Sagan, Scrutiny and Baloney

Carl Sagan,  defender of critical thinking

I sometimes get a hard time on certain Facebook group pages because I refuse to believe what senior archaeologists like Parker Pearson, Gaffney or Darvill  tell me -- or tell us, corporately -- in their "learned" articles.  "How dare I criticise them?" they protest. "They are archaeologists who know what they are talking about, and you are novice who knows nothing about their specialisms....."  I try to tell them that it matters not a jot who they are or how famous they may be, or whether I know a lot or a little about archaeology.  The article is the thing.  If it's rubbish, it's rubbish, and if that is not pointed out, then the rubbish is perpetrated and magnified and accepted as "the truth."

I had forgotten how wise Carl Sagan was on the subject of bad research and unsound conclusions.  I came across this video:



There is also a web article, here:

http://www.openculture.com/2018/03/carl-sagans-baloney-detection-kit.html?fbclid=IwAR2oFyiZwA1vOAsUh6XLVqpIxG_r5nEwSEAa_aRNM6xzmJS9Zuf99pHOyes


Extract:

In the essay, a chapter from his 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World, Sagan proposes a rigorous but comprehensible “baloney detection kit” to separate sense from nonsense.

** Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”

** Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.

** Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.

** Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives.

** 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.

** If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations.

** If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.

** Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler. Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified…. You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result.

Calling his recommendations “tools for skeptical thinking,” he lays out a means of compensating for the strong emotional pulls that “promise something like old-time religion" and recognizing "a fallacious or fraudulent argument.” At the top of the post, in a video produced by Big Think, you can hear science writer and educator Michael Shermer explain the “baloney detection kit” that he himself adapted from Sagan, and just above, read Sagan’s own version, abridged into a short list (read it in full at Brain Pickings).

Like many a science communicator after him, Sagan was very much concerned with the influence of superstitious religious beliefs. He also foresaw a time in the near future much like our own. Elsewhere in The Demon-Haunted World, Sagan writes of “America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time…. when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few.” The loss of control over media and education renders people “unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true.”

This state involves, he says a “slide… back into superstition” of the religious variety and also a general "celebration of ignorance," such that well-supported scientific theories carry the same weight or less than explanations made up on the spot by authorities whom people have lost the ability to “knowledgeably question.” It’s a scary scenario that may not have completely come to pass... just yet, but Sagan knew as well or better than anyone of his time how to address such a potential social epidemic.

=================

In my mind, this chimes in perfectly with the points made by Barclay and Brophy about archaeology, research and "interpretative inflation"........  For superstition, read "British Neolithic Mythos".

PS.      I like the reference to people who "have lost the ability to knowledgeably question" the so-called authorities who tell them things or sell them ideas.  That is indeed a social epidemic, and a very dangerous one.  I see the results almost every day, on blogs and in Facebook groups which I follow intermittently -- whenever a spectacular headline appears in the press following a press release relating to Stonehenge, we see a flood of comments showing that people are completely fooled by the snake oil salesmen, with hardly anybody going back to the recently published article itself and subjecting it to critical scrutiny.  Why don't they do that?  The reasons are many and varied -- but it's clear that people are intimidated by articles that have graphs and tables in them and by writing that is often far more complex than it needs to be.  And yes, one has to conclude that most members of the public no longer have the instinct or the ability to examine a text and work out for themeselves that what they are reading is complete tosh.