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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)

#81

Post by pjmorris »

palmotea wrote: post #65
pjmorris wrote: post #59

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.

>> 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 Friedman's invisible hand. I call these beliefs irrational not because they aren't profitable and effective - in certain environments for certain times - but because in the long run they will bring unenlightened practitioners and their subjects to ruin because they won't balance themselves and so they will be balanced by something else.

As economist Stevie Wonder once said, "When you believe in things that you don't understand Then you suffer Superstition ain't the way"

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

#83

Post by fmlpp »

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…

What a vision.

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

#84

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

palmotea wrote: post #65
pjmorris wrote: post #59

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.

>> 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.

I'd suggest reading David Graeber. Those aren't as categorically distinct as you're assuming.

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

#85

Post by BeetleB »

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…

> 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 premise) — not just most of them

From The Demon Haunted World:

"In the middle 1970s an astronomer I admire put together a modest manifesto called “Objections to Astrology” and asked me to endorse it. I struggled with his wording, and in the end found myself unable to sign—not because I thought astrology has any validity whatever, but because I felt (and still feel) that the tone of the statement was authoritarian. It criticized astrology for having origins shrouded in superstition. But this is true as well for religion, chemistry, medicine, and astronomy, to mention only four. The issue is not what faltering and rudimentary knowledge astrology came from, but what is its present validity.

...

The statement stressed that we can think of no mechanism by which astrology could work. This is certainly a relevant point but by itself it’s unconvincing. No mechanism was known for continental drift (now subsumed in plate tectonics) when it was proposed by Alfred Wegener in the first quarter of the twentieth century to explain a range of puzzling data in geology and paleontology. (Ore-bearing veins of rocks and fossils seemed to run continuously from Eastern South America to West Africa; were the two continents once touching and the Atlantic Ocean new to our planet?) The notion was roundly dismissed by all the great geophysicists, who were certain that continents were fixed, not floating on anything, and therefore unable to “drift.” Instead, the key twentieth-century idea in geophysics turns out to be plate tectonics; we now understand that continental plates do indeed float and “drift” (or better, are carried by a kind of conveyor belt driven by the great heat engine of the Earth’s interior), and all those great geophysicists were simply wrong. Objections to pseudoscience on the grounds of unavailable mechanism can be mistaken—although if the contentions violate well-established laws of physics, such objections of course carry great weight."

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

#86

Post by BeetleB »

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #34
chistev wrote: post #3

Acclaimed 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 is just a gauge. Gauge symmetry

Good one!

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

#87

Post by BeetleB »

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.

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

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

#88

Post by illithid0 »

deron12 wrote: post #61
kgwxd wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it possible to get people to think critically and self-reflect, as a third party? The answer to that question lies in the bottom of a cup of hemlock.

I don't know, man. I'm at a point where not even the tangible effects on me that the policies and decisions some members of my family endorse are enough to get them to think twice.

I can sit right in front of them and describe the problems I'm now dealing with and point out the exact legislative changes that caused them and it's like their brains turn off until the subject changes. More than happy to pray for me, though.

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

#89

Post by eafer »

BeetleB wrote: post #87
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.

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 interesting to read.

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

#90

Post by eafer »

RichardCA wrote: post #76
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.

Sagan made solid contributions to Planetary Science in the 60's and 70's. His role as PBS educator, SF author, etc. needs to be considered as a separate thing. I also loved James Burke and his Connections series, but as it got into the later seasons the so-called "connections" got tenuous and sometimes quite strained. You can go through all the classic PBS science shows and find problems, Stephen Hawking's Universe w…

People like Sagan have a worldview in which we are all either rational robots that only believe in "science", or else silly magic-believers that can't think by themselves. Of course Sagan himself proves that this is wrong: you can be a great scientist while believing a lot of silly nonsense about the ancient world, and about crab evolution apparently.
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