The Demon-Haunted World - Carl Sagan - ***

"As I write, Congress is dissolving its own Office of Technology Assessment -- the only organization specifically tasked to provide advice to the House and Senate on science and technology. Its competence and integrity over the years have been exemplary." - 1995

People try verious belief systems on for size, to see if they fit . . . psuedoscience speaks to powerful emotional needs science often leaves unfilfilled. It caters to fantasies about personal powers we lack and long fore. It offers satisfaction of spiritual hungers, cures for disease, promises that death is not the end.

Perhaps the most successful recent global psuedoscience . . . is the Hindu doctrine of transcendental meditation (TM). . . The worldwide TM organization has an estimated valuation of $3 billion. For a fee they promise through meditation to be able to walk you through walls, to make you invisible, to enable you to fly. By thinking in unison they have, they say, diminished the crime rate in Washington, D.C. and caused the collapse of the Soviet Union, among other secular miracles. Not one smattering of real evidence has been offered for any such claims. TM sells folk medicine, runs trading companies, medical clinics and "research" universities, and has unsuccessfully entered politics.
-- the most successful, huh - I thought they were small-time operators on the cult scale for some reason.

In Russia, under Communism, both religion and psuedoscience were systematically suppressed -- except for the superstition of the state ideological religion. It was advertised as scientific, but fell far short of this ideal as the most unselfcritical mystery cult. . . As a result, post-Communism, many Russians view science with suspicion. . . the region is now awash in UFOs, poltergeists, faith healers, and old-time superstition.

- How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life, Thomas Gilovich



Chapter 2

The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media.

Humans may crave absolute certainty. . . but the history of science teaches us that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding.

-- some time is spent extolling the virtues of science and its superiority over other disciplines, based on its constant questioning of itself


Chapter 3

Each field of science has its own complement of psuedoscience. . . Astronomy has, as its most prominent psuedoscience, astrology - the discipline out of which it emerged.

-- always ask by what process people come to lay claim to nature's intentions

- he cites articles from the Weekly World News as examples of psuedoscientific foolery: does he know what the Weekly World News is?


Chapter 4:

- the crop circle hoax is mentioned


Chapter 5:

After I give lectures - on almost any subject - I'm often asked, "Do you believe in UFOs?" I'm always struck by how the question is phrased, the suggestion that this is a matter of belief and not of evidence. I'm almost never asked, "How good is the evidence that UFOs are alien spaceships?" . . . I've found that the going-in attitude of many people is highly predetermined.

Some of the black-lining in FOIA requests is due to intercepted communications - though the information needs to be revealed, any details regarding its collection are blanked out.

The book of Deuteronomy, in the Bible, was "found" by King Josiah in the middle of a reformation struggle - it confirmed all his views.

Lorenzo of Valla concluded that the Apostles' Creed could not, on grammatical grounds, have been written by the Twelve Apostles.
-- much like my rejection of the Willie Lynch hoax, which led me to research it further


Chapter 6:

- occasionally, people will claim to be in contact with aliens: when Carl Sagan gives them math questions to answer, he never receives a reply, but when he asks questions regarding morality he receives plenty.

- thorazine (and haloperidol) make hallucinations go away

from another site:
Meditation And/Or Sensory Deprivation
When the brain lacks external stimulation to form perceptions, it may compensate by referencing the memory and form hallucinatory perceptions.

It makes good evolutionary sense for children to have fantasies of scary monsters. . . those who are not afraid of monsters tend not to leave descendents.

- only the three or four actual "canals" on Mars ever showed up on photographs: the rest were imaginary


Chapter 7:

Malleus Maleficarum, the "Hammer of Witches": aptly described as one of the most terrifying documents in human history. . . what the Malleus comes down to, pretty much, is that if you're accused of witchcraft, you're a witch.

Witch-hunting in England was profitable. All costs of investigation, trial, and execution were borne by the accused or her relatives. . . one mid-seventeenth-century man confessed he had been the death of above 220 women in England and Scotland, for the gain of twenty shillings apiece.

William Tyndale translated the Bible into English - in thanks, he was captured, garroted, then burned at the stake for good measure. His copies of the New Testament were hunted down house-to-house by armed posses.

There are almost no reports of flying saucers prior to 1947: instead, it was demons and fairies.

The believers [in alien sightings] take the common elements in their stories as tokens of versimilitude, rather than evidence that they have contrived their stories out of a shared culture and biology.


Chapter 8:

The AMA callls memories surfacing under hypnosis less reliable than those recalled without it.
Subjects under hypnosis can as easily recall FUTURE lives as they can past ones.

Unhypnotized subjects can easily be made to believe they saw something they didn't. In a study, subjects are shown a film of a car accident. When questioned about the video, false information is interjected, such as a reference to a nonexistent stop sign. Many subjects then dutifully remember seeing the sign. When the deception is revealed, some vehemently protest, stressing how vividly they remember the sign. . . the psychologist, Elizabeth Loftus, argues that "memories of an event more closely resemble a story undergoing constant revision than a packet of pristine information."
-- that's awesome

President Ronald Reagan, who spent World War II in Hollywood, vividly described his own role in liberating Nazi concentratoin camp victims. Living in the film world, he apparently confused a movie he'd seen with a reality he hadn't. On many occasions in his presidential campaigns, Mr. Reagan told an epic story of World War II courage and sacrifice, an inspiration for all of us. Only it never happened; it was the plot of the movie A Wing and a Prayer.

Legends influence apparitions and vice versa.


Chapter 9:

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. -- Sherlock Holmes

The power or intensity with which something is felt is no guide regarding its truth.
What a more critical mind might recognize as a hallucination or a dream, a more credulous mind interprets as a glimpse of an elusive but profound reality.

Paul Ingram spent fifteen years in prison because he was gullible enough to believe "expert" suggestions that he was denying memories of satanically abusing his daughter.


Chapter 10:

Magic requires cooperation of the audience with the magician.

-- The absence of suitable counterexplanations doesn't make a proposed explanation correct.

The credibility of science is only a consequence of the method.

Carl Jung, regarding people who accept incredible testimony at face value:
"These people are lacking not only in criticism but in the most elementary knowledge of psychology. At bottom they do not want to be taught any better, but merely to go on believing -- surely the naivest of presumptions in view of our human failings."


Chapter 11: Reader Mail
-- Reader mail always baffles me. People are weird and/or retarded.


Chapter 12:

We tell children about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy for reasons we think emotionally sound, but then disabuse them of these myths before they're grown. Why retract? Because their well-being as adults depends on them knowing the world as it really is. We worry, and for good reason, about adults who still believe in Santa Claus.
-- reminds me of the Forestry official who believed that trees were infinite and that if they all were cut down, God would just make more.

Who cares which breakfast cereal has more vitamins when we can take a vitamin pill with breakfast?
There are no authorities in science. At best, there are experts.

Tools for skeptical thinking:

- Independent confirmation of facts
- Substantive debate by knowledgeable proponents
- Multiple hypotheses: how ELSE could that have happened?
- Compare your hypothesis fairly with the alternatives
- Think of the ways your hypothesis could be rejected
- Quantify
- Make sure every link in an argument chain works
- Use Occam's Razor
- Never entertain untestable propositions
- Use carefully designed and controlled experiments

Logical fallacies:

ad hominem (to the man): attacking the arguer, not the argument
non sequitur (it doesn't follow): reaching a conclusion from facts that one can't logically reach
correlation implying causation (post hoc, ergo propter hoc)

argument from authority
argument from consequences
appeal to ignorance: if it can't be disproved, it must be true, right?
special pleading: any "technical" non-explanation
begging the question (assuming the answer): relying on an unproven premise
observational selection: seeing the roses and not the thistles
statistics of small numbers
misunderstanding statistics
meaningless question
false dichotomy: splitting a situation into two choices, at least one of them a straw man
short-term vs. long-term false dichotomy: the belief that a solution to one renders impossible the solution to another
slippery slope
straw man: caricaturing a position to make it easier to attack
bogus evidence
weasel words
-- I'll add statistical extrapolation to that mix: the idea that the current trends will continue, at the projected, into the future.

absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

There are many brands of low-tar cigarettes. Why is low-tar a virtue? Because the refractory tars are where polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and some other carcinogens are concentrated. Aren't the low-tar ads a tacit admission by the tobacco companies that cigarettes indeed cause cancer?


Chapter 13:

A man who sees evidence that his ship is unsound and tricks himself into believing that everything's fine is guilty of causing the deaths of the men aboard that ship when it goes down.
-- Don't care whether or not someone believes, care about the evidence on which their belief stands.

In his brief list of psuedoscience and superstition he mentions four things I found interesting:
- that flatworms who know a task can be fed to other flatworms, which can then do the task -- I'd heard of this one
- Facilitated Communications -- this one could easily be scientifically tested, I'd still try it if my child was autistic
- more crimes being committed when the moon is full -- that one made sense to me, but it needs more empirical research I think
- the secret life of plants book, though I learned that was written by a crackpot well before reading this

- you can stop your pulse by holding a ball in your armpit and squeezing

Nearly half of all Americans believe there is such a thing as psychic or spiritual healing.
-- reminds me of George Carlin's line, something to the tune of: "What are you people, stupid?"

When a child's spleen is ruptured, perform a simple surgical operation and the child is completely better. Take that child to a faith healer and she's dead in a day.

"Carlos", a hoax staged by James Randi in Australia, was pretty badass - they said this kid could channel a dead spirit, used completely unverifiable sources, and the media and countryside ate it up. Once it was revealed as a hoax, people felt betrayed, but justified their behavior.

What a medium needs is darkness and gullibilty.

A scientist places an ad in a Paris newspaper offering a free horoscope. He sends 150 people the horoscope of a serial killer, along with a questionnaire regarding accuracy. 94% of the respondents, as well as 90% of their family and friends, reply that they were recognizable in the horoscope.
-- 94% of respondents? I think people who thought it was inaccurate would be more likely to throw the horoscope away than mail in its questionnaire.

- it talks about cold reading, which is cool, and the list of "evidence" for disorders, which is not so cool


Chapter 14:

The rate of change in science is responsible for some of the fire it draws. Just as we've finally understood something the scientists are talking about, they tell us it isn't true.
-- as opposed to other "pathways of knowledge", which reinterpret, realign, and deny erroneous beliefs in efforts to maintain their claim to truth

- scientists have human failings, but to refute their discoveries based on those is an ad hominem attack


Chapter 15:

Societies that teach contentment with one's present station in life, in expectation of post-mortem reward, inoculate themselves against revolution.

-- How can the Human Genome Project call itself complete when they've sequenced 92% of the genes from no more than 10 people?

By making pronouncements that are, even if only in principle, testable, religions however unwillingly enter the arena of science. . . this, in turn, has infuriated the followers of some religions.

- The Roman Catholic Church didn't admit that the Earth revolved around the Sun until 1992?


Chapter 16:

The Spanish Inquisition sought to avoid direct responsibility for the burning of heretics by handing them over to the secular arm; to burn them itself, it piously explained, would be wholly inconsistent with its Christian principles.

"Absolute secrecy corrupts absolutely": CIA Inspector General, 1995
Open and vigorous debate is often the only protection against the most perilous misuse of technology.

What realm of human behavior is not morally ambiguous? Consider aphorisms: Haste makes waste, but a stich in time saves nine. Better safe then sorry, but nothing ventured, nothing gained. Where there's smoke there's fire, but you can't tell a book by its cover. . . there was a time when people planned or justified their actions on the basis of such contradictory platitudes.
-- That time's not over: "No apologies, no regrets"
-- you have to read between the lines on these: the sum of these aphorisms isn't zero.


Chapter 17:

Because its explanatory power is so great, once you get the hang of scientific reasoning you're eager to apply it everywhere.

We cannot have science in bits and pieces, applying it where we feel safe and ignoring it where we feel threatened.

Societies with a supreme god who lives in the sky tend to be the most ferocious, though this is a statistical correlation only.

Many psuedoscientific and New Age belief systems emerge out of dissatisfaction with conventional values and perspectives -- and are therefore themselves a kind of skepticism.
-- the trashing of Western medicine by Ayur-Ved enthusiasts

If you're only skeptical, no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn anything. You become a crotchety misanthrope convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.)
-- hah

It means nothing to be open to a proposition you don't understand.


Chapter 18:

Factors contributing to the development of the scientific method in Greece:
- The assembly, where men learned to persuade each other through rational debate
- A maritime economy that prevented isolation and parochialism
- A widespread Greek-speaking world around which travelers and scholars could wander
- An independent merchant class that could hire its own teachers.
- The Iliad and the Odyssey
- A literary religion not dominated by priests - ???
- The persistence of these factors for 1,000 years

In cultures lacking unfamiliar challenges, where fundamental change is unneeded, novel ideas need not be encouraged. Indeed, heresies can be declared dangerous.

Thales - the philosopher who, when ridiculed for his poverty, used his climatological skills to form a monopoly on olive presses and make a killing
Eratosthenes - the guy who measured the circumference of the Earth from the shadows cast by the wells
Empedocles: a guy who proved that air isn't just empty space - he also came up with his own version of evolutionary theory


Chapter 19:

When what needs to be learned changes quickly, especially in the course of a single generation, it becomes harder to know what to teach and how to teach it. Students complain about relevance; respect for their elders diminishes.
-- easily solved by teaching the present method while explaining the past methods it was built upon

- he talks about how high schoolers are surly and don't want to ask questions: a phenomenon I observed immediately when I switched to public school

I find many adults are put off when young children pose scientific questions. . . why adults should pretend to be omniscient before 6-year-olds, I can't for the life of me understand. . . is our self-esteem so fragile?

Sixty-three percent of American adults are unaware that the last dinosaur died before the first human arose.
-- 63 as in 63 MILLION YEARS! AGO! - thanks, Bill Nye, for telling me when the dinosaurs died
-- er, wait: 65 MILLION YEARS! AGO! - my mistake, stupid fallible memory

75% don't know that antibiotics kill bacteria but not viruses.
-- I didn't know that, but now that I think about it, I don't really know what a virus is. *research*
-- ...they're basically just wandering gene transmitters that infect and reproduce... very weird

57% don't know that electrons are smaller than atoms.
-- I would have had to think about that for a second, but since I know atoms have electrons, protons, and neutrons, I would've (or should've) gotten that one right.

These are typical questions in "scientific literacy". The results are appalling. But what do they measure? The memorization of authoritative pronouncements. What they SHOULD be asking is HOW WE KNOW these things. . . such questions are a much truer measure of public understanding of science.
-- well thought


Chapter 21:

- There's a good story about Frederick Douglass here.


Chapter 22:

- he talks about the networks claiming The Flintstones has educational value. Also, he mentions The X Files, and suggests, half tongue-in-cheek, that it be replaced by a show in which the paranormal claims turn out to be explainable under skeptical scrutiny

The United States may be the best-entertained nation on Earth, but a steep price is being paid.


Chapter 23:

- the Westminister project: Queen Victoria's idea, in 1860, to fund the invention of television.
- the nature of spin-off scientific discoveries resulting from curiousity preclude an entirely market-driven approach to scientific funding


Chapter 24:

The ink was barely dry on the Bill of Rights before politicians found a way to subvert it -- by cashing in on fear and patriotic hysteria.
-- USA PATRIOT ACT NOW A PERMANENT LAW, NO KNOWN ABUSES FOUND

Exploiting tensions between France and the U.S., and a widespread fear that French and Irish immigrants were somehow intrinsically unfit to be Americans, the Federalists passed a set of laws that have come to be known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. . . the Alien Act gave President John Adams the power to deport any foreigner who aroused his suspicions. . . the Sedition Act made it unlawful to publish "false or malicious" criticism of the government or to inspire opposition to any of its acts.

As soon as Thomas Jefferson was elected - in the first week of his presidency in 1801 - he began pardoning every victim of the Sedition Act because, he said, it was as contrary to the spirit of American freedoms as if Congress had ordered us all to fall down and worship a golden calf. By 1802, none of the Alien and Sedition Acts remained on the books.
-- can such a thing happen in our age?

Whatever the problem, the quick fix is to shave a little freedom off the Bill of Rights. Yes, in 1942, Japanese-Americans were protected by the Bill of Rights, but we locked them up anyway -- after all, there was a war on. Yes, there are Constitutional prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure, but we have a war on drugs and violent crime is racing out of control. . . the pretexts change from year to year, but the result remains the same.


Chapter 25:

There is no nation on Earth today optimized for the middle of the twenty-first century.

Most of us are for freedom of expression when there's a danger that our own views will be suppressed. We're not all that upset, though, when views we despise encounter a little censorship here and there.

The book mentions the "Those who would trade liberty for security deserve neither" quote, but attributes it to J.S. Mill instead of Ben Franklin. Probably a mistake, since Franklin died before J.S. Mill was born.

In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights.