Stargazing Guy

– Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

At the end of my last blog on Sagan’s baloney detection kit, Sagan admonishes against the twenty most common and perilous ones — many rooted in our chronic discomfort with ambiguity — with examples of each in action.

The first two of these pitfalls is covered here, with Sagan’s examples.

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)

Here are some up-to-date examples:

1. ad hominem – “Climate science can’t be trusted because climate scientists are biased”
2. argument from authority – “Isaac Newton was a great scientist and an alchemist, so we should take the discipline of alchemy seriously”

PS: I love coffee. BuyMeACoffee, leave a message with a date and time and we can share it, remotely, at the same time, and think about the Cosmos.

In the meantime, take care of yourself and if you can, someone else, too, because as Adam Smith said, “we naturally desire not only to be loved but to be lovely”.

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