Category: Cosmos
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Pitfalls of Common Sense: courtesy of Carl Sagan – blog 1 of 11
– 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…
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Carl Sagan’s “baloney detection kit” – blog 10 of 10
– Carl Sagan’s Fine Art of Baloney Detection, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark The opening quote, from Carl Sagan, for this series of blogs was: The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science. Science can be hard (can…
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Carl Sagan’s “baloney detection kit” – blog 9 of 10
– Carl Sagan’s Fine Art of Baloney Detection, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark Here is the ninth, and final, tool. 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…
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Carl Sagan’s “baloney detection kit” – blog 8 of 10
– Carl Sagan’s Fine Art of Baloney Detection, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark Here is the eighth tool. When faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well, choose the simpler. Otherwise known as ‘Occam’s Razor’, which is a convenient rule-of-thumb for selection when there is nothing separating the data.…
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Carl Sagan’s “baloney detection kit” – blog 7 of 10
– Carl Sagan’s Fine Art of Baloney Detection, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark On to the seventh tool. Too date you have got the facts (1 of 10), you had a substantive debate (2 of 10), you’ve covered arguments from authority (3 of 10), you have several hypotheses (4 of 10),…
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Carl Sagan’s “baloney detection kit” – blog 6 of 10
– Carl Sagan’s Fine Art of Baloney Detection, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark It’s time for the sixth tool. So far you have got the facts (1 of 10), you had a substantive debate (2 of 10), you’ve covered arguments from authority (3 of 10), you have several hypotheses (4 of…
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Carl Sagan’s “baloney detection kit” – blog 5 of 10
– Carl Sagan’s Fine Art of Baloney Detection, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark Half way through this thread and so far you have got the facts (1 of 10), you had a substantive debate (2 of 10), you know how to treat arguments from authority (3 of 10) and most recently…
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Carl Sagan’s “baloney detection kit” – blog 4 of 10
– Carl Sagan’s Fine Art of Baloney Detection, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark So, you’ve got the facts (1 of 10) and you’ve had a substantive debate (2 of 10) and now (Sagan’s third tool for detecting baloney) how to consider arguments from authority (3 of 10). The next tool…
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Carl Sagan’s “baloney detection kit” – blog 3 of 10
– Carl Sagan’s Fine Art of Baloney Detection, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark So, you’ve got the facts (1 of 10) and you’ve had a substantive debate (2 of 10), now you need to consider Sagan’s third tool for detecting baloney: Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have…
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Carl Sagan’s “baloney detection kit” – blog 2 of 10
– Carl Sagan’s Fine Art of Baloney Detection, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark In my last blog, The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science, I referred to Carl Sagan’s “baloney detection kit” as a set of…
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