– Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
The first 12 of Sagan’s twenty most common and perilous pitfalls — many of which are rooted in our chronic discomfort with ambiguity — are available here – one and two (blog 1 of 11), three and four (blog 2 of 11), five and six (blog 3 of 11), seven and eight (blog 4 of 11), nine and ten (blog 5 of 11), eleven and twelve (blog 6 of 11) and the thirteenth and fourteenth (blog 7 of 11).
The fifteenth and sixteenth of these pitfalls is covered below, with Sagan’s examples.
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”).
Here are some other examples:
15. short-term vs. long-term:
“The question is, should we spend the money on new infrastructure or on maintenance of the existing building?”
16. slippery slope – or ‘thin end/edge of the wedge’, ‘the camel’s nose in the tent’, or ‘If You Give a Mouse a Cookie’.
“If we allow same-sex couples to marry, then the next thing we know we’ll be allowing people to marry their parents, their cars and even monkeys.”
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”.
Remember, hope lives here.
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