If you have read Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World you probably saw the Baloney Detection Kit and may even have made mental note of the ones you agreed with.
But have you ever gone through it point by point to see if maybe Sagan was exposing a little of his own baloney?
As a point of debate/discussion, copy/paste the item(s) you regard as not worthy of being on Sagan’s list and offer your explanation of why the item(s) is/are not baloney detectors.
What would you add to his list?
It seems fine to me.
If I were to add anything, it would involve the unspoken assumption that consequences come what we assert is true instead of what is true. This is a very common error, and while it’s indirectly referenced, it’s incompletely so.
TVAA:
“consequences come what we assert is true instead of what is true”
Er … huh? Is there a preposition missing here or something? My parser just choked.
As a conservative Catholic, I believe in a host of things that Carl Sagan undoubtedly regarded as baloney. That said, I can’t quibble with much in his kit.
Obviously, Carl Sagan had his own set of opinions and biases, and those show in his list. But for the most part, what he says strikes me as commonsensical.
After all, just because Christians believe in SOME seemingly absurd things, it doesn’t follow that we’re supposed to swallow EVERY absurd notion that comes along.
I personally think that Demon Haunted World should be required reading in high school. I don’t see anything on his list for his baloney detection kit that isn’t standard scientific practice or skeptical inquiry. Perhaps if you listed the points YOU think are baloney we could debate THAT.
/em still looking for the invisible flying dragon in the garage…
-XT
Zeldar - if you have something in mind, go ahead and post it. The we can have a debate.
I’m surprised Sagan didn’t know how to pluralize “hypothesis”.
I think slippery slope arguments may have limited utility.
xtisme & The Weak Force,
Is there anything in my wording of the OP that suggests I have a problem with the kit? If so, that wasn’t my point.
I sense there are people among us (no names, just vague impressions) who either have yet to scrutinize such a list of “rules” or have failed to internalize it. It was for the benefit of questioning the applicability of those items that I posted the link and asked the questions.
Asking a question doesn’t automatically mean one has an answer in mind, does it?
The page has “hypotheses” as a plural lower down, so I’m inclinded to say it was a typo rather than not knowing.
I’m nitpicking, aren’t I? Uh, ::points:: he started it! 
Drat it all… boy do I wish we could edit our posts.
Anyway, my point was supposed to be something along these lines:
If you wake up at night to find the fire alarm screaming, flickering red light coming from under your door, and thick smoke quickly filling the room, you can’t reject the possibility that your house is on fire because that would mean that your life is in danger, your belongings will soon be destroyed, and you’ll have to leave your comfortable bed.
For some incomprehensible reason, people eliminate possibilities because they’d be forced to draw uncomfortable conclusions if they were considered. It’s a profound form of stupidity: if your house is on fire, you have problems, regardless of whether you believe it or not. Dr. Sagan refers to this phenomenon, but only indirectly – I would discuss it more.
That’s the only real change I can think of at the moment. There’s certainly nothing wrong about what is there.
Well, it’s hard to say what, but you did give the impression. After all, most people posing a question here have a side they’d like to argue. Yours appears to be the other one, in this case though 
In other words - you posted your question marvellously objectively.
To address the OP: it looks quite a good list - mostly things that are mostly common sense but easy to miss when baloney appears.
But even baloney believers follow the list mostly normally: eg. if you don’t prefer the simpler of two explanations most of the time you go bad imagining pink unicorns. The question is why we all have blind spots of varying sizes where our normal logic just doesn’t get a look in.
Okay, here’s one that I wouldn’t have included: “Spin more than one hypothesis - don’t simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.”
I assume that by “spin” he means “create and examine”, but this may be slang that I’m not familiar with. Not that this is a bad idea in principle, but in my experience, making up hypotheses just for the sake of making them up doesn’t produce any good results. I think better advice would be “Be receptive to others’ hypotheses.”
Of course, if “spin” means “listen to”, then I guess I don’t have anything to say.
Shade,
Did I give the impression or did you (and others) take the impression?
Thanks for observing my effort to be objective in the OP.
Addressing your “blind spots” issue, I suspect we all have them, and that experiences with discussing/debating points and issues with which we have some emotional attachment (if not some vested interest) have put us on guard to potential challenges. We may even work out little scenarios of how we can do thrilling comebacks next time the issue arises and somebody else tries a trick we were fooled by before.
Being open-minded gets harder and harder to do once we fall victim to someone’s failure to “play by the rules” (such as the kit).
Experience is a dear teacher and a fool learns from no other.
What do you mean, “such as the kit”?
What’s wrong with it? I don’t see any way in which Sagan could be said to have failed to play by his own rules.
And that reminds me… there is one thing I’d like to change. Science recognizes one and only one authority: the universe itself.
**
To me, “But have you ever gone through it point by point to see if maybe Sagan was exposing a little of his own baloney?” suggested you feel there is some baloney. On rereading it, it doesn’t actually say that. So let’s put it down to a misunderstanding.
What are saying here? People getting invested in defending something and getting tripped up if it turns out to trigger the baloney detector later?
TVAA,
I suspect you have misinterpreted my statement about “the kit.”
What I was trying to get across was that if we have been subjected to another person’s failure to apply the points in Sagan’s Common fallacies of logic and rhetoric and have been bruised in that abuse of “the rules” by others, that we may develop our own strategies to cope with that abuse in future situations.
To paraphrase an old proverb, “Rise to the occasion, and the occasion will surely come up.”
If we get stung enough we may be so well prepared to “get even” that we use the slightest infraction another might exhibit to avoid really hearing what that person may be saying and to unleash our prepared remarks. It seems to be all too common. A serious barrier to real communication.
(I sense that this “clarification” may have added more obfuscation than clarity.)
My only criticism of the basics has to do with the “Occam’s Razor” point.
It is all too easy to make prejudicial appeals to “the simpler explanation,” because “simpler” involves many levels of interpretation. It is not an “objective fact” about a given explanation. (At its best, it has to do with how an explanation is phrased.)
Incidentally, CS hasn’t stated the Razor very well, IMHO. It’s not at root about mere simplicity, but rather an injunction to refrain from “multiplying hypotheses beyond necessity.” And of course “beyond necessity” involves debatable judgments: and the game begins again.
My suggestion is not that we discard complicated explanatory possibilities, but rather that we weight all conceivable possibilities according to how well they comport with our prior experience, investigating the most familiar explanatory possibilities first–and so on, serially, until we conclude (defeasibly) that the thing has been satisfactorily explained.
We may have to tear out our explanation by the roots in light of later evidence.
[In a way this point illustrates my dissent from the methodology of the Professional Skeptic school of thought.]
If what lies below the basics are only taken as useful rules of thumb, and are not taken as exhaustive even in that context–I have no further objections.
Scott Dickerson,
Well said. I have had my own difficulties with Occam’s Razor ever since I first heard of it – long ago. In my view, there are many apparent violations of it in current science, or at least in my understandings of current science.
Examples include the appeal to manifold dimensions that no one seems to relate to in any practical way. If this is the “simplest way” to explain things, I feel beyond simple!
I do, however, wonder at how our “prior experiences” seem to get preference. Familiarity? Well established? Easy NOT to have to think about?
I will answer my own concerns here by suggesting that there is a very fine line between “inductive reasoning” and outright “prejudice.” By that I hope to say that if we accept as “obvious” or “beyond doubt” something that has just become familiar and easy to use by way of prejudice or bias, we may be missing the trees for the forest.