Draft:The Baloney Detection Kit
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The Baloney Detection Kit is a set of tools for critical thinking introduced by the astronomer Carl Sagan in Parade magazine, used to detect fallacious thinking ("baloney".)[1] The phrase was coined by Arthur Felberbaum, a friend of his wife Ann Druyan.[2] He expanded on it in his penultimate book, The Demon-Haunted World.[3] He writes that: "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."[4][5]
Contents
In the original Parade article, Sagan laments the decline of critical faculties and credulous media presentations of fantastic claims. He outlines tools for scientific thinking:
- Propositions that are not testable are worthless--you have to be able to check assertions out.
- There must be substantive debate—it isn't enough simply to attack your opponent's character
- If there is a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work, including the premise—not just most of them
- Arguments from authority carry little weight—"authorities" have made mistakes in the past and will do so again.[1]
Sagan explored many of these themes in a keynote for the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP).[6] In his penultimate book, The Demon-Haunted World, Sagan expands on the kit with such tools as 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."[4] A corollary is his famous maxim that "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
He goes on to list twenty logical fallacies. He notes that they are particularly pernicious in politics and religion, as figures in those fields may be forced to take contradictory positions. Among them are ad hominem (attacking the arguer and not the argument) and the argument from authority. From his own field, he gives examples of the appeal to ignorance: "There is no compelling evidence that UFOs are not visiting the Earth; therefore UFOs exist — and there is intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. Or: There may be seventy kazillion other worlds, but not one is known to have the moral advancement of the Earth, so we’re still central to the Universe.) This impatience with ambiguity can be criticized in the phrase: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
Other fallacies include the slippery slope and the straw man — "caricaturing a position to make it easier to attack (e.g., 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.)" He warns of weasel words, quoting Talleyrand: "An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public.”[7]
Legacy
The skeptic Michael Shermer expanded on the kit for Big Think[8] and the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.[9] Youtuber Toby Hendy expounds on the kit and its applications.[10] Jonathan Becher notes that Sagan's penultimate book is not as well-known as Cosmos, "but should be." He cites "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection" as his favorite chapter.[11]