[HN Gopher] The Demon-Haunted World
___________________________________________________________________
The Demon-Haunted World
Author : mooreds
Score : 141 points
Date : 2025-09-28 14:00 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| chistev wrote:
| Carl Sagan just might be my favorite non-fiction author. As
| Richard Dawkins said, he was incapable of constructing a bad
| sentence.
|
| One of my favorite parts of this book was the essay "The Dragon
| in my Garage". The essay argues that if you can't provide any
| testable or falsifiable evidence for a dragon's existence, then
| its existence is no different than the absence of a dragon.
|
| Mentioned it in my blog -
|
| "The promise of an afterlife is a cornerstone of many religions,
| offering comfort in the face of mortality. However, this promise
| often hinges on the existence of an all-powerful deity, whose
| nature and existence remain subjects of debate. Central to many
| afterlife beliefs is the notion of an invisible, immortal soul or
| spirit capable of experiencing emotions, enabling the concepts of
| reward or punishment. Yet, no empirical evidence has been found
| to confirm the existence of such a soul. Acclaimed science author
| Carl Sagan illustrated this challenge with his "dragon in the
| garage" analogy. If someone claims to have a dragon that is
| invisible, silent, intangible, and undetectable by any means,
| there is no practical difference between the dragon's existence
| and non-existence. Similarly, without verifiable evidence, the
| existence of an immortal soul remains unproven."
|
| My other favorite books from him are -
|
| 1. Pale Blue Dot - That "look again at that dot" might be the
| most poetic thing I've read.
|
| For the unaware, or for those who want to read it again, here's
| the full quote -
|
| "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On
| it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard
| of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The
| aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident
| religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and
| forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of
| civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love,
| every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer,
| every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every
| "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in
| the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust
| suspended in a sunbeam.
|
| The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of
| the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of
| this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some
| other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager
| they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of
| the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so
| that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary
| masters of a fraction of a dot.
|
| Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that
| we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged
| by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the
| great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this
| vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to
| save us from ourselves.
|
| The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is
| nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species
| could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for
| the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
|
| It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-
| building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of
| the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny
| world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more
| kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale
| blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
|
| 2. Cosmos.
|
| 3. BILLIONS AND BILLIONS - the part he described coming to know
| that he had cancer was beautifully written.
|
| 4. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: A Search for Who We Are with
| Ann Druyan.
|
| I never read that fiction book he wrote - Contact.
|
| But, man, I'm going to add one of his books to my To Be Read list
| again lol.
| card_zero wrote:
| I dislike the "pale blue dot" speech for assigning importance
| to a big empty universe just because it's big, and then
| accusing us of all sorts of hubris despite acknowledging that
| this is the only known place where anything's of interest.
|
| > Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion
| that we have some privileged position in the [irrelevant empty
| space with nothing going for it except size] ...
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| It is indeed a silly claim. Size has nothing do with
| significance. There is no logical inference that says Man
| must occupy a certain amount of the universe to be
| significant.
|
| Perhaps Sagan should have devoted more effort to examining
| his rather amateurish assumptions. Like Dawkins, he was
| terrible at philosophy.
| card_zero wrote:
| _Oh really._ Is that a dig at atheism?
| tinyplanets wrote:
| Good for you!
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| I don't disagree with your point. The earth is pretty special
| as the only known location for intelligent life. However:
|
| 1) Most people haven't internalized _at all_ how big and
| empty and terrifying the universe is. This is a rhetorical
| device to make that point.
|
| 2) Carl Sagan also famously said "We are a way for the
| universe to know itself" so I think you may be straw-manning
| his overall position just a little bit here.
| card_zero wrote:
| He plainly says "the folly of human conceits". It's nice if
| he does a u-turn on this elsewhere, but the speech is still
| gleefully wallowing in putting down humans as big-headed
| ... for what? And why are "superstar" and "supreme leader"
| in quotes like that? Those superstars and supreme leaders
| on earth are the actual genuine ones. I know of no others
| elsewhere, do you? I mean OK important people may _tend_ to
| be pompous, but some people are indeed important. Sagan,
| for instance, was a celebrity, meaning that he was
| celebrated by other people on account of his being some
| good. I don 't need him to deny it, and I don't need him to
| make this speech vicariously denying the importance of
| everybody else.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| This is pretty flakey reasoning. First, the only reason
| "internalizing" the size of the universe would have any
| relevance here is if you were going to use that to draw the
| bad inference of insignificance. That was the context.
| Otherwise, it is, at best, an interesting fact that can be
| equally interpreted as awe-inspiring (I do not see why it
| would be terrifying; I think it is grand and wonderful).
|
| I think Sagan was, in his clumsy way, perhaps trying to
| recover something lost in the loss of religion, a kind of
| reverential humility that recognition of God previously
| inspired. The closest thing he could find was the universe.
| Naturally, this leed toward a kind of pagan materialist
| pantheism (which likely explains his interest in Hinduism).
| jhbadger wrote:
| >Carl Sagan just might be my favorite non-fiction author. As
| Richard Dawkins said, he was incapable of constructing a bad
| sentence.
|
| And Sagan was just so personable and seemingly humble. While
| Sagan basically agreed with Dawkins on most points as to the
| importance of science and reason and the dangers of magical
| thinking and religion, he lacked the arrogance and smugness
| that Dawkins has that often rub people the wrong way. I wonder
| what Sagan would have written had he lived into the early 21st
| century "New Atheism" period.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > While Sagan basically agreed with Dawkins on most points as
| to the importance of science and reason and the dangers of
| magical thinking and religion, he lacked the arrogance and
| smugness that Dawkins has that often rub people the wrong
| way.
|
| He didn't merely lack it - he opposed it. A quote from the
| book:
|
| "In the way that skepticism is sometimes applied to issues of
| public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to
| condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not,
| supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings
| with real feelings, who, like the skeptics, are trying to
| figure out how the world works and what our role in it might
| be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science.
| If their culture has not given them all the tools they need
| to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with
| kindness. None of us comes fully equipped."
|
| ...
|
| "whereas, a compassionate approach that from the beginning
| acknowledges the human roots of pseudoscience and
| superstition might be much more widely accepted."
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Sagan (like Dawkins) was _way_ out of his depth where
| philosophy and theology are concerned. I don't know if he was
| just lazy or presumptuous or had an agenda or somehow managed
| to pass through life criticizing things he didn't understand
| without ever thinking to himself "gee, maybe I should actually
| familiarize myself with these views I keep criticizing", but he
| seemed to be completely unaware of the actual work in this
| space. He was incredibly amateurish, the sort of person
| unintellectual people think is "an intellectual". He was sort
| of a watered-down logical positivist /advocate of scientism
| mired in misconceptions and stereotypes who wasted his time
| jousting with straw men.
|
| Talk about hubris, and a comically unsophisticated sort. There
| are much more intellectually interesting atheists out there (in
| recent history in the Anglosphere, someone like Thomas Nagel,
| for example; Nietzsche, of the historically most famous ones).
| Sagan, Dawkins, the New Atheists are lightweights.
| card_zero wrote:
| You _say_ "logical positivist/advocate of scientism", but
| what I'm hearing is "he liked science, and I don't". I'm
| mischaracterizing your viewpoint, I hope? What do you
| specifically _mean,_ how were his arguments scientistic?
|
| (For bystanders who don't know the term, scientism is like
| when an advert says _our shampoo contains hilyironic acid
| which nourishes the growing hair_ or some similar sciency-
| sounding nonsense, maybe with 3D graphics of molecules, to
| sell you on a thing just by association with science.)
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| I don't know how you came to such a bizarre conclusion. I
| value true science, I appreciate science, but for what it
| is, not what it is not. A robust philosophy of science
| helps in this regard, as it allows us to examine and to
| understand the nature of science, its methods, its limits,
| the nature of the knowledge its gives us, and so on.
| Scientism is incoherent from the start, as its basic
| proposition is self-refuting, as it is not itself a
| scientific claim.
|
| W.r.t. Sagan, it is the general character of his work that
| it privileged science (and I mean this in the modern sense
| of the term, i.e., "empirical science") to the exclusion of
| other rational modes of knowing. Indeed, if anything is
| paradigmatic of rationality, it is _philosophy_ , not
| empirical science. And Sagan's insistence on evidence of
| does not square with things like his views on mathematics
| (never mind some of the superficial commentary on numerical
| representation) or what proofs for the existence of God can
| consist of.
|
| Sagan's views were also often guided by sentiment rather
| than reason. The first that comes to mind if the childish
| and fallacious inference involving the tacit assumption
| that size is proportional to significance. But of course,
| they were presented as if they were reasoned.
|
| My point is, whatever his merits as an astronomer and the
| practice of astronomy (I have heard varying opinions), he
| was a mediocrity in areas like philosophy and theology. He
| should have had the humility to recognize the limits of his
| knowledge.
| card_zero wrote:
| > I don't know how you came to such a bizarre conclusion
|
| By guessing, of course! Gotta start somewhere.
|
| You still haven't supplied details of exactly ... ah,
| don't worry about it, I suppose I'll just bear your
| observation in mind when I come to read a Sagan book. Or
| a Dawkins book. But I don't remember Dawkins sidelining
| philosophy? It still sounds kind of like "oh he should
| have said something apologetic about religion because of
| metaphysics instead of being so damn certain", the kind
| of thing any wet agnostic would like - not because
| there's quality philosophy being overlooked, just because
| wishy-washy people want their spirituality placating.
| tinyplanets wrote:
| Wow, you've really got it out for Carl Sagan (of all
| people)! Why is it required that he be something other
| than a "mediocrity" in philosophy and theology? He was an
| astronomer and (more importantly in my opinion) an
| incredible science communicator. That doesn't necessitate
| also being an expert in the study of religion, faith, and
| philosophy.
| popalchemist wrote:
| Scientism is the name of an ideology to which Sagan
| subscribed.
|
| https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/religion-and-
| philoso...
| rpdillon wrote:
| It's a lot of very strong language with very little evidence.
| popalchemist wrote:
| I absolutely adore Sagan -- I have a first edition of both
| this book and Cosmos in a prize position on my book shelf --
| and yet I agree. He had a disdain for all things irrational,
| yet man himself and his psyche is irrational. He would have
| done well to assimilate Carl Jung et al into his academic
| diet. But he didn't because he had the classic atheist's
| arrogance to him. Still, he was a treasure. You just have to
| know which domains he had authority to speak about and which
| he didn't.
| john-tells-all wrote:
| I read this book many years ago and it made a big impression on
| me.
|
| His view is that normal, rational, intelligent people... can have
| fictional stories in their heads about how things work. It takes
| energy and focus and research to fix these wrong stories, so
| often we live with them or don't recognize them.
|
| Many times I've been casually talking with someone, say
| something, then realize that doesn't make any sense. My wrong
| story made sense in my head, but not when I speak it out loud.
|
| By practicing the scientific method, we can gradually weed out
| the wrong stories in our heads.
|
| Now I'm going to re-read `The Demon-Haunted World`
| card_zero wrote:
| ... to replace them with better wrong stories! Repeatedly, as
| fast as possible.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
| shash wrote:
| AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE
| LITTLE LIES
|
| Edit: came for the Sagan, found the Pratchett!
| maleldil wrote:
| To complete the quote with my favourite part:
|
| > You need to believe in things that aren't true. How
| else can they become?
| card_zero wrote:
| ( _Hogfather,_ p.422)
| tgv wrote:
| Your reply is not very HN, but you have a point. Many things
| cannot be settled with a scientific argument because we
| rarely disagree about the mass of an electron or the spectrum
| of Helium. In our daily discussions, almost nothing can be
| decided by science. Most of it boils down to different
| values, and different ways to think about the world
| (Weltanschauung). Finding common ground in those cases is
| hard work which requires inderstanding, openness and fairness
| of both sides. Or the acceptance of authority.
| aitchnyu wrote:
| I believe we all carry massive mythologies that are tough to
| displace.
|
| My Kagi-fu fails me. Its by an environmentalist who says any,
| say "avoid poisoning fish" advice stands against a massive "the
| line must go up" mythology. He compares it to the geocentrism
| of the Church; how the Sun, Moon and starts rotate around us
| and provides for humanity; and how heliocentrism also had to
| stand up against this massive mythology.
| popalchemist wrote:
| Depth psychology would suggest that mythology is an emergent
| phenomenon of the psyche; there is no removing it.
|
| Better to understand that it is there and how it works. It is
| precisely due to this myth-making faculty that in the absence
| of a legit mythos (i.e. that of Christianity, which was the
| dominant cosmo-conception / worldview in the west for most of
| our history) the vacuum of power that is left by the absence
| of a God figure will be replaced by the nearest
| approximate/surrogate the psyche can find. This is how we
| elevate celebrities like Trump to the status of a God-king
| who can do no wrong.
| mingus88 wrote:
| Dragons of Eden was formative for me.
|
| I feel like the current generation of young people don't have
| anyone like Carl Sagan to bring a sense of wonder to science
| and exploration. It makes me sad.
| blooalien wrote:
| > "I feel like the current generation of young people don't
| have anyone like Carl Sagan to bring a sense of wonder to
| science and exploration. It makes me sad."
|
| The closest I've seen in modern times is maybe [Neil DeGrasse
| Tyson][1].
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_deGrasse_Tyson
| spookybones wrote:
| I once lent my copy to a friend of a friend prone to
| conspiratorial thinking, who professed to be open-minded and
| interested in my viewpoint. A few years later, after many
| reminders, he returned it to me. I asked him what he thought of
| it. He said he never read it, but it made for a great paper
| weight. This was the first of many realizations for me that
| magical thinking cannot be altered with logic.
| freedomben wrote:
| It can, but it's a long process, and it does seem quite rare.
| It's a depressing realization I've come to a well
| ACCount37 wrote:
| It's not a nice thought - how much of human thinking is just
| down to wiring. Pre-set connections somewhere in the big
| switchboard of human mind.
|
| How much of whether you're right or wrong on a given issue is
| not down to knowledge, intelligence or rigor - but to pre-set
| biases that happen to be set the right way or the wrong way.
| How the same knowledge and intelligence that can guide you to
| truths can instead lead you to be more entrenched in wrongs,
| and just how hard it is to know the difference.
|
| You can try to be better than that, but even if you do, you
| aren't going to escape your own nature. And most people don't
| even seem to try.
| card_zero wrote:
| So, being able to be rational is a lottery. With the odds
| improving as culture progresses, but still always a
| lottery. Such is life I guess.
|
| It's open-ended, anyway. I mean _nobody 's_ rationality is
| ever perfect, or even very good, except relative to others.
| BeetleB wrote:
| People here are taking an overly cynical binary stance.
| It's not that logic cannot reach such people, but that
| there are barriers to them thinking and accepting your
| logic. Once you remove most of the barriers, most of these
| people are happily logical.
|
| The important realization I had is that this is true even
| for fairly rational people. If you've ever encountered
| someone who tends to listen more to one source than others,
| they are exhibiting the exact same behavior this thread is
| complaining about. And in my experience, this happens to
| everyone, even the most rational people I've met.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| "Once you remove 97% of human nature, what remains is
| quite logical and reasonable."
|
| That's what I'm talking about. That one person who seems
| way more rational than most might be 95% irrational -
| just outperforming the "97% irrational" baseline. And
| those 2% that make up the difference? How much of this is
| teachable skills, things you and me could learn and
| apply, and how much of it is just some weird brain
| wiring?
|
| That appearance of reason may be deceiving too. You'd
| expect an atheist to outperform the average by a lot -
| but is this true? How many atheists are atheists because
| they carefully examined the case for God's existence and
| found it lacking - and how many are instead atheists
| because of something like an innate contrarian streak, or
| just because of conformism paired with non-religious
| upbringing?
|
| I happen to remember the reason why I ended up an atheist
| quite well. I just didn't like the idea of God existing,
| at all. I didn't get there by being reasonable - I got
| there by being lucky.
| lovecg wrote:
| Those barriers often exist as survival mechanisms. It
| could be quite rational to not even give a hint that one
| will even consider the logical viewpoint if some of the
| consequences involve losing one's status in the
| community, losing one's job etc. The overly "rational"
| loners have something broken with this survival instinct.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| The worst is we don't know what we don't know. That sounds
| trite, but in fact the scientific method is about
| generating a consensus among "rational, educated,
| intelligent people."
|
| That doesn't mean it's correct. It doesn't even mean it's
| _objective_. The best you can get is a consensus among a
| subset of humans that certain things happen because of
| certain other things, and certain models can predict some
| of these things with limited accuracy.
|
| This turns out to be useful for human experiences, as far
| as it goes. But we literally can't imagine what connections
| we're not aware of, what formalisms and models we can't
| create because our brains are too limited by their
| evolutionary wiring, and what experiences we're not having
| because same.
|
| You could argue that these invisible imperceptible things
| can't affect us, by definition. But we don't know that's
| true. There could an entire universe of influences and
| abstractions we're not aware of.
|
| And there probably is. Realistically, what are the odds
| that our not very large or clever brains really do have the
| potential to understand the entire universe?
|
| What we think of science is more like the gap between the
| smartest 1% and the rest of the population. Science is a
| good way to make those 1% insights sticky and useful to
| everyone else.
|
| But it's highly presumptuous to assume that human cognition
| has no limits, and the universe fits comfortably inside our
| brains.
| HSO wrote:
| I like how everybody thinks this applies to others and they
| should change.
|
| When in fact this entire genre should be read and addressed
| exclusively _for oneself_.
|
| It reminds me how I was passionately discussing sth like this
| with a (former) friend and it seemed we agreed on the
| principles. When suddenly through some offhand remakr or turn
| of phrase it turned out he was thinking of _others_ while I was
| thinking of myself
|
| Meaning, he thought how easily others were misled (naturally,
| he himself was perfectly immune, his worldview correct) while I
| was talking about how I needed to protect _myself_ from being
| seduced by agreeable nonsense.
|
| Again, this genre applies _to the reader_ , it is not a lecture
| material for you.
|
| We have no business judging others`s beliefs when we have
| enough trouble keeping our own sane.
|
| What we can do is short or bet against them if we are so
| convinced that we are right. Place your bets and stick to
| yourself. If you are as right as you are convinced, you should
| do well over time. Physical and economic reality >> fantasy and
| cope.
| Root_Denied wrote:
| > We have no business judging others`s beliefs when we have
| enough trouble keeping our own sane.
|
| I agree with you except for this part here, because what
| other people believe can, and does, materially impact you
| when they vote. There's an incentive to try and influence
| others' beliefs when they're harmful to you or your
| communities.
| HSO wrote:
| Sure but then it also pays to be clear what you are doing:
| It it not about "truth" or epistemology but about
| influence/propaganda/persuasion/pick your own euphemism.
|
| And the literature on this is completely difft and, more to
| the point, vastly more effective than the one on philosophy
| of science or striving for truth.
|
| Not saying one is better than the other. My point is only
| those are difft and Sagan is not a good guide to make
| masses of people vote or act how you want.
| Fezzik wrote:
| > We have no business judging others`s beliefs when we have
| enough trouble keeping our own sane.
|
| Assessing other peoples' beliefs and ideas is, in my
| experience, one of the best ways to stay sane and learn.
| Ideas are ultimately independent of the people that hold
| them. I feel like it is people with unfounded ideas
| (religions, historically) that try mightily to stop other
| people from critically assessing them.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| > Ideas are ultimately independent of the people that hold
| them
|
| That's a nice thing to believe. I disagree.
|
| The difference between good people and bad people literally
| is the things they believe. Nazis aren't born evil, they
| are made evil by naziism. Its not only OK, it's necessary
| to your survival to judge them by that metric.
| xanth wrote:
| > What we can do is short or bet against them if we are so
| convinced that we are right. Place your bets and stick to
| yourself. If you are as right as you are convinced, you
| should do well over time. Physical and economic reality >>
| fantasy and cope.
|
| In a world with bad faith & ill-informed missionaries (meme-
| ssionaries?) this is an inadequate political/societal
| perspective. We should all have the humility to be wrong but
| the conviction of our current beliefs and tomes that
| represent them
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| > We have no business judging others`s beliefs when we have
| enough trouble keeping our own sane.
|
| A kinder way to say "judging" is perhaps discrimination. As
| humans we must discriminate between the good and bad opinions
| of others, and even good and bad people, or we are doomed.
|
| If you were to learn only from your own mistakes, or try to
| pretend that there is no such thing as a bad person, you
| would live a short and brutal life of victomhood.
|
| We must judge kindly, but we must judge.
| downboots wrote:
| "While asleep I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen
| formed by flowing blood as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly
| a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That
| hand wrote a number of results in elliptic integrals. They stuck
| to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing..."
|
| - Srinivasa Ramanujan
| hermitcrab wrote:
| He seemed to spend all day thinking about mathematics, so
| perhaps it isn't surprising if he dreamt about it as well.
| BeetleB wrote:
| From https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2022/Jul/the-trouble-with-
| many-...
|
| > Back when I was at university, a friend mentioned to me that he
| wanted to read The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan. I had been
| a fan of Sagan since my teenage years, but had put off reading
| that book. Asking him if he'd read any of Sagan's works, he said
| "No, but this book is often present in skeptic reading lists."
|
| > Many years later, I finally read the book. I'm surprised with
| it being recommended by skeptics, as it has a lengthy criticism
| of skeptics.
|
| ...
|
| Quotes taken straight from the book:
|
| "And yet, the chief deficiency I see in the skeptical movement is
| in its polarization: Us vs. Them--the sense that we have a
| monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all
| these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you're sensible,
| you'll listen to us; and if not, you're beyond redemption. This
| is unconstructive. It does not get the message across. It
| condemns the skeptics to permanent minority status; whereas, a
| compassionate approach that from the beginning acknowledges the
| human roots of pseudoscience and superstition might be much more
| widely accepted."
|
| ...
|
| "In the way that skepticism is sometimes applied to issues of
| public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend,
| to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of
| superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real
| feelings, who, like the skeptics, are trying to figure out how
| the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives
| are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has
| not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great
| quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us
| comes fully equipped."
|
| It is indeed a great book. I would caution folks here that it is
| not particularly representative of Carl Sagan's books. If you
| loved/hated this book, it doesn't mean you'll love/hate his other
| books.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| I have no idea why you'd be surprised the skeptical community
| adores this book, its basically the clearest statement of the
| core fundamental principles, a plea to be open and empathetic
| is not hostile. It's just wisdom, and the majority of people
| who think of themselves as skeptics believe that its important.
| At the same time, sometimes you want to be around people who
| share and build community with the same ideology as you which
| should be perfectly ok.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > I have no idea why you'd be surprised the skeptical
| community adores this book,
|
| The details are in the blog post. Basically, every skeptic
| community I've looked at has espoused the very behavior that
| Carl Sagan criticizes in the book. Very dismissive and
| arrogant folks. There's a reason he explicitly calls out the
| skeptic community.
|
| I did put this disclaimer though - I don't want this
| discussion to degrade into a no true Scotsman fallacy:
|
| > Or at least, visible and vocal skeptics I run across on the
| Internet. An argument could be made that these are the
| minority and not really representative of the majority of
| people who ascribe to skepticism.
| crackrook wrote:
| I read those Sagan quotes as a criticism of capital "S"
| Skeptics, those for whom skepticism is an identity perhaps
| more than it is a means to an end. I feel that Sagan's
| ultimate goal _is_ to foster skepticism (or at least a
| refined version thereof), and that he is merely offering a
| warning about tribalism and ego.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > I feel that Sagan's ultimate goal is to foster
| skepticism (or at least a refined version thereof),
|
| I agree, yet I will note that he goes out of his way in
| the book to label skepticism and then criticize it. He
| did not wish to be thought of as a skeptic. The Descartes
| quote is in the book as well.
|
| Put another way: He was a skeptical person, but he did
| not ascribe to "skepticism".
|
| One thing I was pleasantly surprised to find in the book
| was an inclination to believe certain things to be true
| that many skeptics will refuse to entertain due to the
| lack of evidence. The only example I can recall was that
| back (and other) pain is often entirely psychosomatic. He
| didn't invoke John Sarno, but he showed clear openness to
| believing it. It wasn't a simple "I must have an open
| mind, so I must consider this as a possibility", but an
| actual assertion of his belief in it given recent
| findings. He gives a rationale on why it is a reasonable
| thing to believe.
|
| (Sidenote: I have a lot of pain, and Sarno's approach did
| nothing for me)
| crackrook wrote:
| You originally expressed surprise that skeptics hold this
| book in high regard. I just find your surprise a bit
| difficult to understand. If, on the whole, the work
| advocates for skepticism (among other things), wouldn't
| endorsing it be the consistent choice for skeptics? I
| would never throw out a programming textbook if it
| criticized and emphasized the too-common tendency of
| programmers to over-engineer solutions.
|
| > He goes out of his way in the book to label skepticism
| and criticize it.
|
| Respectfully, I disagree, his criticism reads to me
| primarily as a criticism of dogmatism. First and foremost
| he seemed to identify as a "scientist", but he also
| maintained that you can't have effective science without
| skepticism.
|
| > He did not wish to be thought of as a skeptic.
|
| I would just differ by saying "He did not wish to be
| thought of _only_ as a skeptic, " I am not sure if that
| is a complete departure from your intent.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Can you enumerate these communities?
|
| Can I suggest metabunk, which seems to me to be pretty
| neutral in this regard?
| ACCount37 wrote:
| It's one thing to preach the ideals and another to live by
| them.
| user982 wrote:
| Chapter 2: I have a foreboding of an America in
| my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States
| is a service and information economy; when nearly all the
| manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries;
| when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few,
| and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the
| issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own
| agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when,
| clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes,
| our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between
| what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without
| noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
|
| Chapter 13: One of the saddest lessons of history
| is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject
| any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in
| finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply
| too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been
| taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never
| get it back.
|
| Chapter 25: In every country, we should be
| teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a
| Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and
| community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by
| virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and
| the enveloping darkness.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Sad to say, we are now living in the world he feared, as fully
| realized.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| My only question is was this slide orchestrated or is it the
| natural tendency of humanity to slip back to ignorance when all
| their needs are met, like the Eloi in The Time Machine? Someone
| made lots of money from this slide, I just don't know if it was
| random chance or a scheme that worked.
|
| This quote has always stuck with me and I think about it often,
| perhaps one of the main quotes that have steered my life.
|
| "The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that
| conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is
| more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually
| chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The
| Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory. The truth
| is far more frightening - Nobody is in control. The world is
| rudderless."
|
| -- Alan Moore
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Is the quote actually true or just something the author made
| up? Alan Moore appears to be a fiction writer.
| popalchemist wrote:
| Alan Moore is a deeply philosophical person who does a lot
| of research in general, and as part of his writing process.
| Here's the source for the quote,
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgSbaKpCjq4
|
| However to fully put this into context you also need to
| understand that Alan Moore is an occultist, so he views
| both power and chaos (in the social context as well as the
| metaphysical context) through that lens.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/occult/comments/1iv2eic/alan_moore
| _...
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| It just makes me think he is a lunatic. I don't think the
| same person can be deeply philosophical and an occultist
| at the same time. I recently adopted a practice of
| reading the author's wikipedia page before reading the
| book, to make sure the author is an actual expert in the
| field, and not just a clown.
| popalchemist wrote:
| Say what you will about Moore (though he's the author of
| Watchmen, widely considered not only the greatest graphic
| novel of all time and a biting indictment of the
| entertainment industry and the military industrial
| complex... no small feat)
|
| But -- I'm an occultist and a philosophical person, so I
| can tell you from first hand experience that occultism
| and philosophy are inextricably bound. Any pursuit of
| metaphysics is occult in nature. Occult simply means
| "hidden"; it is the domain of those things which can not
| be perceived directly, but have to be reasoned or
| intuited out via the mind.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Maybe I am misunderstanding what you mean by metaphysics
| and occultism? Do you believe in mysticism, casting
| spells summoning creatures from other realms, etc? Or
| some other kind of occultism? It is my best understanding
| that Alan Moore is into this stuff.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Oh dear, you should learn more about philosophy.
|
| Plato was deeply esoteric -- as were the Pythagoreans for
| that matter. The history of philosophy is rather
| enchanted, as it were.
|
| See Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Ficino, Agrippa,
| Newton...
| xorcist wrote:
| The answer is more often than not alternative c) all of the
| above.
|
| Development may be a random walk, but there are plenty of
| people with interest in a certain outcome, and when they get
| the opportunity they will take it and try escalate the
| process. That's true in most things.
|
| I also tend to believe that it is not a coincidence that so
| many societies right now flirt with authoritarianism, for
| example. We influence each other, even more so now that
| information is global and electronic.
| gdbsjjdn wrote:
| The "crystals and horoscopes" part is such a cheap jab that's
| going to alienate a lot of the population. Astrology is a
| harmless introspective process for most people, they just like
| having a framework to characterise their beliefs and feelings.
| You find very few people who feel that it's prescriptive and
| limits their life.
|
| Contrasted with very rational people who are chasing magical,
| unmoored valuations in the stock market for instance. We buy
| and sell equity based not on future cash flows, but on
| confidence there will be a bigger sucker down the line. This
| untethering of "value" from any productive work is a greater
| contributor to the hollowing out of the US economy than anyone
| buying a piece of amethyst.
| layer8 wrote:
| The "clutching" and "nervously consulting" is essential here.
| It's where it has stopped being a "harmless introspective
| process".
|
| Apart from that, I read "crystals" and "horoscopes" in a more
| metaphorical sense here.
| gdbsjjdn wrote:
| The verbs are not the issue. America has been hollowed out
| by political propaganda, offshoring and growing wealth
| inequality. Sagan fails to identify any of these and
| instead dunks on harmless folk superstitions. Show me where
| the Fed rate or IBM's quarterly earnings or a Fox News
| chyron were determined by a horoscope.
|
| The real enemy is the belief that value can be created from
| nothing, such that an economy of infinite growth can exist.
| Once you've exhausted all the externalities - exploiting
| people overseas, domestically, pillaging natural resources
| - you're left in a zero sum game.
| twisteriffic wrote:
| > Sagan fails to identify any of these and instead dunks
| on harmless folk superstitions. Show me where the Fed
| rate or IBM's quarterly earnings or a Fox News chyron
| were determined by a horoscope.
|
| It's in the same paragraph...
|
| > I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or
| grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a
| service and information economy; when nearly all the
| manufacturing industries have slipped away to other
| countries; when awesome technological powers are in the
| hands of a very few, and no one representing the public
| interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have
| lost the ability to set their own agendas or
| knowledgeably question those in authority
| kogasa240p wrote:
| Well shit, that's happening right now.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| > He explains methods to help distinguish between ideas that are
| considered valid science and those that can be considered
| pseudoscience.
|
| America would be much less divisive if they ignored the
| preachings of their tribe leaders, and made up their own minds.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Unfortunately, humans don't have a good "make up your own mind"
| mechanism wired into them. People laugh at "grok is this true",
| but I have little doubt that Grok does a better job of fact
| checking than an average person would.
| bloak wrote:
| Why is the book so expensive (in Britain)? I found a picture
| online of the back cover showing ISBN 0-7472-5156-8 and PS7.99,
| but the prices I see for ordering it now are ... discouraging.
| roody15 wrote:
| Some research in neuroscience suggests that potentially the
| majority of our actions happen primarily in the limbic regions of
| the brain and then later our pre-frontal cortex makes up a
| logical story for why we acted this way. This is really trippy
| and can cause you to rethink your own sanity if you think about
| it long enough. It's quite possible I don't know why I do much of
| what I do... but I am good at making up a story to explain to
| keep me sane. Crazy to think about.
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