How to detect baloney the Carl Sagan way | Michael Shermer
In 1995, just a few months before his death, astrophysicist Carl Sagan published The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. In that book, he wrote a chapter called 'The Fine...
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Back in the late '90s we introduced the Baloney Detection Kit, inspired by Carl Sagan’s 'Demon-Haunted World' where he had a chapter on the Baloney Detection Kit. He had his set of questions; I kind of developed my own because I started encountering other people that disagreed with me, you know, “we never went to the moon” people, conspiracy people, whatever, and I thought okay so: How do we know—if I don’t know what’s coming down the pike in ten years from now, if I am going to teach my students how to think critically, what are the key points, like just basic questions they can ask? So it begins with one: how reliable is the source of the claim? Here’s the claim, how reliable is it? What’s the evidence for it? What’s the quali...
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Back in the late '90s we introduced the Baloney Detection Kit, inspired by Carl Sagan’s 'Demon-Haunted World' where he had a chapter on the Baloney Detection Kit. He had his set of questions; I kind of developed my own because I started encountering other people that disagreed with me, you know, “we never went to the moon” people, conspiracy people, whatever, and I thought okay so: How do we know—if I don’t know what’s coming down the pike in ten years from now, if I am going to teach my students how to think critically, what are the key points, like just basic questions they can ask? So it begins with one: how reliable is the source of the claim? Here’s the claim, how reliable is it? What’s the evidence for it? What’s the quali...
