Carl Sagan’s Rules

The Baloney Detection Kit: Carl Sagan’s Rules for Bullshit-Busting and Critical Thinking

Necessary cognitive fortification against propaganda, pseudoscience, and general falsehood.

BY MARIA POPOVA

Carl Sagan was many things — a cosmic sage,voracious reader, hopeless romantic, and brilliant philosopher. But above all, he endures as our era’s greatest patron saint of reason and common sense, a master of the vital balance between skepticism and openness. In The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (public library) — the same indispensable volume that gave us Sagan’s timeless meditation on science and spirituality, published mere months before his death in 1996 — Sagan shares his secret to upholding the rites of reason, even in the face of society’s most shameless untruths and outrageous propaganda.

In a chapter titled “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection,” Sagan reflects on the many types of deception to which we’re susceptible — from psychics to religious zealotry to paid product endorsements by scientists, which he held in especially low regard, noting that they “betray contempt for the intelligence of their customers” and “introduce an insidious corruption of popular attitudes about scientific objectivity.” (Cue in PBS’s Joe Hanson on how to read science news.) But rather than preaching from the ivory tower of self-righteousness, Sagan approaches the subject from the most vulnerable of places — having just lost both of his parents, he reflects on the all too human allure of promises of supernatural reunions in the afterlife, reminding us that falling for such fictions doesn’t make us stupid or bad people, but simply means that we need to equip ourselves with the right tools against them.

Through their training, scientists are equipped with what Sagan calls a “baloney detection kit” — a set of cognitive tools and techniques that fortify the mind against penetration by falsehoods:

The kit is brought out as a matter of course whenever new ideas are offered for consideration. If the new idea survives examination by the tools in our kit, we grant it warm, although tentative, acceptance. If you’re so inclined, if you don’t want to buy baloney even when it’s reassuring to do so, there are precautions that can be taken; there’s a tried-and-true, consumer-tested method.

But the kit, Sagan argues, isn’t merely a tool of science — rather, it contains invaluable tools of healthy skepticism that apply just as elegantly, and just as necessarily, to everyday life. By adopting the kit, we can all shield ourselves against clueless guile and deliberate manipulation. Sagan shares nine of these tools:

1. Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”
2. Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
3. 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.
4. Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives. What survives, the hypothesis that resists disproof in this Darwinian selection among “multiple working hypotheses,” has a much better chance of being the right answer than if you had simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.
5. 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.
6. Quantify. If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations. Of course there are truths to be sought in the many qualitative issues we are obliged to confront, but finding them is more challenging.
7. If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.
8. Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler.
9. Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable are not worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and everything in it is just an elementary particle — an electron, say — in a much bigger Cosmos. But if we can never acquire information from outside our Universe, is not the idea incapable of disproof? You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result.

Just as important as learning these helpful tools, however, is unlearning and avoiding the most common pitfalls of common sense. Reminding us of where society is most vulnerable to those, Sagan writes:

In addition to teaching us what to do when evaluating a claim to knowledge, any good baloney detection kit must also teach us what not to do. It helps us recognize the most common and perilous fallacies of logic and rhetoric. Many good examples can be found in religion and politics, because their practitioners are so often obliged to justify two contradictory propositions.

He admonishes against the twenty most common and perilous ones — many rooted in our chronic discomfort with ambiguity — with examples of each in action:

1. ad hominem — Latin for “to the man,” attacking the arguer and not the argument (e.g., The Reverend Dr. Smith is a known Biblical fundamentalist, so her objections to evolution need not be taken seriously)
2. argument from authority (e.g., President Richard Nixon should be re-elected because he has a secret plan to end the war in Southeast Asia — but because it was secret, there was no way for the electorate to evaluate it on its merits; the argument amounted to trusting him because he was President: a mistake, as it turned out)
3. argument from adverse consequences (e.g., A God meting out punishment and reward must exist, because if He didn’t, society would be much more lawless and dangerous — perhaps even ungovernable. Or: The defendant in a widely publicized murder trial must be found guilty; otherwise, it will be an encouragement for other men to murder their wives)
4. appeal to ignorance — the claim that whatever has not been proved false must be true, and vice versa (e.g., There is no compelling evidence that UFOs are not visiting the Earth; therefore UFOs exist — and there is intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe.Or: There may be seventy kazillion other worlds, but not one is known to have the moral advancement of the Earth, so we’re still central to the Universe.) This impatience with ambiguity can be criticized in the phrase: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
5. special pleading, often to rescue a proposition in deep rhetorical trouble (e.g., How can a merciful God condemn future generations to torment because, against orders, one woman induced one man to eat an apple? Special plead: you don’t understand the subtle Doctrine of Free Will. Or: How can there be an equally godlike Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in the same Person? Special plead: You don’t understand the Divine Mystery of the Trinity. Or: How could God permit the followers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — each in their own way enjoined to heroic measures of loving kindness and compassion — to have perpetrated so much cruelty for so long? Special plead: You don’t understand Free Will again. And anyway, God moves in mysterious ways.)
6. begging the question, also called assuming the answer (e.g., We must institute the death penalty to discourage violent crime. But does the violent crime rate in fact fall when the death penalty is imposed? Or: The stock market fell yesterday because of a technical adjustment and profit-taking by investors — but is there any independent evidence for the causal role of “adjustment” and profit-taking; have we learned anything at all from this purported explanation?)
7. observational selection, also called the enumeration of favorable circumstances, or as the philosopher Francis Bacon described it, counting the hits and forgetting the misses (e.g., A state boasts of the Presidents it has produced, but is silent on its serial killers)
8. statistics of small numbers — a close relative of observational selection (e.g., “They say 1 out of every 5 people is Chinese. How is this possible? I know hundreds of people, and none of them is Chinese. Yours truly.” Or: “I’ve thrown three sevens in a row. Tonight I can’t lose.”)
9. misunderstanding of the nature of statistics (e.g., President Dwight Eisenhower expressing astonishment and alarm on discovering that fully half of all Americans have below average intelligence);
10. inconsistency (e.g., Prudently plan for the worst of which a potential military adversary is capable, but thriftily ignore scientific projections on environmental dangers because they’re not “proved.” Or: Attribute the declining life expectancy in the former Soviet Union to the failures of communism many years ago, but never attribute the high infant mortality rate in the United States (now highest of the major industrial nations) to the failures of capitalism. Or: Consider it reasonable for the Universe to continue to exist forever into the future, but judge absurd the possibility that it has infinite duration into the past);
11. non sequitur — Latin for “It doesn’t follow” (e.g., Our nation will prevail because God is great. But nearly every nation pretends this to be true; the German formulation was “Gott mit uns”). Often those falling into the non sequitur fallacy have simply failed to recognize alternative possibilities;
12. post hoc, ergo propter hoc — Latin for “It happened after, so it was caused by” (e.g., Jaime Cardinal Sin, Archbishop of Manila: “I know of … a 26-year-old who looks 60 because she takes [contraceptive] pills.” Or: Before women got the vote, there were no nuclear weapons)
13. meaningless question (e.g., What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? But if there is such a thing as an irresistible force there can be no immovable objects, and vice versa)
14. excluded middle, or false dichotomy — considering only the two extremes in a continuum of intermediate possibilities (e.g.,“Sure, take his side; my husband’s perfect; I’m always wrong.” Or: “Either you love your country or you hate it.” Or: “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem”)
15. short-term vs. long-term — a subset of the excluded middle, but so important I’ve pulled it out for special attention (e.g., We can’t afford programs to feed malnourished children and educate pre-school kids. We need to urgently deal with crime on the streets.Or: Why explore space or pursue fundamental science when we have so huge a budget deficit?);
16. slippery slope, related to excluded middle (e.g., If we allow abortion in the first weeks of pregnancy, it will be impossible to prevent the killing of a full-term infant. Or, conversely: If the state prohibits abortion even in the ninth month, it will soon be telling us what to do with our bodies around the time of conception);
17. confusion of correlation and causation (e.g., A survey shows that more college graduates are homosexual than those with lesser education; therefore education makes people gay. Or:Andean earthquakes are correlated with closest approaches of the planet Uranus; therefore — despite the absence of any such correlation for the nearer, more massive planet Jupiter — the latter causes the former)
18. straw man — caricaturing a position to make it easier to attack (e.g., Scientists suppose that living things simply fell together by chance — a formulation that willfully ignores the central Darwinian insight, that Nature ratchets up by saving what works and discarding what doesn’t. Or — this is also a short-term/long-term fallacy — environmentalists care more for snail darters and spotted owls than they do for people)
19. suppressed evidence, or half-truths (e.g., An amazingly accurate and widely quoted “prophecy” of the assassination attempt on President Reagan is shown on television; but — an important detail — was it recorded before or after the event? Or:These government abuses demand revolution, even if you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs. Yes, but is this likely to be a revolution in which far more people are killed than under the previous regime? What does the experience of other revolutions suggest? Are all revolutions against oppressive regimes desirable and in the interests of the people?)
20. weasel words (e.g., The separation of powers of the U.S. Constitution specifies that the United States may not conduct a war without a declaration by Congress. On the other hand, Presidents are given control of foreign policy and the conduct of wars, which are potentially powerful tools for getting themselves re-elected. Presidents of either political party may therefore be tempted to arrange wars while waving the flag and calling the wars something else — “police actions,” “armed incursions,” “protective reaction strikes,” “pacification,” “safeguarding American interests,” and a wide variety of “operations,” such as “Operation Just Cause.” Euphemisms for war are one of a broad class of reinventions of language for political purposes. Talleyrand said, “An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public”)

Sagan ends the chapter with a necessary disclaimer:

Like all tools, the baloney detection kit can be misused, applied out of context, or even employed as a rote alternative to thinking. But applied judiciously, it can make all the difference in the world — not least in evaluating our own arguments before we present them to others.

The Demon-Haunted World is a timelessly fantastic read in its entirety, timelier than ever in a great many ways amidst our present media landscape of propaganda, pseudoscience, and various commercial motives. Complement it with Sagan onscience and “God”.

“Why is God telling me to stop asking questions?”: Meet the woman behind Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Cosmos”

“Why is God telling me to stop asking questions?”: Meet the woman behind Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Cosmos”


Wednesday, Jun 18, 2014 06:00 PM -0500
 
“Why is God telling me to stop asking questions?”: Meet the woman behind Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Cosmos”

Ann Druyan, "Cosmos" creator and widow of
Carl Sagan, on science vs. religion--and men getting credit for her work

Andrew O'Hehir  
 

Ann Druyan, the writer and executive producer of "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey."(Credit: Reuters/Kevork Djansezian)

As the host of the recently concluded series “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey” – now available on home video, if you missed it – Neil deGrasse Tyson
became, along with America’s most prominent astrophysicist, the public
face of science in its effort to recapture the public imagination. But
although Tyson is an important author in his own right, he didn’t
conceive, write or produce “Cosmos.” He essentially served the role of
an actor or a news anchor, a charismatic and credible figure reading
someone else’s words off a Teleprompter. Those words, and damn near
everything else about the show, were the work of Ann Druyan, the writer
and executive producer who also co-created the original “Cosmos” series
with her late husband, Carl Sagan, more than 30 years ago.

Druyan
does not personally seek the limelight and is not a celebrity, but in
her own way she’s a key cultural figure in the struggle against the
popular antagonism to science and the spread of anti-scientific claptrap
about climate change and evolution. Those on the creationist or
anti-evolutionist fringe who understood the unstinting scientific
arguments of “Cosmos” as a direct attack on their beliefs were entirely
correct, but Druyan’s critique of religion goes well beyond the
literal-minded idiocy of the Answers in Genesis crowd. She describes
herself as an agnostic rather than an atheist – based on the premise
that science must withhold judgment on questions it cannot answer – but she has also described
religious faith as “antithetical to the values of science” and religion
in general as “a statement of contempt for nature and reality.”

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Druyan is well aware that many religious people would reject those
characterizations, and those snippets may make her philosophical
approach sound less generous and open-minded than it really is. While
she is profoundly uncomfortable with the artificial wall between the
domains of science and religion erected by Stephen Jay Gould’s famous
pronouncement that they are “non-overlapping magisteria,” she welcomes
discussion of seemingly indefinable and unscientific concepts like
sacredness and spirituality. Those things are to be found at a capacious
and more evolved level, she argues, by leaving behind “our infantile
sense of centrality in the universe,” in which we are the precious
offspring of a benevolent protector, and instead shifting our focus to
the profound and immense mysteries presented by “13 billion years of
cosmic evolution and four and a half billion years of the story of life
on this planet.”

During my all-too-brief phone conversation with
Druyan, we also discussed her brilliant rereading of the story of the
Garden of Eden, which she sees as the story of humanity’s escape from “a
maximum-security prison with 24-hour surveillance.” Adam and Eve’s
capital offense is that they seek knowledge and ask questions, precisely
the qualities that define the human species. At least in that story,
God appears to demand a subservient and doctrinaire incuriosity, and
many of his followers continue to insist on that path to this day. There
are certainly currents within the major religious traditions that
resist such a simple-minded negation of science – Buddhism, Judaism and
the Catholic Church are now OK, generally speaking, with both evolution
and cosmology – but Druyan’s provocative critique of religion as a
distorting social force is well worth considering even if you think her
argument is too sweeping.

One mistake Druyan never makes, either
in “Cosmos” or anywhere else, is the arrogant historicism sometimes
displayed by Richard Dawkins and other prominent scientific atheists. By
that I mean the quasi-religious assumption that we stand at a uniquely
privileged position of near-perfect scientific knowledge, with just a
few blanks to fill in before we understand everything about the
universe. “I’m sure most of what we all hold dearest and cherish most,
believing at this very moment,” Druyan has said, “will be revealed at
some future time to be merely a product of our age and our history and
our understanding of reality.” Science as a process, as “the
never-ending search for truth,” is sacred. But what we now know, or
think we know, is always a matter for humility and doubt.

Ann,
I know I’m not the first person to bring this up, but you’ve done two
versions of this show where, you know, a prominent male scientist was
on-screen and you were behind the scenes. The first time around, of
course, it was your husband, and this time it’s Neil Tyson. Because he’s
standing in front of the cameras, everybody thinks of him as the
creator of the show. What’s going on with that?

That is a
funny thing, isn’t that? I am a little bit surprised when critics, who I
think are more likely to read the credits with some degree of
attention, talk about the show as if Neil has had something to do with
its inception or its writing. In the case of Carl it was different.
Obviously Carl was the senior partner in conceiving the show with me and
[astronomer] Steven Soter. And so, I mean, I am kind of taken aback.
But then I look at the brilliance of Neil’s performance, and how
unexpectedly he has taken what I wrote and given it its best possible
expression on the show. So I love the guy. I guess that’s the plight of
the writer. It is coming out of someone else’s mouth; people think it
must be theirs. It’s a natural reaction.

It’s funny,
though. I mean, I’m a movie critic, and I don’t think people are
confused when they go to see a movie and Johnny Depp is up there playing
a character. They pretty much get the concept that somebody wrote those
lines for him. But they don’t seem to understand that in this case.

They
don’t, and that’s because, you know, Neil is a scientist and a writer
also. So it’s not that great a leap to think that this is his material.
And of course, it was true for Carl too, in a much greater degree. So it
all makes sense. I’m happy. I mean, look, I can’t get the fact that
this show has played in something like 181 countries, and in the vast
majority of them it’s been an off-the-scale success. For someone who
started out on this road seven years ago, this is the best possible
outcome I could have imagined.

How have you felt about the
degree of pushback from religious folks? You’ve been very clear about
embracing the scientific consensus that climate change is the result of
human activity, that evolution by natural selection is a fact, and that
the age of the universe is not in dispute. I’m sure you were expecting
some resistance to all that.

Actually, it’s been the
relative meekness of the reaction that has really surprised me. I
thought that, you know, taking on the human origins of global warming or
even evolution via natural selection, that saying it so frontally would
result in a big pushback. But it hasn’t come to that. I guess I
expected, never having worked with Fox and National Geographic before, I
was expecting when I submitted my script that, you know, the vice
president of Standards & Practices or whoever would come back with
some issues. And yet it was just the opposite. It was, you know, letters
in all caps saying, “I cannot wait to see this show on television.
Thank you!” So, you know, life is so rarely what I expect it to be.

The
things that I was steeling myself for just didn’t happen. I mean, you
know, the negative reaction to the scientific ideas that are at the
heart of the series was really different and very mild. I have to be
honest. I have read a smattering of those from sources where I could
sort of anticipate what the reaction would be. I did go there. And, you
know, it seemed like it was more in sorrow than in anger. [Laughter.] I
didn’t see anything personally that was disturbing. Mostly, it was just
people who disagreed.

You’ve been pretty outspoken over
the years about your views of religious myth and its relationship to
science. You’ve talked at times about the desire to reclaim some of the
sense of mystery or daring or even spirituality that could
hypothetically be associated with science. Is this show to be considered
as part of that struggle, as an attempt to recapture the mystery and
power of science in the public imagination?

That’s
beautifully said. And you know, I could speak to that. Yes, I mean, what
always has surprised me personally is that the revelations about nature
and the universe that science has presented to us are not just, you
know, more likely to be better approximations of natural reality than
we’ve gotten from any other source, but they’re also way more
spiritually satisfying than anything we’ve ever been able to make up.
You know, our interpretations of nature that are not rooted in nature at
all and that are anthropocentric are kind of the infantile idealized
visions of us as the center of the universe. As the children of a very
disappointed father. [Laughter.]

You know, that stuff just leaves
me cold. I’m sorry; it doesn’t really do anything for me. But the idea,
you know, that we are, in my view, a species in search of fulfillment is
something very real. And we used to get it from theory, you know, that
we were literally special. That we were created apart from all of
nature. We can’t get that anymore once you understand a mountain of
evidence from DNA and many other independent causalities, which seems to
create our oneness with all of life. I think we’re being brave. We’re
looking at reality as it really is, we’re being brave enough and
grown-up enough to know how tiny we truly are. “Cosmos,” in the original
and in this incarnation, is intended to teach and familiarize the
broadest possible audience with some of the insights and methods of
science and some of its heroes, but also to make you feel what
science is telling us. Personally, I think that’s important. We’re
embracing these challenges that can only be solved through science.
We’re looking at the universe and trying to understand how it’s put
together, and you can’t see that without science. There’s only one way
to see that.

This is too big a topic for a phone
conversation, maybe, but you personally seem not to feel any need for
the kind of — I don’t know — consolation or mystical fulfillment that
myth and religion traditionally supplied. Is it that you don’t feel or
understand that need, or is it that you think science can ultimately
provide the same sense of largeness and mystery, the same space for
asking what may be unanswerable questions?

Yeah, yeah.
And you see, I have no problem asking the unanswerable questions, or in
asking the as-yet-unanswerable questions. I have no problem with asking
them, and I certainly have no issue with how we get through those dark
nights of the soul by answering them. I would never presume to tell
anyone how to answer them for themselves, not even my own children. I
wouldn’t even think of it. I can only speak for myself when I say,
“Yeah, asking questions – the more the better.” It’s just that if you
come up with answers that make no adjustment to the scale of space and
time that we find ourselves in, we see a failure of the imagination.
But, you know, in terms of asking those questions, yeah, I think that is
the origin of so much of what we as human beings are capable of.

Well,
I think people still look to religion as a zone for certain questions
that science has no way to approach. You know, does the universe have
some pattern or meaning behind it, even if we cannot discern it? Why is
there something instead of nothing at all?

Oh, yes. Yes,
that is Leibniz. That’s his favorite question. In “The Varieties of
Scientific Experience” [a memoir co-authored by Druyan and Sagan], in
the introduction, I wrote about that in the context of a note that I
found in Carl’s handwriting. He had taken that paragraph [from Leibniz],
summarized it and then written something in the margins. You know,
Leibniz goes on to say, and I’m paraphrasing, “What would happen if we
did not, you know, stop asking that question? Where would we go? We’d
have to say God, because that’s the only place we could stop asking that
question.”

So Carl wrote, in his beautiful Brooklyn public school
handwriting, “So don’t stop.” I found that after his death, and it was
like hearing his voice. And it was like, exactly, I couldn’t agree more.
Why is God telling me to stop asking questions? When we defied God by
tasting of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, that’s how we became
ourselves. You know, God may not like that part of us, but I do.

You’ve
written a lot about the public mistrust of science or estrangement from
science. But surely you must understand it pretty well. I’ve read your
brilliant exegesis on the Garden of Eden as a totalitarian prison with
24-hour surveillance, which actually parallels an account by the German
philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Their subject is the
relationship between myth and enlightenment, and they see that story as
an ironic parable that exposes the dangers of both. But they were
writing in the late 1940s, in the wake of the Holocaust and the
Hiroshima bombing. So the downside of the Enlightenment tradition that
produced modern science was pretty obvious.

Absolutely.
You know, in every episode of “Cosmos,” we have been very insistent
about putting every part of science out for scrutiny, of course. You see
the explosion of Tsar Bomba [in 1961], which was the largest
thermonuclear explosion on the surface of the earth. Has science known
sin? Absolutely. We’ve misused everything that we have at our disposal.
How could we not misuse science?

Like everything else that we
have, science has known sin. I mean, there is no such thing as a human
enterprise that is not riddled with error and crime. We carry that
evolutionary baggage with us wherever we go. Carl often used to say that
the question is which of those tendencies that we have — the tendency
to nurture, to collaborate, to share, or the tendency to dominate – is
likely to win out. Do we really want to use technology for cruelty? It
all depends on what kind of society we live in: one that really tries to
actualize cooperation, or one that wants to return the highest reward?
That part is up to us; we have the capacity to optimize for one set of
traits or the other. And, you know, that’s the real substance of it:
Which part of ourselves will win?

“Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey” is now available on Blu-ray and DVD, in an expanded edition box set with many extras. The original episodes can also be viewed on Hulu.