
The Baloney Detection Kit: Carl Sagan’s Rules for Critical Thinking - skuthus
https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/03/baloney-detection-kit-carl-sagan/
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ctack
I read the Demon Haunted World by mistake a long time ago and it really
challenged my belief system at the time. But then little by little it won me
over.

Not without damage in the form of missed education opportunities, I managed to
overcome a lot of the bullshit magical thinking that had managed to cloud my
thoughts in my teens and early 20s.

It's interesting to me, just today I've been respectfully challenging a friend
for their belief in some or other Covid conspiracy. After some introspection,
I realised that the ire this raised in me and which I was directing at my
friend, was actually anger at my young self for the years "lost" in the form
of education not pursued.

What a day.

~~~
skuthus
Thanks for sharing. Sagan's work has also had a profound impact on my life. I
miss him and his wisdom terribly.

------
yters
'Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have made
mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better
way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are
experts.'

It'd be interesting to see what is left after applying this consistently to
scientific announcements. E.g. much of the pro climate change arguments I see
are: all the scientists think it is happening, so it must be happening. Not
saying they are wrong, but why should only science get a pass when it comes to
argument from authority?

Science is not the only field with experts, and it's hard to argue that only
scientific expertise is real expertise without going in circles (which
requires an expert in philosophy to avoid ;).

~~~
swayvil
We put our faith in the scientific institution. (And if we are religious,
political or etc, we put our faith in the appropriate institution for that
too.)

Fact is, virtually all knowledge about what lies beyond our personal sight and
understanding is authority-based.

Maybe that's unavoidable.

The key feature of science could be said to be the institution of the rule
that, to be considered truly high-quality, a model must have a strong
experimental reference.

Or you could say that the key feature of science is that we get such high-
quality models that experimental reference is unnecessary. Which is a little
scary. It's like we're just creating a more-airtight dogma.

(Wow, they're actually downvoting you.)

~~~
grawprog
I've noticed a fairly big distinction in what I learned as science and the
philosophy of science as it was practiced up until around the last 20 years or
so and now.

Science was based on rigorous falsification. Scientists actively tried to
prove themselves and other scientists wrong. Science has always been more
about, 'well we know it's not all of these things, so it's probably that until
we prove that wrong too'.

Sometime in the last couple decades, it's stopped being like that. Instead
it's, 'my models and data say this, so it is this and everything else is
wrong'.

Science at this point is really only authority driven because journals and
even governments charge exorbitant prices for access to them, cutting out a
vast majority of the population from actually partaking in any part of the
scientific process.

When all you get is contradictory news reports on a handful of selected
research from journalists that barely understand what they're reading, you're
going to be stuck with an elitist authority driven system.

There's zero reason for this in todays world other than control and profit.
Even within the scientific community, there's 'caste' systems, financial
guardianship and other such barriers, keeping again, many people from learning
and partaking.

Science isn't hard, it isn't magic, it's a systematic way of looking at the
world through observation and falsification. That is all science is. Anyone
can do science. I've taken groups of kids, volunteers and many people and in
short time, taught them to do science.

It's just people don't really get taught to do this. It's easier to control a
population that's trickled information through 'authoritative' sources than it
is one that's educated and capable of thinking for themselves.

This is stuff I was literally taught in school, by other scientists. Like, we
were actually taught that most people need to be given only the information
they need to know, because essentially they're too dumb to understand and
scientists should just run things in the world. I'm not making this up, we
were actually told this by several of our professors.

~~~
marcosdumay
Science was never purely driven by falsification, or authority or anything. It
was actually never pure, it was always driven by an equivalent of "hey, it
works on my machine" and proven by successful application in some engineering
or other practical discipline.

That broke since the late 20th century because science got much broader than
any possible application.

~~~
grawprog
I agree with that to an extent too. Actually, the whole history behind the
modern scientific method and the various competing philosophies behind science
over the centuries is pretty amazing and I recommend anyone that's interested
to start here:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science)

And go on to.read the referenced papers by Kuhn and others. There's a
lifetime's worth of stuff to be studied there.

The thing is, much of our modern scientific progress has been through
following these principles

>1\. that there is an objective reality shared by all rational observers

>2\. that this objective reality is governed by natural laws

>3\. that reality can be discovered by means of systematic observation and
experimentation

>4\. that Nature has uniformity of laws and most if not all things in nature
must have at least a natural cause

>5\. that experimental procedures will be done satisfactorily without any
deliberate or unintentional mistakes that will influence the results

>6\. that experimenters won't be significantly biased by their presumptions

>7\. that random sampling is representative of the entire population

The main issues I see these days fall around 5, 6 and to a lesser extent 7.
Agenda driven, ego based research is prevalent in a lot of fields these days,
tied directly into that authoritarian mind set. Scientists must be correct,
the people funding their research must get the results they desire and to
bring 7 in their, sampling will be done to skew results to that effect.

I've witnessed this first hand on projects where industry would have been
impacted by results. In the case of one project, tens of thousands of dollars
were spent mitigating absolutely nothing, while the actual issue was ignored
because that would have cut into profits of the largest company in the
community. I had a water sampling cup in my hand still, when they told us to
stop and sample elsewhere after we found pH spikes suspiciously near some
runoff. Those high pH samples never made it into the report.

In the case of my own project, our results would have impacted an active mine,
so we were told by government not publicly release our results, under threat
of loss of funding.

This type of bullshit occurs in every field of science. This type of bullshit
is why authority driven science is not real science and is holding back human
progress and honestly, puts the entire human race and much of life on Earth's
continued existence at risk.

~~~
musicale
And perhaps

\- that it is possible for humans and/or machines to understand and/or
describe said natural laws

\- that it is a good idea to attempt to do so

(e.g. scientific progress could lead to technology that eventually makes it
impossible for anything to live on the Earth)

