the way. A debugger that tells you the content of a memory address really is, down the stack, doing a memory read, which is an instruction to hardware to measure the voltages in an array of inverter pairs structured as a level 1 SRAM[1]. Or it's setting a breakpoint or watchpoint, which are CPU features implemented in hardware, etc...
The hardware is always there, but we've done such a good job of hiding it that even practitioners are fooled into thinking it isn't there.
[1] And of course there's a stack there too. But read instructions hit the L1 cache.
Re: Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit: Tools for Thinking Critically (2025)
#46Acclaimed science author Carl Sagan illustrated this challenge with his “dragon in the garage” analogy. 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. Similarly, without verifiable evidence, the existence of an immortal soul remains unproven. https://www.rxjourney.net/the-possib…
A parking lot dragon? This sounds familiar. [Assuming not a Dragon of Eden, nor one who farts nerve gas] I believe it is a parable about cause and effect; consistency of the world's state.
A parking garage, poured in modern times from reinforced concrete, might have been found to be structurally unstable during a renovation. If this turned out to be rooted in a massive [dragon, dinosaur, etc] skeleton being embedded in the concrete (As it was being poured?) surely this would be a contradiction, if people (workers, onlookers) witnessed the garage's construction.
There would be evidence from the reinforcement efforts; materials sourced to reinforce it due to structural flaws introduced by the skeleton; wear on the truck tires carrying them, memories in brains etc. If suddenly the skeleton were to have vanished, would there be logical consistency problems with the world state? Quite a thing to ponder!
I would like to clarify that this is purely a thought experiment. It is not possible that any group of people, no matter how secluded, could either A: Will such a reptile into existence while maintaining cosmological consistency, nor B: Remove it from our cosmos after evidence over its existence has propagated.
Re: Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit: Tools for Thinking Critically (2025)
#47The 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)
Re: Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit: Tools for Thinking Critically (2025)
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn’t silent, invisible, intangible also apply to software? You can’t really tell a particular piece of hardware is running software by a direct physical measurement. You can only infer that indirectly.
Having debugged code with a logic analyzer, I'm pretty sure the voltage on those CPU pins is real, and really the consequence of the code I think I'm running.
This. Try it! LAs are cheap and easier to use than a scope, even if it has digital features.
Re: Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit: Tools for Thinking Critically (2025)
#49I think the notion of considering all points of view depends on the assumption that people are arguing in good faith. When this breaks down, I don’t think we can just throw up our hands and give up, but the baloney detection kit needs to be updated. I don’t have a blog-worthy list of answers, but it’s something I at least think about.
One thing we can do is a kind of meta-analysis, where we check on the condition of our own baloney detection kit. For instance, if I reject an idea and it later turns out to be true, did my BDK fail? Does it need to be updated? Or are a few scattered failures OK? You can treat the BDK as a testable hypothesis like anything else.
Re: Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit: Tools for Thinking Critically (2025)
#50Acclaimed science author Carl Sagan illustrated this challenge with his “dragon in the garage” analogy. 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. Similarly, without verifiable evidence, the existence of an immortal soul remains unproven. https://www.rxjourney.net/the-possib…
Doesn’t silent, invisible, intangible also apply to software? You can’t really tell a particular piece of hardware is running software by a direct physical measurement. You can only infer that indirectly.
Software (that is running on hardware) isn't a great example - you'd be better off going with something like prime numbers. They don't really "exist" in the same way a toaster does. Souls also don't exist (citation needed etc) but are a similarly useful (for some people) way of thinking about the world.