Sagan, Carl (1995), The Demon-Haunted World, Random House, Inc. , New York: NY. ISBN 0-394-53512-X

The Demon-Haunted World

Introduction to Excerpt - by Idris Hsi

Truth is a slippery commodity in today's Information Age. Just about all our communication mediums, new and old, have become faster, more efficient, and transmit more information than at any point in human history. Optimistically, one would think that these improvements would allow the human race to learn more and faster. They have but in a more chaotic and undirected a fashion at any other time in history. Everyone is communicating, often with an agenda. All these communications combined with cheaper storage and distribution media has made available a sea of data rich in information but sparse on facts. Entertainment people distort reality to provide an engaging experience. Political activists and politicians only give you one side of an argument that supports their cause. Companies publish "scientific" results discovered in their own laboratories that prove the benefits of their product. Advertisers will sell you methods for getting rich quick or losing weight in a short amount of time. If we have re-learned anything from the recent corporate scandals, lies can be extremely dangerous and can go undetected for quite a while given a sufficiently profitable motivation for concealment. The outright untruths (defined by myself as having no factual basis or empirical proof in reality) can be easy to detect using some common sense heuristics ("If it sounds too good to be true... "). Half-truths are much harder to detect because they sound just plausible enough to be true but not implausible enough to seem false. It seems that the basic problem with information is that most people (including myself) tend to only hear what they are already inclined to believe. In my case, I find that I'm predisposed to believe that a politician or corporation deliberately misled the public for personal gain than I am that a politician or corporation told the absolute truth about something. Responsible scientists do not have this luxury as predispositions can produce biases in analysis that would taint the results. Students learning the process of science at any level acquire toolkits of techniques that enable them to prove something with certainty. Unfortunately, most people seem to be quite happy with using the "if it sounds true, I'll believe it" heuristic. It's not just an issue of laziness. Activists tend to be wonderful and hard-working researchers and spend extensive time gathering evidence to prove their case. It's just that they don't spend an equal amount of time actively testing their beliefs against objective criteria.

For democracy to work, for science to work, the institutions supporting them have to be honest. The techniques used in debating the extremes to reach a compromise or a correct solution must necessarily employ logical reasoning supported by as much analytical reasoning as can be brought to bear on the situation. Democracy and science both fail when the tools used to persuade someone of the merits of one side or another consist of rhetorical tricks and stunts designed more to conceal the weaknesses of an argument than to advance the strength of the idea.

Like many others in my generation, Carl Sagan and his PBS series Cosmos had a profound effect on my life. Through visualizations, narrative, and state of the art computer technology, Sagan made science accessible to the lay person and connected his audience to science's history and its potential futures. In this essay, Sagan begins by explaining some of the logical holes in the arguments made for life after death, reincarnation, and past-life experiences. He then uses this to expound on the basic problem that humans seem to have had since the dawn of time of making distinctions between fact and fiction, science and pseudoscience, and truth and lies. This section of the essay presents Sagan's "baloney-detection" techniques; a mental toolkit for testing the arguments that one hears. For example, in Walt Disney's Beauty and the Beast, one of the villains utters "If you're not with us, you're against us. "The audience laughs because it's a silly thing to say. But we've heard this argument many times and in many contexts that are not cartoonish in presentation or impact. This is the fallacy of the "excluded middle" - that arguments only have two extremes to them. I've taken parts of Sagan's essay and parsed it into a more modern format for easy reference. In certain sections, I've added some bracketed comments of my own.

Note: For a funnier article in a similar vein, try Love is a Fallacy by Max Shulman

The Fine Art of Baloney Detection (pp. 201-218)

... There is a class of aspirin commercials in which actors pretending to be doctors reveal the competing product to have only so much of the painkilling ingredient that doctors recommend most - they don't tell you what the mysterious ingredient is. Whereas their product has a dramatically larger amount (1. 2 to 2 times per tablet). So buy their product. But why not just take two of the competing tablets? Or consider the analgesic that works better than the "regular-strength" product of the competition. Why not then take the "extra-strength" competitive product? And of course they do not tell use of the more than a thousand deaths each year in the United States from the use of aspirin, or the roughly 5,000 annual cases of kidney failure from the use of acetaminophen, chiefly Tylenol. Or who cares which breakfast cereal has more vitamins when we can take a vitamin pill with breakfast? Likewise, why should it matter whether an antacid contains calcium if the calcium is for nutrition and irrelevant for gastritis? Commercial culture is full of similar misdirections and evasions at the expense of the consumer. You're not supposed to ask. Don't think. Buy.

Paid product endorsements, especially by real or purported experts, constitute a steady rainfall of deception. They betray contempt for the intelligence of their customers. They introduce an insidious corruption of popular attitudes about scientific objectivity. Today there are even commercials in which real scientists, some of considerable distinction, shill for corporations. They teach that scientists too will lie for money. As Tom Paine warned, inuring us to lies lays the groundwork for many other evils.

...

Distraught cancer victims make pilgrimages to the Philippines, where "psychic surgeons," having palmed bits of chicken liver or goat heart, pretend to reach into the patient's innards and withdraw the diseased tissue, which is then triumphantly displayed. Leaders of Western democracies regularly consult astrologers and mystics before making decisions of state. Under public pressure for results, police with an unsolved murder or a missing body on their hands consult ESP "experts" (who never guess better than expected by common sense, but the police, the ESPers say, keep calling). A clairvoyance gap with adversary nations is announced, and the Central Intelligence Agency, under Congressional prodding, spends tax money to find out whether submarines in the ocean depths can be located by thinking hard at them. A "psychic" - using pendulums over maps and dowsing rods in airplanes - purports to find new mineral deposits; an Australian mining company pays him top dollar up front, none of it returnable in the event of failure, and a share in the exploitation of ores in the event of success. Nothing is discovered. Statues of Jesus or murals of Mary are spotted with moisture, and thousands of kind-hearted people convince themselves that they have witnessed a miracle.

These are all cases of proved or presumptive baloney. A deception arises, sometimes innocently but collaboratively, sometimes with cynical premeditation. Usually the victim is caught up in a powerful emotion - wonder, fear, greed, grief. Credulous acceptance of baloney can cost you money; that's what P. T. Barnum meant when he said, "There's a sucker born every minute. "But it can be much more dangerous than that, and when governments and societies lose the capacity for critical thinking, the results can be catastrophic - however sympathetic we may be to those who have bought the baloney.

[The Skeptic's Toolkit]

In science we may start with experimental results, data, observations, measurements, "facts. "We invent, if we can, a rich array of possible explanations and systematically confront each explanation with the facts. In the course of their training, scientists are equipped with a baloney detection kit. 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.

What's in the kit? Tools for skeptical thinking.

What skeptical thinking boils down to is the means to construct, and to understand, a reasoned argument and - especially important - to recognize a fallacious or fraudulent argument. The question is not whether we like the conclusion that emerges out of a train of reasoning, but whether the conclusion follows from the premise or starting point and whether that premise is true.

[Tool]	Description
Chain of Argument	If there's a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) - not just most of them.
Debate	Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
Independent Confirmation	Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the "facts".
Is the Hypothesis Falsifiable? [Refutable]	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.
Is this an Argument from Authority?	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.
Multiple Hypotheses	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. This is a problem that affects jury trials. Retrospective studies show that some jurors make up their minds very early - perhaps during opening arguments - and then retain the evidence that seems to support their initial impressions and reject the contrary evidence. The method of alternative working hypotheses is not running in their heads.
Ocaam's Razor	This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler.
Pet Idea?	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.

The reliance on carefully designed and controlled experiments is key, as I tried to stress earlier. We will not learn much from mere contemplation. It is tempting to rest content with the first candidate explanation we can think of. One is much better than none. But what happens if we invent several? How do we decide among them? We don't. We let experiment do it. Francis Bacon provided the classic reason:

Argumentation cannot suffice for the discovery of new work, since the subtlety of Nature is greater many times than the subtlety of argument.

Control experiments are essential. If, for example, a new medicine is alleged to cure a disease 20 percent of the time, we must make sure that a control population, taking a dummy sugar pill which as far as the subjects know might be the new drug, does not also experience spontaneous remission of the disease 20 percent of the time.

Variables must be separated. Suppose you're seasick, and given both an acupressure bracelet and 50 milligrams of meclizine. You find the unpleasantness vanishes. What did it - the bracelet or the pill? You can tell only if you take the one without the other, next time you're seasick. Now imagine that you're not so dedicated to science as to be willing to be seasick. Then you won't separate the variables. You'll take both remedies again. You've achieved the desired practical result; further knowledge, you might say, is not worth the discomfort of attaining it.

Often the experiment must be done "double-blind," so that those hoping for a certain finding are not in the potentially compromising position of evaluating the results. In testing a new medicine, for example, you might want the physicians who determine which patients' symptoms are relieved not to know which patients have been given the new drug. The knowledge might influence their decision, even if only unconsciously. Instead the list of those who experienced remission of symptoms can be compared with the list of those who got the new drug, each independently ascertained. Then you can determine what correlated exists. Or in conducting a police lineup or photo identification, the officer in charge should not know who the prime suspect is, so as not consciously or unconsciously to influence the witness.

[The Fallacy Detection Toolkit]

In addition to teaching us what to do when evaluating a claim to knowledge, any good baloney detection kit must also teach us what not to do. It helps us recognize the most common and perilous fallacies of logic and rhetoric. Most good examples can be found in religion and politics, because their practitioners are so often obliged to justify two contradictory propositions.

Type of Fallacy	Description	Examples
Ad Hominem	Latin for "to the man," attacking the arguer and not the argument	The Reverend Dr. Smith is a known Biblical fundamentalist, so her objections to evolution need not be taken seriously
Appeal to Ignorance	The claim that whatever has not been proved false must be true, and vice versa. This impatience with ambiguity can be criticized in the phrase: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.	There is no compelling evidence that UFOs are not visiting the Earth; therefore UFOs exist - and there is intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. There may be seventy kazillion other worlds, but not one is known to have the moral advancement of Earth, so we're still central to the Universe.
Argument from Authority	[X is an authority, therefore X must be correct. ]	President Richard Nixon should be re-elected because he has a secret plan to end the war in Southeast Asia - but because it was secret, there was no way for the electorate to evaluate it on its merits; the argument amounted to trusting him because he was President: a mistake, as it turned out.
Argument from Adverse Consequences	[If my argument were not true, then things would be much worse. Or, if you do not buy into my argument, dire things will happen.	A God meting out punishment and reward must exist, because if He didn't, society would be much more lawless and dangerous - perhaps even ungovernable. (A more cynical formulation by the Roman historian Polybius: "Since the masses of the people are inconstant, full of unruly desires, passionate, and reckless of consequences, they must be filled with fears to keep them in order. The ancients did well, therefore, to invent gods, and the belief in punishment after death. ) The defendant in a widely publicized murder trial must be found guilty; otherwise, it will be an encouragement for other men to murder their wives.
Begging the Question	Also called assuming the answer. [This fallacy more or less says that the argument is true because the evidence is true. It's bootstrapping. ]	We must institute the death penalty to discourage violent crime. But does the violent crime rate in fact fall when the death penalty is imposed? The stock market fell yesterday because of a technical adjustment and profit-taking by investors. But is there any independent evidence for the causal role of "adjustment" and profit-taking; have we learned anything at all from this purported explanation? "
Confusion of Correlation and Causation	[This is a popular one. Event A happened at the same time as B. Therefore A caused B. ]	A survey shows that more college graduates are homosexual than those with lesser education; therefore education makes people gay. Andean earthquakes are correlated with closest approaches of the planet Uranus; therefore - despite the absence of any such correlation for the nearer, more massive planet Jupiter - the latter causes the former. Children who watch violent TV programs tend to be more violent when they grow up. But did the TV cause the violence, or do violent children preferentially enjoy watching violent programs? Very likely both are true. Commercial defenders of TV violence argue that anyone can distinguish between television and reality. But Saturday morning children's programs now average 25 acts of violence per hour. At the very least this desensitizes young children to aggression and random cruelty. And if impressionable adults can have false memories implanted in their brains, what are we implanting in our children when we expose them to some 100,000 acts of violence before they graduate from elementary school?
Excluded Middle or False Dichotomy	Considering only the two extremes in a continuum of intermediate possibilities.	"Sure, take his side; my husband's perfect; I'm always wrong. " "Either you love your country or you hate it. " "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem"
Inconsistency	[This is a curious fallacy as it seems to be a flaw of omission rather than commission. I choose to argue A but not argue B even though it has a parallel form. ]	Prudently plan for the worst of which a potential military adversary is capable, but thriftily ignore scientific projections on environmental dangers because they're not "proved. " Attribute the declining life expectancy in the former Soviet Union to the failures of communism many years ago, but never attribute the high infant mortality rate in the United States (now highest of the major industrial nations) to the failures of capitalism. Consider it reasonable for the Universe to continue to exist forever into the future, but judge absurd the possibility that it has infinite duration into the past.
Meaningless Question		What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? But if there is such a thing as an irresistible force there can be no immovable objects, and vice versa.
Misunderstanding of the Nature of Statistics	[Statistics are only as good as the person doing the analysis. ]	President Dwight Eisenhower expressing astonishment and alarm on discovering that fully half of all Americans have below average intelligence.
Non Sequitur	Latin for "It doesn't follow. "Often those falling into the non sequitur fallacy have simply failed to recognize alternative possibilities.	Our nation will prevail because God is great. But nearly every nation pretends this to be true; the German formulation was "Gott mit uns").
Observational Selection	Also called the "enumeration of favorable circumstances", or as the philosopher Francis Bacon described it, counting the hits and forgetting the misses.	A state boasts of the Presidents it has produced, but is silent on its serial killers. My favorite example is this story, told about the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, newly arrived on American shores, enlisted in the Manhattan nuclear weapons Project, and brought face-to-face in the midst of World War II with U. S. flag officers. So-and-so is a great general, he was told. What is the definition of a great general? Fermi characteristically asked. I guess it's a general who's won many consecutive battles. How many? After some back and forth, they settled on five. What fraction of American generals are great? After some more back and forth, they settled on a few percent. But imagine, Fermi rejoined, that there is no such thing as a great general, that all armies are equally matched, and that winning a battle is purely a matter of chance. Then the chance of winning one battle is one out of two, or 1/2; two battles 1/4, three 1/8, four 1/16, and five consecutive battles 1/32 - which is about 3 percent. You would expect a few percent of American generals to win five consecutive battles - purely by chance. Now, has any of them won ten consecutive battles... ?
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc	Latin for "It happened after, so it was caused by"	Jaime Cardinal Sin, Archbishop of Manila: "I know of ... a 26-year-old who looks 60 because she takes [contraceptive] pills. " Before women got the vote, there were no nuclear weapons.
Short-Term vs. Long-Term	Subset of the Excluded Middle, but so important I've pulled it out for special attention.	We can't afford programs to feed malnourished children and educate pre-school kids. We need to urgently deal with crime on the streets. Why explore space or pursue fundamental science when we have so huge a budget deficit?
Slippery Slope	Related to the Excluded Middle. [Basically the argument assumes effects that supposedly cascade from a certain decision or idea. ]	If we allow abortion in the first weeks of pregnancy, it will be impossible to prevent the killing of a full-term infant. If the state prohibits abortion even in the ninth month, it will soon be telling us what to do with our bodies around the time of conception.
Special Pleading	Often [used] to rescue a proposition in deep rhetorical trouble [This fallacy seems to take the form: If you just understood A, all would be made clear. But you don't so it's hopeless to argue with you. "]	How can a merciful God condemn future generations to torment because, against orders, one woman induced one man to eat an apple? Special plead: you don't understand the subtle Doctrine of Free Will. How can there be an equally godlike Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in the same Person? Special plead: You don't understand the Divine Mystery of the Trinity. How could God permit the followers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - each in their own way enjoined to heroic measures of loving kindness and compassion - to have perpetuated so much cruelty for so long? Special plead: You don't understand Free Will again. And anyway, God moves in mysterious ways.
Statistics of Small Numbers	A close relative of observational selection.	They say 1 out of every 5 people is Chinese. How is this possible? I know hundreds of people and none of them is Chinese. I've thrown three sevens in a row. Tonight I can't lose.
Straw Man	Caricaturing a position to make it easier to attack	Scientists suppose that living things simply fell together by chance - a formulation that willfully ignores the central Darwinian insight, that Nature ratchets up by saving what works and discarding what doesn't. Or - this is also a short-term / long-term fallacy - environmentalists care more for snail daters and spotted owls than they do for people.
Suppressed Evidence	Half Truths	An amazingly accurate and widely quoted "prophecy" of the assassination attempt on President Reagan is shown on television; but - an important detail - was it recorded before or after the event? These government abuses demand revolution, even if you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs. Yes, but is this likely to be a revolution in which far more people are killed than under the previous regime? What does the experience of other revolutions suggest? Are all revolutions against oppressive regimes desirable and in the interests of the people?
Weasel Words	[Using technical sounding or different vocabulary to add legitimacy to an argument]	The separation of powers of the U. S. Constitution specifies that the United States may not conduct a war without a declaration by Congress. On the other hand, Presidents are given control of foreign policy and the conduct of wars, which are potentially powerful tools for getting themselves re-elected.. Presidents of either political party may therefore be tempted to arrange wars while waving the flag and calling the wars something else - "police actions," "armed incursions," "protective reaction strikes," "pacification," "safeguarding American interests," and a wide variety of "operations," such as "Operation Just Cause. "Euphemisms for war are one of a broad class of reinventions of language for political purposes. Talleyrand said, "An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public. "

Knowing the existence of such logical and rhetorical fallacies rounds out our toolkit. Like all tools, the baloney detection kit can be misused, applied out of context, or even employed as a rote alternative to thinking. But applied judiciously, it can make all the difference in the world - not least in evaluating our own arguments before we present them to others.

[The Tobacco Industry Example]

The American tobacco industry grosses some $50 billion per year. There is a statistical correlation between smoking and cancer, the tobacco industry admits, but not, they say, a causal relation. A logical fallacy, they imply, is being committed. What might this mean? Maybe people with hereditary propensities for cancer also have hereditary propensities to take addictive drugs - so cancer and smoking might be correlated, but the cancer would not be caused by the smoking. Increasingly farfetched connections of this sort can be contrived. This is exactly one of the reasons science insists on control experiments.

Suppose you paint the backs of large numbers of mice with cigarette tar, and also follow the health of large numbers of nearly identical mice that have not been painted. If the former get cancer and the latter do not, you can be pretty sure that the correlation is causal. Inhale tobacco smoke, and the chance of getting cancer goes up; don't inhale, and the rate stays at the background level. Likewise for emphysema, bronchitis, and cardiovascular diseases.

When the first work was published in the scientific literature in 1953 showing that the substances in cigarette smoke when painted on the backs of rodents produce malignancies, the response of the six major tobacco companies was to initiate a public relations campaign to impugn the research, sponsored by the Sloan Kettering Foundation. This is similar to what the Du Pont Corporation did when the first research was published in 1974 showing that their Freon product attacks the protective ozone layer. There are many other examples.

You might think that before they denounce unwelcome research findings, major corporations would devote their considerable resources to checking out the safety of the products they propose to manufacture. And if they missed something, if independent scientists suggest a hazard, why would the companies protests? Would they rather kill people than lose profits? If, in an uncertain world, an error must be made, shouldn't it be biasing toward protecting customers and the public?

A 1971 internal report of the Brown and Williamson tobacco Corporation lists as a corporate objective "to set aside in the minds of millions the false conviction that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer and other diseases; a conviction based on fanatical assumptions, fallacious rumors, unsupported claims and the unscientific statements and conjectures of publicity-seeking opportunists. "They complain of

the incredible, unprecedented and nefarious attack against the cigarette, constituting the greatest libel and slander ever perpetrated against any product in the history of free enterprise; a criminal libel of such major proportions and implications that one wonders how such a crusade of calumny can be reconciled under the Constitution can be so flouted and violated [sic].

This rhetoric is only slightly more inflamed than what the tobacco industry has from time to time uttered for public consumption.

There are many brands of cigarettes that advertise low "tar" (ten milligrams or less per cigarette). Why is this a virtue? Because it is the refractory tars in which the 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?

Healthy Buildings International is a for-profit organization, recipient of millions of dollars over the years from the tobacco industry. It performs research on second-hand smoke, and testifies for the tobacco companies. In 1994, three of its technicians complained that senior executives had faked data on inhalable cigarette particles in the air. In every case, the invented or "corrected" data made tobacco smoke seem safer than the technicians' measurements had indicated. Do corporate research departments or outside research contractors ever find a product to be more dangerous than the tobacco corporation has publicly declared? If they do, is their employment continued?

Tobacco is addictive; by many criteria more so than heroin and cocaine. There was a reason people would, as the 1940s ad put it, "walk a mile for a Camel. "More people have died of tobacco than in all of World War II. According to the World Health Organization, smoking kills three million people every year worldwide. This will rise to ten million annual deaths by 2020 - in part because of a massive advertising campaign to portray smoking as advanced and fashionable to young women in the developing world. Part of the success of the tobacco industry in purveying this brew of addictive poisons can be attributed to widespread unfamiliarity with baloney detection, critical thinking, and the scientific method. Gullibility kills.