How To Slay Demons

If there is one book that I wish everyone (or at least, a great number) would read, it would be Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World.

Carl Sagan, with a model of the Viking lander 
I visited several bookstores a few months ago looking for a copy, but I did not find any. The bookstores I visited all had prominent displays of those “Shades of Grey” books, and many, many editions and translations of the Bible (you really can’t miss those two), but no Carl Sagan books, unfortunately. 
Or any other sciencey books, for that matter. 

Carl Sagan was an American astrophysicist who popularized science and promoted scientific thinking in his books. Published in 1995, “The Demon-Haunted World” is one of those books that the rather trite expression “eye-opener” applies perfectly. The book promotes critical thinking to be applied in everything, to help people avoid being bamboozled by charlatans and crackpots (like the people on this list) who deceive and hoodwink others.
It helps us know the difference between valid science and pseudoscience, between casuistry and sound reasoning, and keeps us from being gullible and to have a healthy dose of skepticism. 
Critical thinking enables us to escape the gravity pull of superstition that keeps us mired in stupidity and ignorance.

Carl Sagan's “Baloney Detection Kit” comes highly recommended and is very useful in slaying "demons" (don't leave home without it!):


The Baloney Detection Kit
§  Seek independent confirmation of alleged facts.
§  Encourage an open debate about the issue and the available evidence.
§  "In science, there are no authorities. At most, there are experts."
§  Come up with a variety of competing hypotheses explaining a given outcome. Considering many different explanations will lower the risk of confirmation bias.
§  Don't get too attached to your own ideas, lest you get reluctant to reject them even in the face of evidence to the contrary.
§  Quantify whenever possible, allowing for easier comparisons between hypotheses' relative explanatory power.
§  Every step in an argument must be logically sound; a single weak link can doom the entire chain.
§  When the evidence is inconclusive, use Occam's Razor to discriminate between hypotheses.
§  Pay attention to falsifiability. Science does not concern itself with unfalsifiable propositions.

The book also has a list of common logical and rhetorical fallacies:
    • Ad hominem - attacking the arguer and not the argument.
    • Argument from "authority".
    • Argument from adverse consequences (putting pressure on the decision maker by pointing out dire consequences of an "unfavorable" decision).
    • Appeal to ignorance (absence of evidence is not evidence of absence).
    • Special pleading (typically referring to god's will).
    • Begging the question (assuming an answer in the way the question is phrased).
    • Observational selection (counting the hits and forgetting the misses).
    • Statistics of small numbers (such as drawing conclusions from inadequate sample sizes).
    • Misunderstanding the nature of statistics (Majority of people in Manila die in hospitals; therefore stay out of hospitals! )
    • Inconsistency (When two propositions are asserted that cannot both possibly be  true).
    • Non sequitur - "it does not follow" - the logic falls down.
    • Post hoc, ergo propter hoc - "it happened after so it was caused by" - confusion of cause and effect.
    • Meaningless question ("what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?).
    • Excluded middle - considering only the two extremes in a range of possibilities (making the "other side" look worse than it really is).
    • Short-term v. long-term - a subset of excluded middle ("why pursue fundamental science when we have so huge a budget deficit?").
    • Slippery slope - a subset of excluded middle - unwarranted extrapolation of the effects (give an inch and they will take a mile).
    • Confusion of correlation and causation.
    • Straw man - caricaturing (or stereotyping) a position to make it easier to attack.
    • Suppressed evidence or half-truths.
    • Weasel words - Broadly, any word or words used with the intention to mislead or misinform (e.g., using words like, "many people say...", "according to experts...", etc.). 
If you’ve ever engaged in any debate (especially online), you’re already familiar with some of the concepts on the list above.
I’ll provide examples on each one on my next post on this blog.  


In the meantime, I wish you a world free of demons and full of light.

Comments

Post a Comment

So, what do you think? Post it here:

Popular posts from this blog

The Square Cube Law and How It Killed Giants

Image
We are so used to the idea of giants that we take it for granted that they exist, or must have existed at one point in our history.  You know, those very large and very tall human-like creatures, carrying a humongous club, and being very nasty. Like this: And if you are a typical, god-fearing Catholic Pinoy, you would swear that not only are they true, you even saw one beside that big-ass, scary-looking tree not far from your home, one night when you were going home after an evening of binge-drinking with your buddies. And the bastard’s smoking a cigar as long and as big as your leg! Or you know someone who saw one of those cigar-smoking monsters. This creature is called a kapre —a cigar-smoking giant wearing a loincloth. Or maybe a tikbalang —a half-man, half-horse creature about as tall as a kapre. Unlike a centaur, however, a tikbalang is a giant with the torso and arms of a man, and the head and legs of a horse.  Scary creatures, these—and, if I may add
Read more

Vincent

Image
Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings are valued today at hundreds of millions of dollars. One of the world’s greatest painters, he is also one of the most influential figures in Post-Impressionism art. Ironic, because nobody wanted his paintings when he was alive.  He was a “weirdo” and nobody really understood him. Except for the few friends he had with other struggling, unsuccessful painters, one of whom he quarreled with, a quarrel that resulted in Van Gogh cutting off his ear with  a razor.  He also suffered from delusions and had psychotic breaks. He seldom ate and drank heavily. He was one of those tortured souls who had so much to give but was largely ignored. His genius and artistry nobody really got while he was alive. He was an idealist, a sensitive soul who had too much empathy. Imagine somebody like that living today.  At age 37, Vincent Van Gogh - struggling with depression, mental illness, and thinking that he was a failure - killed himself.  You know, maybe Don McLean
Read more

Typhoons and Earthquakes in the Philippines

Image
The Philippines has more than its fair share of disasters, and not because the country is particularly cursed or anything, but because the entire archipelago—purportedly composed of 7,100 islands—lies on a region in the Pacific Ocean called the “Ring of Fire” (actually, the area is shaped more like a horseshoe, although to be fair, “The Horseshoe of Fire” doesn’t have the same impact as the “Ring of Fire”). About 40,000 kilometers long, the “ring” runs from the southern tip of South America, up along the coast of North America, across the Bering Strait, down through Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia (the Ring of Fire’s western edge extends into the Indian Ocean), and to New Zealand.  The “Fire” part of the Ring of Fire is because a string of 452 volcanoes dot this line, like a malevolent game of connect-the-dots. The regions along this line experience volcanic eruptions and periodic earthquakes—majority of them small, hardly-felt tremors, and the few devastating ones that kil
Read more

The Queen of Heaven

Image
Inanna, “The Queen of Heaven,” is a goddess of Sumerian origin: goddess of warfare, fertility, and sexual love. The Akkadians called her Ishtar , a name from which Easter was derived. Yes, the Christian holiday. Inanna is the most popular and important female deity in ancient Mesopotamia. She is also known as a healer, life giver, composer of songs, and possessing a wide range of emotions—passionate, ambitious, jealous, grieving, joyful, timid, and generous. In later cultures, she went by different names: Astarte, Isis, Aphrodite—she was the Goddess. She is the original femme fatale , the embodiment of the woman every man dreams about; the female that devours men, the female that attracts/scares men; the virgin harlot. Every man knows at least one. The goddess makes an appearance in Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods.”  Throughout Sumer’s existence, her powers and deeds were glorified and extolled in myth, epic, and hymn. No one dared oppose her, neither god nor man. She was
Read more