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The Baloney Detection Kit
Carl Sagan’s rules for critical thinking offer cognitive fortification against propaganda, pseudoscience, and general falsehood.
The Marginalian
EXCERPT:
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The kit is brought out as a matter of course whenever new
ideas are offered for consideration. If the new idea survives
examination by the tools in our kit, we grant it warm, although
tentative, acceptance. If you’re so inclined, if you don’t want to buy
baloney even when it’s reassuring to do so, there are precautions that
can be taken; there’s a tried-and-true, consumer-tested method.
But the kit, Sagan argues, isn’t merely a tool of science —
rather, it contains invaluable tools of healthy skepticism that apply
just as elegantly, and just as necessarily, to everyday life.
By
adopting the kit, we can all shield ourselves against clueless guile and
deliberate manipulation. Sagan shares nine of these tools:
- 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. What
survives, the hypothesis that resists disproof in this Darwinian
selection among “multiple working hypotheses,” has a much better chance
of being the right answer than if you had simply run with the first idea
that caught your fancy.
- 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.
- Quantify.
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. Of course there are truths to be sought in the many
qualitative issues we are obliged to confront, but finding them is more
challenging.
- 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.
Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable are not worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and everything in it is just
an elementary particle — an electron, say — in a much bigger Cosmos. But
if we can never acquire information from outside our Universe, is not
the idea incapable of disproof? 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.
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