Stargazing Guy

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

The first 14 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), the thirteenth and fourteenth (blog 7 of 11) and fifteenth and sixteenth (blog 8 of 11).

The seventeenth and eighteenth of these pitfalls is covered below, with Sagan’s examples.

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 wilfully 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).

Here are some other examples:

17. confusion of correlation and causation:

Smoking cigarettes cause lung cancer : Despite the continued pleading to be skeptical of various claims, sometimes disbelieving a true claim also has consequences. For years tobacco companies tried to cast doubt on the link between smoking and lung cancer, often using “correlation is not causation!” type propaganda.

and

Spurious Correlations (spurious or due to chance): There’s a whole website of these, but this one is great:  

Causal inference, not for the faint of heart

Credit

18. straw man:

Person 1: I think pollution from humans contributes to climate change.

Person 2: So, you think humans are directly responsible for extreme weather, like hurricanes, and have caused the droughts in the southwestern U.S.?

OR

Person A: Trans fat is not good for you.

Person B: Getting a microgram of trans fat is not going to kill you. This idea that trans fat amounts to cancer is insane!

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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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