A Filipino, I'm a wide, wild reader, English. From a
Facebook post, I'm reading Bulgarian-American Maria Popova's essay on an
American mind titled "Carl Sagan On The Power Of Books And Reading As The Path
To Democracy" (08 November 2017, Brain
Pickings, brainpickings.org,
source of image above). I will grant that Sagan is correct in reading books as
path to democracy, but Sagan's claim to fame as The Baloney Detector is all
that, baloney!
Sagan died 20 December 1996, so he barely experienced the
digital universe while alive. The World
Wide Web, aka Internet, has since
changed the world of knowledge, mentally and materially, that whatever Sagan
said will now have to be taken with a grain of silt.
Reading as path to
democracy? Maybe.
Reading as the path to
creativity, yes! I'm an excellent proof of that online, having uploaded
5,000 plus long essays since 2007. Check out just these 2 blogs of mine: "A Magazine Called Love, blogspot.com,
where I make the claim, "Frank H, World's most highly original, creative
writer online," and Creative
Thinkering, blogspot.com,
where lies my boast, "World's creative genius online, most prolific writer
of non-fiction." I research and write from A to Z, from AI to Creative
Thinkering to Crop Rotation to Entrepreneurship to Infusion of Innovations to
Multiple Intelligences to Organic Matter to Partnerships to Redemption to Word 2013 to Youth to Zimbabwe. Mindworks,
those.
Yes, as Miss Maria claims in an earlier essay, Sagan was
"a cosmic sage, voracious reader, hopeless romantic, and brilliant
philosopher" (03 January 2014, "The Baloney Detection Kit: Carl Sagan's
Rules for Bullshit-Busting and Critical Thinking," brainpickings.org),
but all that does not make Sagan Overall
Genius! Miss Maria makes much of Sagan's "Baloney Detection Kit,"
which she and/or he claims is a "necessary cognitive fortification against
propaganda, pseudoscience, and general falsehood." She says:
The kit, Sagan argues,
isn't merely a tool of science – rather, 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.
She says "Sagan shares nine of these tools," and I
proceed to examine them; I now reproduce only the first 3, and you will see
why:
1. Wherever possible there must be independent
confirmation of the "facts."
2. Encourage substantive debate on the evidence
by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
3. 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.
I summarize #1 into "Confirm facts independently."
Nice, I have the Internet to do that.
I summarize #2 into "Encourage debate." Agree!
I summarize #3 into "Arguments from no
authorities" – and immediately I tell myself:
Stop! If as Sagan says
'Arguments from authority carry little weight," then the same applies to
him.
According to
Carl Sagan himself,
what Carl Sagan is saying carries little weight!
what Carl Sagan is saying carries little weight!
The End.517
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