The late scientist Carl Sagan…..Carl Sagan (November 9, 1934–December 20, 1996) was many things — a cosmic sage, voracious reader, hopeless romantic, and brilliant philosopher. But above all, he endures as our era’s greatest patron saint of reason and critical thinking, a master of the vital balance between skepticism and openness.

He3 devised a way of separating facts from crap…..he called it the ‘Baloney Detection Kit’…..

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.
• (This is my opinion….and this is where the Democrats lose the voter….they offer way too many details and ‘facts’….in other words that give TMI for the voter to grasp.)

It is a shame that more people, especially voters, do not have the mental capacity to test their ‘facts’ out before they act.

It is either they are too confused or lazy and now they let AI do their thinking….after all the attention span of the normal voter is that of a goldfish.

Social media has killed the desire for the truth it is easier to find someone who thinks like the individual and stop there before examine the information provided….I give you, my reader, the current situation in the world….about 70% of the information available is either a half-truth or an outright lie.

If you want to save our republic from collapse then maybe now would be a good time to start paying attention to the crap you fed.

Just a thought!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”