{"id":5350,"date":"2017-06-16T17:08:59","date_gmt":"2017-06-17T00:08:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/?p=5350"},"modified":"2020-10-18T11:45:52","modified_gmt":"2020-10-18T18:45:52","slug":"carl-sagans-baloney-detection-kit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2017\/06\/16\/carl-sagans-baloney-detection-kit\/","title":{"rendered":"Carl Sagan’s “Baloney Detection Kit”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Carl Sagan, one of the great scientist-communicators to the general public of the past century, author of the 1980 book Cosmos<\/b> and host of the 1980 TV series of that name, has a list of ideas for how to evaluate any kind of claim, a “Baloney Detection Kit”, described many times and recently posted again here: 9 questions Carl Sagan encourages you to ask before believing anything anyone has to say<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Briefly:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Independently confirm ‘facts’\n
  2. Encourage debate\n
  3. There are no authorities, but there are experts\n
  4. Spin more than one hypothesis\n
  5. Don’t become attached to a hypothesis because it’s yours\n
  6. Quantify\n
  7. Examine every link in a chain of arguments\n
  8. Occam’s Razor\n
  9. Always consider if a given hypothesis can be falsified; beware if not\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Carl Sagan, one of the great scientist-communicators to the general public of the past century, author of the 1980 book Cosmos and host of the 1980 TV series of that name, has a list of ideas for how to evaluate … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,20,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mind","category-psychology","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5350"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5350\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5351,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5350\/revisions\/5351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}