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The article links to an article about Sagans' prediction of the decline of america. Strangely fitting nowadays.
> I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…
- Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives.
- See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.
This is good advice IME. Get well acquainted (like REALLY well acquainted) with opposing viewpoints, such that you could argue them better than their proponents. See also "Argue Well by Losing" by Phil Haack [1].
Somewhat relatedly, the ancients viewed Rhetoric as the purest expression of intelligence. It required you to have deep knowledge of a topic, including all arguments in favour and against (implying deep empathy with the audience), and the ability to form coherent and meaningful argument. Modern political "debate" is ludicrous in comparison.
I think the notion of considering all points of view depends on the assumption that people are arguing in good faith. When this breaks down, I don’t think we can just throw up our hands and give up, but the baloney detection kit needs to be updated. I don’t have a blog-worthy list of answers, but it’s something I at least think about.
One thing we can do is a kind of meta-analysis, where we check on the condition of our own baloney detection kit. For instance, if I reject an idea and it later turns out to be true, did my BDK fail? Does it need to be updated? Or are a few scattered failures OK? You can treat the BDK as a testable hypothesis like anything else.
While skeptical, he did not have much skepticism against mainstream theories.
I think it needs another item in the list:
For any theory/ hypothesis: how well does it stand against the null-hypothesis?
For example: How much physical evidence is there really for the string-theory?
And I would upgrade this one:
If there’s a chain of physical evidence (was argument), every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them
And when breaking these items do not mean that something is false. It means that the arguments and evidence is incomplete. Don't jump to conclusions when you think that the arguments or evidence is invalid (that is how some people even think that the moonlanding was a hoax).
Acclaimed science author Carl Sagan illustrated this challenge with his “dragon in the garage” analogy. If someone claims to have a dragon that is invisible, silent, intangible, and undetectable by any means, there is no practical difference between the dragon’s existence and non-existence. Similarly, without verifiable evidence, the existence of an immortal soul remains unproven.
>If someone claims to have a dragon that is invisible, silent, intangible, and undetectable by any means, there is no practical difference between the dragon’s existence and non-existence.
“Everyone knows that dragons don’t exist. But while this simplistic formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific mind. The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact wholly unconcerned with what does exist. Indeed, the banality of existence has been so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to discuss it any further here. The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each non-existed in an entirely different way.”
― Stanisław Lem, The Cyberiad
Lem's "Non-Existence" piece is a delightful parody, but it actually maps onto a real epistemological problem. Popper distinguished testable claims from unfalsifiable ones, but as Lakatos showed, researchers often protect core theories with auxiliary hypotheses—cf. his work on research programmes. The dragon thought experiment targets claims that retreat from empirical contact. The subtler issue is identifying when protective belts around legitimate theories become pathological.
Software differs in that it has observable effects - CPU cycles consumed, memory addresses accessed, network packets sent. These are direct physical measurements (voltage changes, EM emissions, heat). The invisibility is just abstraction layers we built.
Sagan's dragon lacks any measurable impact. Software without observable effects wouldn't be running at all - it'd be equivalent to non-existent code.
Scene: It's a fine sunny day in the forest; and a rabbit is sitting outside his burrow, tippy-tapping on his lap top. Along comes a fox, out for a walk.
Fox: "What are you working on?" Rabbit: "My thesis." Fox: "Hmmmmm. What is it about?" Rabbit: "Oh, I'm writing about how rabbits eat foxes."
(incredulous pause) Fox: "That's ridiculous! Any fool knows that rabbits don't eat foxes!" Rabbit: "Come with me and I'll show you!"
They both disappear into the rabbit's burrow. After a few minutes, gnawing on a fox bone, the rabbit returns to his lap top and resumes typing.
Soon a wolf comes along and stops to watch the hard working rabbit.
(Tippy-tap, tippy-tap, tippy-tippy-tap).
Wolf: "What's that you are writing?" Rabbit: "I'm doing a thesis on how rabbits eat wolves."
(loud guffaws). Wolf: "You don't expect to get such rubbish published, do you?" Rabbit: "No problem. Do you want to see why?"
The rabbit and the wolf go into the burrow, and again the rabbit returns by himself. This time he is patting his stomach. He goes back to his typing.
(Tippy-tap, tippy-tap, tippy-tippy-tap).
Finally a bear comes along and asks, "What are you doing?"
Rabbit: "I'm doing a thesis on how rabbits eat bears." Bear: "Well that's absurd!" Rabbit: "Come into my home and I'll show you."
SCENE: Inside the rabbit's burrow. In one corner, there is a pile of fox bones. In another corner is a pile of wolf bones. On the other side of the room a huge lion is belching and picking his teeth.
MORAL: It doesn't matter what you choose for a thesis topic. It doesn't matter what you use for your data. It doesn't even matter if your topic makes sense. What matters is who you have for a thesis advisor.
I think you missed his point. In that exercise, the justifications for the dragons existence are always shifting.
“Oh, it doesn’t show up on thermal? That’s because it doesn’t emit heat. It has special fire”
“Oh, when you spray flour in the air nothing sticks to the dragon? Well that’s because it is also incorporeal”
Skeptics keep asking questions. That’s the point. If you are never satisfied with any answer, you have no reason to believe the claim. There is literally nothing there to believe in.
His point is that skepticism and wonder go hand in hand. One without the other is dangerous. What a fascinating claim, an invisible dragon! It should not be dismissed outright as obvious quackery, but let’s see how much scrutiny it can take
We start with an invisible dragon and the more we look into it we now have to explain fire without heat, bodies without form, etc. gee, it seems that for this to be true our entire understanding of the world is wrong…or is the simple answer that someone is trying to trick us would answer this better.
Then the skeptic starts asking why someone would want to trick us…
Yes. The beauty is that once you get the means you can adjust your view. But you can't go just "trust me bro, it's there, you can't ever verify it, but I know it's there." It might be there... But why do you believe it to be so?
Do you actually live your life with the idea that there might be a dragon in your garage that is undetectable by any means currently known to humanity? And maybe an elephant in the neighbor's, and a unicorn down the street?
But who gets to decide what counts as "verifiable evidence"? The institutions we trust to validate claims—scientific bodies, tech platforms, government agencies—have their own blind spots and biases. When we dismiss something as undetectable, are we protecting truth or just gatekeeping what kinds of questions are worth asking?
I wonder how well Sagan's own "baloney" holds up against his kit. Historians despise the guy for all the stuff he made up about the library of Alexandria, Hypatia, Eratosthenes, etc... People still repeat a lot of that to this day.
The people for whom this stuff isn't glaringly obvious, relatively early in life, will never get it. Except, maybe, specific instances that directly affect them in a bad way. Switch "brands" and they'll be fooled again. They'll probably even double-down on it.
I've come to observe with having kids (and also moving to Germany and seeing other kids shaped) that so so much is taught. There is a ton born into a kid but so many things like the ability to think critically about a problem is actually taught in primary school and early years education (kindergarten/kita/preschool). There might be some raw horsepower that some people have more or less of with regards to certain problem spaces but for the most part - how to tackle a problem and think critically is very much a learned skill that some may get on their own but it can certainly also be given to them.
I spoke in absolutes. Guess I'll say I've never observed it happening in anyone after maybe late teens. Some learn to keep quiet about whatever they're bought into, because they've learned it will scare a lot of people off. Or they end up pseudo intellectuals with a podcast. Or scamming their way into huge money and political positions. So they can be pretty good at "winning". But most of them are just sad and lonely, living mostly to prop up those "winners".
I've fallen for it enough to see it almost instantly now. So much time wasted, thinking some people just needed to figure things out, or maybe they figured out something I couldn't see. But, little by little, they just keep getting worse, more unreasonable, dangerous even.
Unfortunately, I wasted my youth on that idea. Now the people that warned me not to, moved on to much better things, far outside the environment I've been hanging out in.
Hard disagree. I grew up with parents who LOVED science; my earliest memories in the 80s are my mom checking out Cosmos from the library on VHS and binging it. It is a big reason I have an engineering PhD. At the same time, they were 60s hippies and into meditation woo-woo, as in "visualize a beam of light coming from your stomach and you can instantly travel to Jupiter!", being able to walk through walls because of quantum physics, etc. Tons of pseudoscience. So, I grew up in both worlds, while always somewhat skeptical of the woo, still was sort of in it through high school. I read Demon Haunted World in college, and the woo was eradicated overnight. I think part of this also has to do with PhD programs, particularly reviewing papers, where it is basically BS detection. But, DHW framed it spectacularly for me, and is one of the most influential books I have read.
Spot on. I just finished reading the demon haunted world to my daughter. She’s 13 and we have been very concerned about her going on social media.
I framed it as being more important than ever to be skeptical of what you see. Everything online is fake in some way. Every picture is touched up at best, AI slop at worst. You need to question everything.
I honestly fear her generation is just cooked. They were forced into online learning during covid, have socialization issues, and are coming of age in an era of rampant disinformation and generated content that is too good to spot and designed to addict and influence.
You joke but you’d be amazed at the Reddit front page. It’s hard to tell anymore if the comments are even people, but I have noticed many fake posts of some Trump tweet he never actually made getting traction.
It’s so easy to verify his public statements. Did he really say that? Just go look.
Yet time and time again people get baited into rage mode. It’s more satisfying to post than it is to do 30 seconds of research.
I've been using the baloney detection kit as a checklist when reading preprints in my field. The "independent confirmation" principle has saved me countless hours - I now wait for at least one replication attempt before diving deep into any paper that makes surprising claims. It's amazing how many don't hold up to that first test.
In production, the biggest threat isn't bad data—it's confirmation bias during postmortems. Everyone wants their theory to be right. The fifth incident teaches you to test the hypothesis you don't want to be true first.
> I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…
https://www.openculture.com/2025/02/carl-sagan-predicts-the-...