Does Sagan's "Baloney Detection Kit" contain baloney of its own?

Great Debates
21

Occam’s Razor is nice in theory. In the messy world of molecular control of protein expression, one sometimes cannot tell which hypothesis is actually simpler. And sometimes one just has to go with the “least bad” of various models available until more information comes in. There is still an awful lot of black boxing. We know what goes in, we know what comes out. It’s the middle that’s giving us fits.

However, I do agree with Sagan that multiple hypotheses is a stronger way to do science. What I was taught was that this is part of the “strong inference” model of science. Construct competing hypotheses. Then design and carry out an experiment that will start to knock some of them off. This is a much faster way to get some meaningful theory than working on one hypothesis at a time.

22

Zeldar reminds me of the arguments physicists make against the possibility of time travel. They all boil down to “If that happens, then one could violate causality. It is impossible to violate causality because that would be too icky.”

I’ve yet to see any solid work that demonstrates that causality must hold in all situations. I will allow that it does seem to work quite nicely at the Newtonian level, which is where we tend to live, but that doesn’t mean that the Newtonian level is not just a special case.

23

Call me goofy, but it’s my understanding that Ockham said nothing about “simple.”

24

Violating causality destroys all models. (More to the point, the universe itself wouldn’t be able to tolerate it: it wouldn’t “know” how to compute the outcome of any configuration.)

Therefore we can conclude that we don’t exist in such a universe. There’s a simple thought experiment one can conduct to conclude that time travel can violate causality (if it’s possible at all).

25

Well, when a physicist talks about “causality,” they mean that the cause always comes before the effect in all frames of reference. By this definition, backward time travel must violate causality. Still, that’s no reason for all of physics to crumble. I think that what you mean is that a time traveller could never change their own past because that would be logically impossible. They could affect the past, but that would just mean what they did was part of history all along. Or, they could travel into an alternate timeline and change an alternate past. Neither one of these scenarios violates logic. Whether they violate physics, however, is currently unknown.

26

I wouldn’t call you goofy, andros, even if I could have found a version of Ockham’s (Occam’s) Razor that was expressed using the term “simple.” Here is one of many links that gets at the gist of the “law of parsimony.”

You may wish to avoid “simple” or “simplest” to stay closer to the precise language Ockham/Occam used, but as is the case with Murphy’s Law, there are plenty of ways to say pretty much the same thing at least in the same general sense.

What I tried to say about my discomfort with some of the explanations that lay people (of which I am one) get about recent scientific advancement is that it goes right past me. Not just the words, but the concepts. Even if what they’re saying is (for them) in the most parsimonious terms and involves the least multiplication of variables, it escapes my understanding, and thus raises my discomfort with it.

I have neither the time nor the inclination to go back to school to get up to speed on the latest theories in Physics, Chemistry, Biology, you name it. And I do try to find reasonable “popularizations” by competent writers to help wade through the abstruse theories and schemes that seem to be prevalent these days. But if the very language is using terms that are admittedly “not all that intuitive” I question the results.

I think it may have been Richard Feynman (no slouch at science) who said that of you couldn’t explain it to a barmaid, you didn’t understand it yourself.

That’s what I was really meaning about the problems I had applying Occam’s Razor to recent science.

27

Although I can find a few problems, let me say I very much like “Demon Haunted World” and the baloney detection kit and encourage people to read it (them).

Things I would add:
We ought to make it a serious moral obligation to see to it that we make every effort to avoid false beliefs. I think much of the book supports this but it is not specifically in the baloney detection kit, and we will never detect baloney if we don’t see it as a serious priority. Most of the world’s most grave problems are caused by people who adopt false beliefs, resulting in war, terrorism, genocide, bigotry, and other horrors.

Next I would add an avoidance of polarization - becoming emotionally attached to one side of an issue. When we regard those we disagree with as enemies who are supporting “evil” we lose our objectivity and our ability to objectively evaluate the pros and cons of an issue.

We need to be deeply suspicious of virtually everything that is even slightly controversial, even (especially) if it agrees with our preconceived notions. We can memorize long lists of logical fallicies, but if we aren’t suspicious of things we hear, we will never notice them.

Some nitpics on specific detection kit items:

I don’t think “argument from adverse consequences” is a fallacy. Obviously if an action has adverse consequences, that is a good reason for not taking the action. The examples Sagan gives fail for other reasons.

“Special pleading” strikes me as far too vague to be a useful complaint. He gives examples involving free will and “God acts in mysterious ways”. The latter is an argument from ignorance, and “free will” is such a poorly defined concept that I don’t feel any argument should be made based on it.

One of Sagan’s examples of “statistics of small numbers” involves not knowing any Chinese despite one out of five people being Chinese. This is a problem of a skewed sample, not a small sample.

I have a website, www.truthpizza.org that gives my personal slant on critical thinking.

Despite my minor criticisms, I still think “Demon Haunted World” and the baloney detection kit are excellent reading for everyone.

28

Sagan and similar people I like them all. But just the same I do indulge in the luxuries of things they object against, like religion, on one condition as follows:

Now, for me there is only one baloney, believing in something that requires you to hurt or deprive you of your multi-millennially evolved physiology and also your intelligence, reason, and logic, or that of your human neighbors, also your other neighborly life-forms.

Susma Rio Sep

29

Posted by Zeldar:

In the Great Debates forum, Zeldar, it usually does mean exactly that. Not always, but usually.

Posted by TVAA:

In fact this is covered in the list of Common Fallacies of Logic and Rhetoric:

It’s a few years since I read The Demon-Haunted World, but I believe in that book Sagan giveS a more complete explanation, as he does with all the logical fallacies which, in the referenced Web page, are reduced to one or two sentences.

Posted by bullfighter:

Of course we should avoid courses of action that might lead to adverse consequences, bullfighter. The point Sagan is making is that we should never avoid a course of reasoning just because it might lead to conclusions that would make us uncomfortable or, if publicized, produce social effects we would dislike. E.g., I read once of a 19th-century British lady who, on hearing of Darwin’s theory of biological evolution, declared, “Oh, let us hope it is not true! But if it is true, let up hope it does not become widely known!”

Regarding Occam’s Razor: According to An Incomplete Education by Judy Jones and William Wilson (New York: Ballantine Books, 1987), p. 328, Occam’s original formulation was, “It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer.” It is sometimes rendered as “Entities ought not to be multiplied, except from necessity,” which is an inaccurate quotation but expresses the spirit of the principle pretty well. Occam was reacting against the medieval Scholastic philosophers such as St. Thomas Aquinas, who build towering intellectual structures festooned with angels, thrones, powers, dominions, etc., etc. In terms of the modern scientific method, Occam’s Razor is often expressed thus: “If two hypotheses serve equally well to explain an observed phenomenon, the hypothesis requiring the fewest assumptions is to be preferred.” As a reasoning tool, this serves well enough, even out on the most exotic cutting edge of science.

30

JFTR, here’s a fairly accessible rhetoric site for educators (and certainly anyone who is interested in developing strength of argument):

www.intrepidsoftware.com/fallacy/toc.htm

The list of terms, though exhaustible, allows you to click on individual terms to bring up added information if the provided definitions are found to be inadequate.

31

Quite right, BrainGlutton, but I still would have preferred more.

More importantly, it would have been nice if the reasons for this were explored. Oh well.

32

BrainGlutton I agree with you that we should we should not believe something because we don’t like it’s implications.

Sagan gave two examples, the first of which could be interpreted either way: God must exist or society would be more lawless. I interpreted it to mean that we would see more lawlessness now if he didn’t exist, which if true would be evidence to support his existence; if it is taken to imply a fear that society would be more lawless in the future, your interpretation would be appropriate.

The second example was that a man “must be found guilty” otherwise it would send a bad message. That seems to me to say the ACTION of finding him innocent would have bad consequences. If the statement said the man “must be guilty” then it would support your interpretation. The principle you support is a good one and deserves to be included, but Sagan’s explanation seems faulty. It misled me, in any case.

33

What you’re saying here, or at least what I’m hearing, is that this very forum thrives on misapplications of the “rules” in The Baloney Detection Kit. Is that what you’re saying?

If it is, my posting of this set of observations by a man whom most here seem to regard as a prophet of Science or at least a hero to be emulated for his atheistic beliefs and his espousal of those beliefs, was to provide an opportunity to the members who don’t share those high opinions of Dr. Sagan to debunk Sagan’s “rules” for proper debate/rhetoric.

Rather than state my own opinion on the matter, I preferred to use a “catchy” title for the thread to invite people at least to look at the proposal.

For the record, I support the Baloney Detection Kit as a concept, but have yet to apply it 100% to every debate or argument I get into. I allow my emotions to intervene while my intellect takes a nap in the back seat. I would like to recover the steadiness of mind not to be persuaded by emotional appeals/attacks and to focus more on the gist of what’s being said.

It appears to me that “Great Debates” (in many cases) start off poorly and result in shouting matches, ad hominem attacks, and other flagrant violations of the Baloney Detection Kit, and I was seeking a gentle way of saying that.

34

Posted by Zeldar:

Well, kinda . . . with reservations . . .

If I “ask” a question, regarding which I am already committed to a particular answer, that does not itself violate any rule of the Baloney Detection Kit. It does tend in the direction of begging the question (assuming an answer in the way the question is phrased), but that is an error I might or might not commit in that particular instance. And remember, if you challenge my position (or what you perceive to be my position) because you suspect my motives in framing the question, or my intellectual honesty, then you are yourself in danger of committing the logical fallacy of argumentum ad hominem.*

But the real problem is that the BDK does not apply to all questions and assertions we post in the Great Debates forum. Not everything asserted here can be classified as baloney or not-baloney.

Carl Sagan was a scientist. He put together the BDK to help us spot errors in logical reasoning and inadequately supported assertions of scientific or historical fact. But on the GD board, we don’t just argue about purely scientific or historical issues (those usually belong in the GQ forum anyway). We argue about religion, politics, ethics – things which depend on values, not facts. We disagree a lot (and have tons of fun disagreeing!) because we are all different individuals and because we come from a wide variety of backgrounds and traditions – ethnic, cultural, religious, moral and intellectual.

E.g.: There are a lot of threads going on right now about the possibility of a coming war between the United States and North Korea. Some of the factual assertions made by some posters might be false, some of their logical reasoning might be specious, and Sagan’s BDK can help us discern those things. But it cannot help us answer the core question: Would the loss of life and destruction of property such a war would necessarily cause be “worth,” or be “justified” by, the end-goal of removing NK as a regional threat in East Asia? That is a problem in value judgment and there can be no logical or scientific solution.

35

Zeldar - I took an implication from the wording of your post and the thread title that you had something specific in mind. It turns out I was wrong.

My view of Ockham’s Razor is that it is a useful rule of thumb. It isn’t always convenient to use, but that’s not really a big deal, is it? After all, we already know there’s no substitute for clear thinking.

36

Could someone maybe clarify what Sagan meant when he said:

I’m not sure exactly what he’s trying to get at here. I have a copy of A Demon Haunted World, but I’m not at home right now so I can’t reference it - it’s been a while since I read it.

AFAIK, there are many times when every link in a chain of reasoning cannot be proven. As Dogface mentioned earlier, this happens quite often in molecular biology, although he was talking about Occam’s Razor.

If there are a lot of “black boxes” in your chain of reasoning, then not every “link” works. An example would be a drug which has been proven to work through clinical trials, but for which the exact biological mechanism of action is still unknown. Would this fall under Sagan’s “link in the chain” argument?

Or am I just completely not getting it? [sub](The more likely hypothesis - Occam’s Razor in action again) :wink: [/sub]

37

The relevant argument would then be the clinical trials that demonstrated the drug’s effectiveness. If every link in that chain holds, then the conclusion is valid, even if complete explanations are lacking.

38

Waenara,

I did a quick scan of the chapter on BDK in the book and I didn’t spot any expansion on the “chain of argument” issue over the one-liner quoted on the webpage.

Your expansion looks reasonable to me and may be a good example of the type of thing Sagan meant to invoke, but I have wondered how the entire house of cards that astronomy is based on might come tumbling down if we found somehow that the spectra that we had thought were coming from the distant objects wound up being artifacts of our atmosphere.

Not that I have grave doubts about spectroscopy, but it does represent a key ingredient in the whole science of astronomy. If that is proved to be erroneous, astronomy would take a giant step backward and we might realize we “know” very little.

I just hope that that IF isn’t a weak link in the chain.

Any help? Or just more mud in the water?

39

Thanks TVAA.

I suspected as much after I had a few minutes to think about it. (still haven’t woken up completely yet)

40

I missed you on preview Zeldar.

re: astronomy and spectroscopy - this might be a concern with earth-based telescopes (but I don’t know - IANA Astronomer). But wouldn’t information from space-based telescopes help out here? Hubble?