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nobody9999•1d

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

105 comments

scns•1d
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 representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…
https://www.openculture.com/2025/02/carl-sagan-predicts-the-...
- mdelias•1d
  Brian Williams reads and recites the above (2021)
  https://youtu.be/utjK0EtkU8U?si=vWYdumffcgxKvkFV
  - janez2•5h
    your link has a "si=" tracking parameter
- fmlpp•22h
  What a vision.
- kgwxd•1d
  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.
  - deron12•1d
    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.
    - illithid0•22h
      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.
      - claytongulick•19h
        Do you think there's a possibility that while they may love you and sympathize with your struggles, they recognize that with any policy some people will be negatively affected?
        The idea is to have political policy that minimizes harm and maximizes benefit, for the most people.
        Is it possible that this is the way they are viewing it, and that perhaps you are the one who isn't thinking critically because you're being directly negatively affected?
        nrb•18h
        Definitely reasonable to question oneself in this way. But realistically, if someone is unwilling to engage with you about policies that negatively affect you, but instead offer their prayers, that "perhaps..." is working overtime.
- godelski•15h
  Asimov and Feynman also spoke about similar things (along with many others)
  In 1980, Asimov famously wrote The Cult of Ignorance[0], criticizing the rise of anti-intellectualism. Where there was a strong political push of "don't trust the experts". He criticizes claims that sound familiar today "America has a right to know" on the basis of this being meaningless without literacy. He clarifies that literacy is far more than being able to actually read words on a page, but to interpret and process them. Asimov isn't being pretentious, his definition is consistent with how we determine reading levels[2] and his critique would be that most people do not have that of a Freshman in High School. Hell, it is even in his fiction! It is even in The Foundation and is literally the premise of Profession[3].
  Feynman is a bit more scattered, but I think his discussion about the education system in Brazil (in the 50's) says a lot[4]. He talks a lot about how the students could recite the equations, ace all the tests, and achieve everything that looks to be, at least on paper, perfectly academic; but how the students did not really have the deeper understanding of the equations. It is a discussion about literacy. Were he around today I'm sure he'd use the phrase "metric hacking". Anyone that knows Feynman may also be thinking about his Cargo Cult Science[5](a commencement speech at Cal Tech (1974)). This is where his famous quote
```
  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. 
```
  comes from. But there is a lot of important context surrounding this and it is worth knowing about.
  [0] Note: 1980 was an election year, and one with a sweeping victory...[1] https://people.bath.ac.uk/mnsbr/papers/Asimov-Newsweek-Janua...
  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_United_States_presidentia...
  [2] https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/reading/achieve.aspx
  [3] Profession has been in discussion lately, directly relating to this topic. If you haven't read it I'll say it is one of my favorite's of his. Not as good as Foundation but up there with Nightfall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession_(novella)
  [4] https://enlightenedidiot.net/random/feynman-on-brazilian-edu...
  [5] https://sites.cs.ucsb.edu/~ravenben/cargocult.html
  [Edit]
  I wanted to add Asimov's The Relativity of Wrong. Sometimes I feel it should be required reading before arguing on the internet. I find myself coming back to read it at least once a year
  https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
- palmotea•1d
  > 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 representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…
  Not really. His prediction actually seems pretty off-base, with only some bits that are coincidentally correct. For instance, he seems to attributing the cause of that decline to superstition, when it was really capitalism infected by the shareholder-theory-of-value and financialization pursued by really smart and rational people focused on pursing their narrow self-interest.
  I don't know the full context of that passage, but my read comports with my understanding of Sagan's biases.
  - pjmorris•1d
    > capitalism infected by the shareholder-theory-of-value and financialization
    For those who aren't inside the club, those are superstitions.
    - palmotea•24h
      >> 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.
      - pjmorris•22h
        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"
        palmotea•1h
        > 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.
      - jasonwatkinspdx•22h
        I'd suggest reading David Graeber. Those aren't as categorically distinct as you're assuming.
  - xhkkffbf•1d
    I kind of agree. I find that almost everyone I meet has a firm grasp on tech topics affect their lives. From social media to privacy, they seem to understand the fundamental questions even though they aren't programmers or CISOs or whatever.
  - krapp•1d
    > when it was really capitalism infected by the shareholder-theory-of-value and fictionalization pursued by really smart and rational people focused on their personal self-interest.
    That's one factor, sure. Another factor is the widespread rejection of mainstream science and consensus reality in favor of conspiracy theories that feed into populism and authoritarianism.
    For all of capitalism's faults, you can at least have an educated society with technological and scientific progress under it. You can't have any of that when people who don't believe germs or real or who do believe wildfires are caused by Jewish space lasers are allowed anywhere near positions of power. When belief in imaginary satanic pedophile cults swing elections but actual pedophiles face no consequences. It doesn't seem entirely wrong to me.
    - palmotea•24h
      >> when it was really capitalism infected by the shareholder-theory-of-value and fictionalization pursued by really smart and rational people focused on their personal self-interest.
      > That's one factor, sure. Another factor is the widespread rejection of mainstream science and consensus reality in favor of conspiracy theories that feed into populism and authoritarianism.
      I think you (and Sagan) are getting the causality backwards. Unrestrained capitalism doesn't serve people, it serves money. "Widespread rejection of mainstream science and consensus reality in favor of conspiracy theories that feed into populism and authoritarianism" is a reaction to an economic system that doesn't serve the common person and is very resistant to change.
      - akramachamarei•23h
        Can you explain what it means for capitalism to "serve money"? That sounds exactly backwards to me; money serves capitalism, that is, it is the breath expelled when people speak the language of prices to understand each others' values.
        I think it's also worth dilating on this notion of "unrestrained capitalism". Capitalism is after all a product of restraints, namely the enforcement of property, contracts, and the validity of money.
        palmotea•23h
        > Can you explain what it means for capitalism to "serve money"? That sounds exactly backwards to me; money serves capitalism, that is, it is the breath expelled when people speak the language of prices to understand each others' values.
        Capitalism doesn't work to satisfy the wants and needs of the people in a society, generally. It works to satisfy the wants and needs of the people who have money, in proportion to the amount of money they have. If you don't have money but need something, Capitalism says "kindly FOAD." If you desperately need something, but a rich guy kinda-sorta wants it, rich guy gets it if he's willing to pay more.
        So as inequality increases and wealth gets concentrated, a capitalist ceremony (without more restraints that we have) will increasingly neglect the needs of a large fraction of the people in society.
        A lot of capitalism apologists assert capitalism is there to meet people's needs, generally (usually just lazily generalizing from US vs. USSR circa 1980), but that's only true under certain conditions which are not guaranteed. That goal is not part of its programming.
        bigbadfeline•18h
        > A lot of capitalism apologists assert capitalism is there to meet people's needs,
        An apologist here. "Capitalism" is a legion - a near continuum of systems - some of them can meet people's needs quite well.
        > but that's only true under certain conditions which are not guaranteed. That goal is not part of its programming.
        It's not an intrinsic part of its popular tradition but there's noting preventing us from adding it to the program in some sensible manner. The lack of guarantees isn't mandatory either, such can be added within the framework of capitalism.
kitd•1d
- 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 than their proponents. See also "Argue Well by Losing" by Phil Haack [1].
Somewhat relatedly, the ancients viewed Rhetoric as the purest expression of intelligence. It required you to have deep knowledge of a topic, including all arguments in favour and against (implying deep empathy with the audience), and the ability to form coherent and meaningful argument. Modern political "debate" is ludicrous in comparison.
[1] https://haacked.com/archive/2013/10/21/argue-well-by-losing....
- rhcom2•1d
  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.
  - nradov•23h
    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 back room negotiations.
    - bigbadfeline•18h
      > The public Congressional debates are performative, > The substantive debates happen in private using completely different rhetoric.
      If we can't hear the substantive debates, voting becomes meaningless and performative too. Are we supposed to believe that we vote better when we don't know the truth?
      > This is mostly fine
      Is it?
    - rhcom2•15h
      While I accept that this is how it is done in practice, I think the unintended consequence is it raises the partisan temperature and further ruins the already abysmal trust of Congress.
    - deaux•10h
      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?
- swed420•24h
  > Somewhat relatedly, the ancients viewed Rhetoric as the purest expression of intelligence. It required you to have deep knowledge of a topic, including all arguments in favour and against (implying deep empathy with the audience), and the ability to form coherent and meaningful argument. Modern political "debate" is ludicrous in comparison.
  "Rhetoric" is an unfortunately overloaded term, as modern political "debate" is often nothing more than (the other definition of) rhetoric.
- mothballed•1d
  I've also found simply testing a hypothesis without reasoning about it can quite often outdo your own reasoning and the reasoning of everyone else. Sometimes you are wrong, and everyone else is wrong, and only an empirical test can separate the wheat from the chaff.
  Although maybe this method only works for me because I am a moron, and many people can out reason me, so the only way I can discover anything is to do something all reasonable and rational people are already sure is wrong.
  - bigbadfeline•17h
    > Sometimes you are wrong, and everyone else is wrong,
    Happens all the time.
    > and only an empirical test can separate the wheat from the chaff.
    Not for the vast majority of political issues and indeed for most of Social Sciences. In these cases, empirical evidence is just an accessory, it's still evidence but it's never conclusive, you need reasoning to sort out the complexity.
- godelski•13h
```
  > 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
tunesmith•18h
While each of these are good to keep in mind while reading, I don't find them very exhaustive or derivable. I prefer the Theory of Constraints (Eli Goldratt)'s "Thinking Tools", specifically the "categories of legitimate reservation". Depending on source, there are between six and eight.
1. Is it clear?
2. Does it actually exist? Is it true?
3. Does the cause actually cause the effect?
4. For the proposed cause, do its other implied effects exist?
5. Is the cause sufficient for the effect?
6. Are cause and effect reversed?
chistev•1d
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-possibility-of-life-after-deat...
- nobody9999•1d
  >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 does exist. Indeed, the banality of existence has been so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to discuss it any further here. The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each non-existed in an entirely different way.” ― Stanisław Lem, The Cyberiad
  - chistev•1d
    https://youtube.com/shorts/CEEHjtVJHYs?si=H_muwqpJTIndywr8
    - stefanfisk•12h
      So gender is a strict binary but dragons kinda-sorta exist, got it (＠_＠)
  - mdallastella•1d
    Love that book!
- CGMthrowaway•1d
  The dragon is just a gauge. Gauge symmetry
  - BeetleB•22h
    Good one!
- krapp•1d
  > 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.
  Unsurprising that the longest subthread here is one criticizing the premise.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC•1d
  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.
  - Zigurd•1d
    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.
    - the__alchemist•1d
      This. Try it! LAs are cheap and easier to use than a scope, even if it has digital features.
    - RcouF1uZ4gsC•17h
      This is like arguing I can hear humans talk, therefore the souls must exist.
      You can wire voltage to CPU pins without software.
  - hearsathought•24h
    > Doesn’t silent, invisible, intangible also apply to software?
    No. Because software is hardware.
    > You can’t really tell a particular piece of hardware is running software by a direct physical measurement. You can only infer that indirectly.
    You can literally step through code. Have you ever used a debugger or a profiler? You can dump memory, check the registers, read off the disk, etc.
    If software was silent, invisible and intangible, you couldn't store it on disk, or copy it to memory. A computer wouldn't work if software was as you describe it.
  - kesslern•1d
    If software were undetectable by any means, we'd have no way to run software or tell which software is running at a given time.
  - dghf•1d
    What? Yes you can. I know my laptop is running a web browser because I can see it and interact with it. That's a physical measurement.
    - donkeybeer•22h
      Won't be surprised if he's one of those that think "radiation" is some kind of harmful beams instead of also what the computer screen emits and we detect it to interact with it.
  - DharmaPolice•1d
    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.
  - SigmundA•23h
    Software can make sound, not silent, software can make things appear on the screen, not invisible, software can affect physical objects through device control, not intangible.
    Nothing like an invisible dragon you might claim exists without any of the above.
  - ajross•1d
    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.
  - wat10000•1d
    Only in the same way that it applies to, say, a tree. You can never observe a tree directly. All you can do is infer it from the nerve signals coming from your retinas and touch receptors.
    The point of the dragon in the garage isn't that you can't measure it directly. It's that you can't measure it at all. It has no observable effects at all. Software definitely has observable effects, as do trees and almost everything else that people accept as real.
- qsera•1d
  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.
  - andsoitis•1d
    > 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.
    The point is that if someone does claim that the dragon exists, they better be able to explain how they know it exists.
    - qsera•16h
      Subjective experience.
      Imagine you are a pigeon with navigation magnets in your head. And imagine asked by your friends without it "How do you know it is the right direction?", at some point you have to say "I just know it dammit!"
      And imagine pigeons haven't yet figured out magnetism. So it ain't possible to explain it by any means known to them.
      Carl sagan's logic breaks down at this point.
  - technothrasher•1d
    > That makes Carl Sagan's claim some what Balonish.
    His claim wasn't that invisible dragons don't exist. His claim was that you cannot tell the difference between a dragon that doesn't exist and one that is, to use your qualifier, currently undetectable by any means known to humanity. If you cannot tell the difference between existence and non-existence of something, any claims to its existence are vacuous.
    - qsera•16h
      Can you really prove that the last second really existed? I don't think so. It is like taking a frame from a movie reel and from that alone trying to prove that the previous frame really exist. You can't, there is always a possibility that it is the very first frame, or is just a photograph.
      But does that stop you from claiming its existence (last second's)?
      So as I said in another thread. This logic is completely ignoring the sea of subjective experience that we live in.
      It is funny, Because these types of arguments arise because there is no real understanding of the nature of reality. And people have different assumptions on how deep the rabbit hole goes. So every one have a different definition of "existence" when they argue about it. I think Carl Sagan also had one, and it is a shame that he didn't make it explicit when he was talking about it.
      It appears that he considered something to "exist" if it can interact with this world in a way that human beings can observe.
      That is somewhat a narrow point of view. But it suits scientists because it adds to their authority, instead of taking away from it by implying that there could be a realm of existence that they can't reach or reason about. They say "Oh it is useless to muse about that, so don't do it. Limit your imagination to what we say!".
  - GetTheFacts•1d
    Your "argument" reminds me of this:
    The Rabbit's Thesis
    Scene: It's a fine sunny day in the forest; and a rabbit is sitting outside his burrow, tippy-tapping on his lap top. Along comes a fox, out for a walk.
    Fox: "What are you working on?" Rabbit: "My thesis." Fox: "Hmmmmm. What is it about?" Rabbit: "Oh, I'm writing about how rabbits eat foxes."
    (incredulous pause) Fox: "That's ridiculous! Any fool knows that rabbits don't eat foxes!" Rabbit: "Come with me and I'll show you!"
    They both disappear into the rabbit's burrow. After a few minutes, gnawing on a fox bone, the rabbit returns to his lap top and resumes typing.
    Soon a wolf comes along and stops to watch the hard working rabbit.
    (Tippy-tap, tippy-tap, tippy-tippy-tap).
    Wolf: "What's that you are writing?" Rabbit: "I'm doing a thesis on how rabbits eat wolves."
    (loud guffaws). Wolf: "You don't expect to get such rubbish published, do you?" Rabbit: "No problem. Do you want to see why?"
    The rabbit and the wolf go into the burrow, and again the rabbit returns by himself. This time he is patting his stomach. He goes back to his typing.
    (Tippy-tap, tippy-tap, tippy-tippy-tap).
    Finally a bear comes along and asks, "What are you doing?"
    Rabbit: "I'm doing a thesis on how rabbits eat bears." Bear: "Well that's absurd!" Rabbit: "Come into my home and I'll show you."
    SCENE: Inside the rabbit's burrow. In one corner, there is a pile of fox bones. In another corner is a pile of wolf bones. On the other side of the room a huge lion is belching and picking his teeth.
    MORAL: It doesn't matter what you choose for a thesis topic. It doesn't matter what you use for your data. It doesn't even matter if your topic makes sense. What matters is who you have for a thesis advisor.
  - mingus88•1d
    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…
  - RealityVoid•1d
    Yes. The beauty is that once you get the means you can adjust your view. But you can't go just "trust me bro, it's there, you can't ever verify it, but I know it's there." It might be there... But why do you believe it to be so?
  - wat10000•1d
    Do you actually live your life with the idea that there might be a dragon in your garage that is undetectable by any means currently known to humanity? And maybe an elephant in the neighbor's, and a unicorn down the street?
- the__alchemist•1d
  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.
zyxzevn•1d
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 premise) — not just most of them
And when breaking these items do not mean that something is false. It means that the arguments and evidence is incomplete. Don't jump to conclusions when you think that the arguments or evidence is invalid (that is how some people even think that the moonlanding was a hoax).
- ceejayoz•24h
  > 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
  We still use Newtonian physics plenty, despite bits of it not working due to relativity.
  - nobody9999•23h
    >We still use Newtonian physics plenty, despite bits of it not working due to relativity.
    Absolutely. And since no one else has trotted this bit out yet, I guess it will be me:
    All of our science is based on imperfect models of how the universe works. Every single one is wrong.
    However, the models we use today are less wrong than those we used in the past. We know this because we (as you pointed out about Newtonian physics) can more accurately describe the universe than we were able to do previously.
    That doesn't mean we've found "the truth." Nor does it mean that we have all the answers.
    This is an important concept for baloney detection as those who are peddling baloney will (often, but not always) purport to know "the truth."
    Anyone who makes such claims is either knowingly attempting to mislead or is lying to themselves and others.
    Which, IMHO, is a pretty big red flag in baloney detection.
- ajross•1d
  > While skeptical, he did not have much skepticism against mainstream theories.
  That's tautological. The definition of a "mainstream theory" is one that is widely believed. And while, sure, sometimes scientific paradigms are wrong (c.f. Kuhn), that's rare. Demanding someone be "skeptical" of theories that end up wrong is isomorphic to demanding that they be a preternatural genius in all things able to see through mistakes that all the world's experts cannot. That doesn't work.
  (It's 100% not enough just to apply a null hypothesis argument, btw!)
  Really that's all of a piece with his argument. It's not a recipe for detecting truth (he didn't have one, and neither do you[1]). It's a recipe for detecting when arguments are unsupported by scientific consensus. That's not the same thing, but it's closer than other stuff like "trust".
  (And it's 100% better th an applying a null-hypothesis argument, to be clear.)
  [1] Well, we do, but it's called "the scientific method" and it's really, really hard. Not something to deploy in an internet argument.
- BeetleB•22h
  > 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."
- like_any_other•8h
  > 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.
analog31•1d
I 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.
eafer•1d
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.
- RichardCA•23h
  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 was basically unwatchable because they refused to engage with the math.
  - eafer•22h
    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.
    - krapp•21h
      Believing silly nonsense which is still plausible isn't the same category of error as believing in magic.
      Also I don't think skeptics hold the worldview you ascribe to them. You seem to have a particular grudge against Sagan.
      - eafer•21h
        I actually kinda like Sagan, Cosmos is seriously gorgeous (though Vangelis does a lot of the heavy lifting there). I'm just kinda tired of the whole "Library of Alexandria" myth that comes up constantly around nerdy forums such as this one.
        > Believing silly nonsense which is still plausible isn't the same category of error as believing in magic.
        Eh, hard to say what is magic and what is not. Sagan's beliefs about the ancient world could have been fixed with a five minute conversation with an expert. He just didn't care enough to do that, and for some reason that attitude is common among so-called skeptics when it comes to history.
        krapp•20h
        >Eh, hard to say what is magic and what is not.
        I don't think it is?
        I had to look up what specifically Sagan's errors about history were and yes it looks like he popularized a lot of bad mythology (I referenced this site[0]). I have to admit I believed a lot of this myself at one time. But I think there's a difference between the plausible but wrong and the impossible. If he'd said he thought Atlantis was real, or gone on about Tartaria or the great Ice Wall, that would be a lot closer to magical thinking.
        Although it is a lot easier to be led astray by plausible lies than implausible ones. It seems like Sagan is certainly guilty of not being critical about narratives that reinforced his worldview.
        [0]https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/02/05/carl-sagan-was-...
        eafer•19h
        >> Eh, hard to say what is magic and what is not.
        > I don't think it is? I think there's a difference between the plausible but wrong and the impossible.
        I find that the word "magic" is very overused by smart people online as a sort of thought-terminating cliché. It's a vague concept and I'm not always sure what they mean by it.
        It's often extremely hard, even for top minds, to tell apart magic and science ahead of time. Think of Einstein mocking quantum physicists for believing in "spooky action at a distance". Of course if you still don't believe in quantum entanglement today then you are being irrational, but that's only because science has (mostly) settled the question, nothing to do with how magical or plausible the concept may sound.
        Someone defending astrology will tell you that the gravity of the moon affects their bloodstream like it affects the tides of the ocean. That doesn't hold water if you sit down and do the math of course, but the same is true if you bother to check the dates for events in ancient history.
    - RichardCA•21h
      A lot to unpack here. He espoused a worldview where human beings are "star stuff", a way for the Universe to be self-aware.
      And this worldview does not exclude spiritual thinking, it just channels it in a specific direction.
      Yes, he said our brains are made from the same matter as everything else, but it does not follow that he espoused any sort of strict materialism.
      The truth is more subtle and nuanced than that.
      If you are interested in getting inside his head, I recommend reading the Mr. X article.
      https://marijuana-uses.com/mr-x/
- eafer•1d
  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.
  - jgoewert•14m
    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?
- BeetleB•22h
  Did he make the stuff up, or did he get them from (now considered) poor sources?
  - eafer•22h
    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.
    - pu_pe•5h
      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.
- SoftTalker•23h
  I loved watching Cosmos when I was a kid but as I got older I developed a dislike for Sagan. He strikes me as supremely arrogant and probably insufferable to be around. I don't know that of course, I never met him. Just a feeling.
- palmotea•23h
  > 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.
  Yeah, but he's a saint of science-fandom, so don't question him. Instead, admire and follow him, and encourage others to do likewise.
- Fricken•17h
  "As I write, the number-one videocassette rental in America is the movie Dumb and Dumber. “Beavis and Butthead” remain popular (and influential) with young TV viewers. The plain lesson is that study and learning—not just of science, but of anything—are avoidable, even undesirable.”
  Mike Judge's satire was lost on Sagan. Carl took his knee-jerk reaction and ran with it.
goobert•24h
A significant amount of modern academia would dissolve if this was applied
- swed420•24h
  > A significant amount of modern academia would dissolve if this was applied
  You could go one level higher with this observation, since "modern academia" is just another business.
  Rephrased: A significant amount of businesses would dissolve if this was applied.
- donkeybeer•22h
  Almost all of religion would vanish too.
dredmorbius•23h
Sagan's kit is one of several similar resources I'd turned up ... over a decade ago now ... when I'd begun considering the matter of epistemics in media, particularly online discourse. The situation's not improved.
My catalogue is here: <https://web.archive.org/web/20200121211018/https://old.reddi...> (archive).
It includes in addition to Sagan: Rory Coker's precis on pseudoscience, the Venn Diagram of Irrational Nonsense, the concept of falsifiability, an informative (if excruciatingly painful) BBC docu on stupidity, Frankfurt's "On Bullshit", Ferguson on why youth culture made everything suck, Brandolino's Law, Silver's Bullshitter's Inequality, a relationship between the Kübler-Ross model and the Dunning-Kruger Effect, The Periodic Table of Irrational Nonsense, and Adams's 'B'-Ark.
kgwxd•1d
The 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.
- philipallstar•1d
  > The people for whom this stuff isn't glaringly obvious, relatively early in life, will never get it
  How do you know this?
  - AdamN•1d
    Yeah I hard disagree with their statement.
    I've come to observe with having kids (and also moving to Germany and seeing other kids shaped) that so so much is taught. There is a ton born into a kid but so many things like the ability to think critically about a problem is actually taught in primary school and early years education (kindergarten/kita/preschool). There might be some raw horsepower that some people have more or less of with regards to certain problem spaces but for the most part - how to tackle a problem and think critically is very much a learned skill that some may get on their own but it can certainly also be given to them.
    - RankingMember•1d
      I concur with regard to critical thinking being a taught skill. My read is that parent's comment is possibly more of a vent about the type of person many of us have become more familiar with than we ever wanted to in the past decade or so of "post-truth" discourse- the virulent, intentional ignoramus. (We could write reams about what leads people to be this way, but in the interests of keeping short-form commentary short-form, I'll say that I think there are a confluence of causes :P).
      - projektfu•1d
        People who can assert both "Fauci was wrong about masks" and "Nobody really died from COVID" come to mind.
  - kgwxd•1d
    I spoke in absolutes. Guess I'll say I've never observed it happening in anyone after maybe late teens. Some learn to keep quiet about whatever they're bought into, because they've learned it will scare a lot of people off. Or they end up pseudo intellectuals with a podcast. Or scamming their way into huge money and political positions. So they can be pretty good at "winning". But most of them are just sad and lonely, living mostly to prop up those "winners".
    I've fallen for it enough to see it almost instantly now. So much time wasted, thinking some people just needed to figure things out, or maybe they figured out something I couldn't see. But, little by little, they just keep getting worse, more unreasonable, dangerous even.
    Unfortunately, I wasted my youth on that idea. Now the people that warned me not to, moved on to much better things, far outside the environment I've been hanging out in.
    Guess I'm just passing along the warning.
    - philipallstar•19h
      What I'm getting at is you also don't seem to be applying the balony detection kit to what you're saying. I could be wrong, but you seem to be describing people with center or right wing views. That seems like tribalism rather than anything reasoned, as while the right has people like that, the left does too, and perhaps currently with more fundamental reasoning issues.
- jawilson2•1d
  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 quantum physics, etc. Tons of pseudoscience. So, I grew up in both worlds, while always somewhat skeptical of the woo, still was sort of in it through high school. I read Demon Haunted World in college, and the woo was eradicated overnight. I think part of this also has to do with PhD programs, particularly reviewing papers, where it is basically BS detection. But, DHW framed it spectacularly for me, and is one of the most influential books I have read.
  - the__alchemist•1d
    Another anecdote: Ann Druyan (Sagan's wife and collaborator) was into the wu herself!
- mingus88•1d
  Spot on. I just finished reading the demon haunted world to my daughter. She’s 13 and we have been very concerned about her going on social media.
  I framed it as being more important than ever to be skeptical of what you see. Everything online is fake in some way. Every picture is touched up at best, AI slop at worst. You need to question everything.
  I honestly fear her generation is just cooked. They were forced into online learning during covid, have socialization issues, and are coming of age in an era of rampant disinformation and generated content that is too good to spot and designed to addict and influence.
  - Brian_K_White•19h
    More than just question everything, but also develop a facility to answer the questions.
    Otherwise it just means don't believe anything, which is more or less the same as believe everything, or believe & disbelieve things at random or according to wish.
nobody9999•1d
Original Title:
Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit: Tools for Thinking Critically & Knowing Pseudoscience When You See It
jgalt212•1d
In these fractious times, I think we're all very good at scrutinizing other side of the aisle, and not so good at self-reflection.
As a committed centrist, I am very good at fairly scrutinizing everything. /s
- mingus88•1d
  You joke but you’d be amazed at the Reddit front page. It’s hard to tell anymore if the comments are even people, but I have noticed many fake posts of some Trump tweet he never actually made getting traction.
  It’s so easy to verify his public statements. Did he really say that? Just go look.
  Yet time and time again people get baited into rage mode. It’s more satisfying to post than it is to do 30 seconds of research.
coolhand2120•1d
I love this. I drill this into my children, they have it memorized.