https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World

Dune (all 6)

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig

Manufacturing Consent

The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan

If This Is a Man, Primo Levi

Light, M. John Harrison

It showed me that the questions I'd always had were real, and finally let me break free :)

Among many other good things in this book, there is a chapter called “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection,” which is the best primer in detecting bad thinking I've seen.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Demon-Haunted-World-Science-Candle-Da...

"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

Sounds exactly like me. I strongly suggest:

1. The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins)

2. The Demon-Haunted World (Carl Sagan)

...or if you need a little inspiration...

3. Founders at Work

I put "The Selfish Gene" and "The Demon-Haunted World" and I got "Women, Race and Class" by Angela Davis and "The Feynman Lectures".

I was not especially religious, or especially anything until that book convinced me that skepticism was a useful default setting.

Carl Sagan Dragon fallacy (1) reincarnation may be as real as not existing. Buddhism was mainly a way to solve India caste problem.

(1) Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World

http://www.amazon.com/The-Demon-Haunted-World-Science-Candle...

Dust by Joseph Amato

The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan

Physics of the Future by Michio Kaku

Most collections by Stephen Jay Gould (though I like "I Have Landed")

For anyone interested in a sympathetic approach to debunking fraudulent belief systems I recommend Carl Sagan's excellent book: The Demon Haunted World. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World

Of course I didn't immediately transform into a perfect 14-year-old skeptic by reading this book (I'm twice that age now and I'm sure I still believe all manner of things that aren't true), but this was the first time I truly realized that I even needed to be skeptical about what I believed.

Fighter jets (Like the Navy HUD showed in the article?) have radars, targeting pods with high zoom, IR, TV, and laser-range-detectors, and fly in formation. These radars show the altitude and airspeed of anything they pick up. They also are always recording displays that would save this information.

My building's concierge loves talking about UFOs. I try to steer him towards articles etc on the latest exobiology info. Real stuff can capture that desire for something exotic just as well. Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World is a great read for the psychology and history behind the UFO phenomenon.

It changed the way I see the world, how to have a sceptical mind and not only how but why one should question.

And also, it shows to me that, if you don't have a answer for something, doesn't mean that it can not be true. It's just that you don't know. And for a lot of things, this is the correct and only answer that we can have now.

- The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan - It gave me the tools required to cut through bullshit and helped me free myself from the shackles of a religious upbringing

- The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins - Gave me the courage to look at things differently when everyone thinks we know it all

- Zero to One by Peter Thiel - It made me question what I was doing professionally and I now have a list of questions to answer whenever I am in a startup to help guide me

- Compersion by Hypatia From Space - It help remove limits to how I can love and care for the people that are important to me.

It is all speculation until we have real hard numbers. It's easy to argue in both directions.

People believed all kinds of conspiracies when I was a kid. And people still do. The only difference is that it's more visible now. In the pre-WWW days you'd only hear it if you were in the room with them. Now you can see it even if they said it days ago.

Carl Sagan wrote The Demon Haunted World in the 90's, and it is mostly about exactly this: Whereas science had made tremendous progress in his life, the attitudes and crazy beliefs people have had not shifted much. The whole book is a lament about this, and a certain amount of bitterness on this being the case despite him spending most of his life promoting science.

Probably the only real thing that has changed is the role and type of media people consume. In the 80's if a whole bunch of people believed something that was clearly wrong, and were geographically spread out, they didn't have an easy means to make that an issue for elections. You would need to form a lobby group which takes time and money. The newspapers usually did not entertain them.

Now you don't need newspapers and news channels to get your message out. You have Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, etc. The cost to organize and spread your message is much lower. So tiny fringe groups have the potential to be much more influential. The politicians can now exploit that.

http://dannybhoy1.tripod.com/baloney.htm

It would be even better if we had effective sound bites. I suppose we have "Correlation does not equal causation", which rhymes nicely, but too many people think it means that correlation isn't evidence for causation, which is wrong. I guess this is a problem with soundbites in general.

That sounds exactly like a religious self-help book if you just replace "Science" and "Baloney" with "Christianity" and "Falsehood"

Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World.

Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained.

T.H. White, The Once and Future King.

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia.

Everyone should read this book and then reevaluate comments about chiropractors.

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0345409469/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_imm...

And I’m not throwing shade. It’s not any single persons fault or a comment on character. I really do believe there’s a systemic problem with our education system. The reason chiropracty causes this to stand out is that it very successfully flaunts the scientific method and is still accepted at large (for reasons I won’t start going into, but most of which are covered in the book)

> I did watch this presentation for an hour -- but it was so painful for me to experience this scene of incompetence and mockery of neuroscience getting worldwide attention simply because of Musk's money (while true scientists lose their jobs because of the lack of NIH or NSF grants for their quality research) that I add some sentences here and just leave. They did not show how their robot-controlled microelectrodes actually penetrate into the cortex and find cells -- because, as every single-cell recording expert knows, this is the difficulty: not just to move each microelectrode close enough to the targeted neuron but to make sure they can be kept there for long periods while not damaging the cell either. To do this, as claimed by Musk with 1,000 microelectrodes within an hour with "surgery without anesthesia", in the pulsing brain with no neurosurgeon present is not just impossible but even its proposal is an outright embarrassment for people with more education than the Twitter-audience encouraged to send their questions. Enough. Carl Sagan's prophetic 1996 book "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" predicted an America sinking in "superstition and darkness". This time has arrived. -- ---Nandor Ludvig, MD, PhD

I must say, it does feel like history repeating itself. It seems that anyone who is an expert in a field that Musk enters ALWAYS bets against Musk.

And then, in the fullness of time, they are often proven to be wrong because Musk finds another way they couldn't imagine - probably because he works as a multi domain expert and from a viewpoint of first priciples.

It will be interesting to see if that is how this one plays out.

Among those four, two use comedy as the medium. Three of them has been banned in various countries. The only exception is the south park episode and I suspect the only reason is because scientology is not the majority religion in any country or state.

Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World, 1995.

I’ve had this quote in mind at many points this year. The refusal to wear masks, the inability to agree on basic facts, the wildfire spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories.

IMHO the only way out of this hole is by doubling down on critical thinking education. Education that focuses not just on skills for a labor market, but skills for thinking. Being able to separate fact from fiction, ‘feels from reals’.

An aside: I’ve often felt that writing longhand on paper produces a different result than typing. Something about the deliberate pace. Technology has given us awesome powers, and the ability to blast out our stream of consciousness at hyper speed. We would do well to slow down a little, reflect more, try to fully grasp issues and consider the sources and validity of things before we share them out.

But above all, we need to find our way back to truth through science - not just what feels good, but what we can sort out through the full power of our mental abilities.

The Demon Haunted World (Carl Sagan) — although I was already a skeptical thinker, this book opened me up to how critical thinking can enhance your spiritual side as well as your intellectual side.

Godel, Escher, Bach (Douglas Hofstadter) — this book added color to a lot my intuitions about the deeper connections of patterns we see throughout reality.

Truth & Power (Michel Foucault) — I'm not a fan of most so-called continental philosophy, but Foucault's ideas about cultural structures has always stuck with me.

The Allegory of the Cave (Plato; section in The Republic) — classic; some might say the basic idea underpinning all philosophical and scientific inquiry.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Ludwig Wittgenstein) — I'll admit I never quite understood this book from reading it, but it definitely changed how I thought about philosophy, consciousness and spirituality.

Charles Sanders Peirce essays — it's been a long time, so I don't remember the specific texts, but he did fascinating work in semiotics. One essay in particular was critical in how I think about communication and consciousness.

Fact, Fiction, Forecast (Nelson Goodman) — Goodman is brilliant and is great at relaying philosophical problems as puzzles. He's a great writer and turns the problem of induction on its head in this one.

Foucault's Pendulum (Umberto Eco) — I don't read a lot of fiction, but this book is amazing. There's a lot of history, so you may need to keep an encyclopedia nearby, but this one will really get you thinking about how the autonomy of memes. Probably quite relevant at the moment.

Any number of books and essays by great analytic philosophers: Saul Kripke, W.V.O. Quine, Bertrand Russell, Karl Popper, Carl Hempel, John Campbell, David Chalmers, Thomas Nagel, Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, Dan Dennett, David Lewis, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World

Also around the age of 8 or 9 I read some Erich von Däniken book and got quite excited by what it contained. However, I eventually realised that it was complete nonsense and I got really affronted that people could write books that contained stuff that wasn't true. A useful lesson!

Edit: Another one is "Why People Believe Weird Things":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_People_Believe_Weird_Thing...

Personally, I find what people capable of in our darker moments disturbing, but science is essentially the antidote for that. Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World" being strongly recommended:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World

  * The Reckoners #1/#2
  * Stormlight Archive #1/#2
  * Mistborn #1/#2/#3
  * Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures As the World's Most Wanted Hacker

  * How to Win Friends and Influence People
  * Malazon Book #1
  * The Forever War
  * The Martian

  * Think and Grow Rich
  * Watership Down
  * Rainbows End
  * Snow Crash
  * What is Zen
  * Wool: Silo
  * Founders at Work
  * Light Bringer
  * Hyperion
  * The War of Art
  * Atlas Shrugged
  * The Demon Haunted World
  * Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
  * Joe Abercrombie's books
  * Rich Dad Poor Dad
  * Founders at Work
  * Fear the Sky
  * Daemon -- EDIT ADDED

  * All of Brandon Sanderson's Books
  * The Kingkiller Chronicles
  * How to Win Friends and Influence People
  * Issac Asimov's short stories and Foundation series
  * The Forever War
  * Gentleman Bastards
  * Ready Player One
  * The Martian
  * A Wizard of Earthsea

  * http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World

Also perhaps Bill Bryon's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" for an entertaining broad view of a variety of scientific areas:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Short_History_of_Nearly_Every...

The Daemon-haunted World.

(In case it's not clear, I'm playing off the title of Carl Sagan's book "The Demon-Haunted World". We haven't fully exorcised "real" demons from our world yet here we are developing artificial ones, eh?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World

> The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark is a 1995 book by astrophysicist Carl Sagan, in which the author aims to explain the scientific method to laypeople, and to encourage people to learn critical and skeptical thinking. He explains methods to help distinguish between ideas that are considered valid science and those that can be considered pseudoscience. Sagan states that when new ideas are offered for consideration, they should be tested by means of skeptical thinking and should stand up to rigorous questioning.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17349.The_Demon_Haunted_...

There is plenty of pseudoscience masquerading as science unfortunately. A good book to read on this is Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark". A significant portion of the book is devoted to what Sagan calls a "Baloney detection kit" that he thinks everyone should have. If more people could accurately distinguish science from pseudoscience, the world might be a better place.

My personal pick for pseudoscience that is routinely given credence by the general public is nutritional studies. Any study that says an oddly specific food (e.g. blueberries) is a "superfood" is probably baloney. Producers of that food probably got together and funded a study that, surprise, says what they produce is good to eat! Why aren't other berries just as good? What about berries vs other fruit? What is in blueberries that is not present in other berries?

The thing about nutritional studies is that they're so hard to do properly that virtually nobody does. If you wanted to find out which foods are genuinely healthy you'd need a large sample size of people willing to have their diets and activities micro-managed in a way that would make most people rebel. You could probably do a decent study if you had enough money, but nobody is willing to foot the bill. The only people with skin in the game (e.g. blueberry producers) have no interest in a study that puts blueberries fairly in their place amongst a plethora of other foods.

My crazy prediction is that, sometime in the next century or two, we're actually going to become interested enough in optimizing healthy bodies that governments will start funding real scientific studies on nutrition, exercise, etc.. The crap that's out there today is going to be seen as utter quackery, albeit with some nuggets of truth mixed in almost by random chance.

Not without damage in the form of missed education opportunities, I managed to overcome a lot of the bullshit magical thinking that had managed to cloud my thoughts in my teens and early 20s.

It's interesting to me, just today I've been respectfully challenging a friend for their belief in some or other Covid conspiracy. After some introspection, I realised that the ire this raised in me and which I was directing at my friend, was actually anger at my young self for the years "lost" in the form of education not pursued.

What a day.

2. The last few chapters of GEB

3. Regardless of whether you're a programmer, anything by Carl Sagan. The Demon-Haunted World and Dragons of Eden are my favorites.

From my point of view, the consequences of global nuclear war
became much more dangerous with the invention of the hydrogen
bomb, because airbursts of thermonuclear weapons are much
more capable of burning cities, generating vast amounts of smoke,
cooling and darkening the Earth, and inducing global-scale
nuclear winter. This was perhaps the most controversial scientific
debate I've been involved in (from about 1983-90). Much of the
debate was politically driven. The strategic implications of nuclear
winter were disquieting to those wedded to a policy of massive
retaliation to deter a nuclear attack, or to those wishing to
preserve the option of a massive first strike. In either case, the
environmental consequences work [to] the self-destruction of any
nation launching large numbers of thermonuclear weapons even
with no retaliation from the adversary. A major segment of the
strategic policy of decades, and the reason for accumulating tens
of thousands of nuclear weapons, suddenly became much less
credible.

This "need to project power" is just another way to say we're too goddamn stupid to use the technology we create without blowing ourselves, and everyone else, up with it. Democracy has nothing to do with it. Raw, unmitigated human stupidity dominates military decisions in every country.

"Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom. But reading is still the path."

Also, perhaps my favourite part describing the reaction to a speech by Douglass:

"His very appearance and demeanour destroyed the then-
prevalent myth of the 'natural servility' of African-Americans. By all accounts his eloquent analysis of the evils of slavery was one of the most brilliant debuts in American oratorical history.

William Lloyd Garrison, the leading abolitionist of the day, sat in the front row. When Douglass finished his speech. Garrison rose, turned to the stunned audience, and challenged them with a shouted question:

'Have we been listening to a thing, a chattel personal, or a man?'

'A man! A man!' the audience roared back as one voice.

'Shall such a man be held a slave in a Christian land?' called out Garrison.

'No! No!' shouted the audience.

And even louder, Garrison asked: 'Shall such a man ever be
sent back to bondage from the free soil of Old Massachusetts?'
And now the crowd was on its feet, crying out 'No! No! No!'

He never did return to slavery."

If you wanted to really grapple with the argument as a means of growing your mind, not just satirize it without understanding what's going on, you should probably start with a more neutral summary of the state of things. Like this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anselms_argument#Plantinga.27s_...

Honestly, though, that's not the one I would have picked to pursue. I think that particular contribution of his is a minor thing, only interesting to professional philosophers in the first place. I had in mind something more major, like his notion of Warrented Belief. Or perhaps something amusing, like his evolutionary argument against naturalism.

But look, taking someone's weakest work, saying "Huh?", and satirizing it may feel good, but it's not a valid way to grow intellectually. Back when I was a creationist, if someone had said to me, "Look, you really ought to read The Demon-Haunted World -- even if you don't agree, it'll expose you to a totally new way of thinking about things," and instead of reading it, I went and found someone on a creationist website who made fun of some obscure little passage without really understanding it? I wouldn't gain anything by the experience.

Grapple with the original and the strongest form, or don't bother. Don't fool yourself.

[Edit: If you're looking for something meaty of Plantinga's to read, try this: http://philofreligion.homestead.com/files/alspaper.htm . It's entertaining and friendly, and you'll probably learn something.]

Now the rest.

One lesser-known book that made a deep impression on me: A.K. Dewdney's "The Planiverse", a kind of Flatland-meets-the-MIT-hackers story. How would architecture, biology, and chemistry work in a 2-dimensional world?

Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World" was an important book for me, but I read it when I was a couple years older than 14.

SICP, if the 14-year-old knows basic programming and has written a few 1000-line programs. I wouldn't have understood it at 14 but enjoyed it tremendously at 18.

Carl Sagan, in his 1995 book ‘The Demon-Haunted World’, wrote:

> I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

The moment he prophesied now appears to be upon us. I don’t know how we can restore this country to one where people mostly act in good faith and try to base decisions in science and fact. I see so many incredibly compassionate people supporting the most despicable politicians. Right-wingers on Twitter repeating false talking points that the left are trying to destroy the country while tweeting about how proud they are of local youth offering free lawn care to disabled and senior citizens. Left-wingers openly insulting rural and conservative people as the scum of the earth while relentlessly supporting policies intended to improve those same peoples’ lives. How does this happen? What do we have to do—as individuals, as nations, as humans—to get it to stop?

Imagine that the astronomer were based at Lackawanna College. Would that information be worth conveying through the title?

"Lackawanna College Astronomer on the Interstellar Object ‘Oumuamua"

I doubt it. The problem with appeal to authority is that there's no place in science for it. Not only that, appeal to authority undermines science itself.

As Carl Sagan put it in The Demon-Haunted World:

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.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/535475-arguments-from-autho...

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, Science as a Candle in the Dark

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World

Ultimate Questions by Bryan Magee (more philosophy of knowledge than science per se).

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan.

The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski are not essays, but it is one of the finest writings on science I've read.

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard W. Hamming

Letters to a Young Scientist by Edward O. Wilson

I can't not help mention The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson, which is fiction, but hear me out - it melds natural philosophy, alchemy, maths, history, Newton, Leibniz, The Sun King, British parliament, colonialism, slavery, Egypt, India, war, finance, commerce, revenge, satire and so much more. I've learnt more about the origins of the Royal Society and the early days of modern science from these three books than anywhere else.

I’d just note that your comment reads a bit like I endorse this view - whereas the intention of my post was to refute it. Perhaps you meant to reply to my parent?

    I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time --
    when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all
    the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome
    technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing
    the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the
    ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority;
    when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our
    critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good
    and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition
    and darkness...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World

[2] https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/03/baloney-detection-k...

I wouldn't look only for technical people to talk to and hang out with. While I'm sure that shared interest can create a strong bond between you, there is more to life and the soul than computers.

I'd like to recommend three books to you that really changed my perspective on how to deal with people. Arguably any value I have in communicating with people comes from the lessons of, or derived from using, these books.

1) Life Would Be Easier if it Weren't for Other People
2) How to Succeed With Women
3) The Demon Haunted World, Science as a Candle in the Dark

The first is the most important, how you convey yourself to others and how they convey themselves to you. However, the book focuses on the dysfunctional aspects of communication. This book has made my more worth living in every single way.

2) How to Succeed with Women. You didn't mention whether or not you have a girlfriend. This of this like Cosmo with useful advice for me. Basically, it is how women look at dating and how men often don't even come close to thinking about what they want.

3) Just a great book on human nature.

Good luck buddy. Got carried away.

I won't assert the truth of it, and I can think of a couple plausible vectors that don't involve consciousness surviving death and into another body (however unlikely they might be), but if it's compelling enough for the author of The Demon Haunted World to suggest it deserves "serious study", I'm the last person in the world to gainsay him.

> And yet, the chief deficiency I see in the sceptical movement is in its polarization: Us v. Them - the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you're sensible, you'll listen to us; and if not, you're beyond redemption. This is unconstructive. It does not get the message across. It condemns the sceptics to permanent minority status; whereas, a compassionate approach that from the beginning acknowledges the human roots of pseudoscience and superstition might be much more widely accepted.

Selected quotes from The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan

Corny as it sounds,, that book changed my way of thinking and indeed my life when I was around 18yo.

I agree with your suspicion that luck is often involved. But twice- or even thrice-successful entrepreneurs might also be lucky as well as good. I think an anecdote about the great physicist Enrico Fermi is in order:

My [Carl Sagan's] favorite example [of the non sequitur fallacy] 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 middle 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 battles is purely a matter of chance. Then the chance of winning one battle of 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...?

(From The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan; http://tinyurl.com/yeprpx4)

"instead of judging people on their individual merits and deficits, we concentrate on one or two bits of information about them, and then place them in a small number of previously constructed pigeonholes. This saves the trouble of thinking, at the price in many cases of committing a profound injustice. It also shields the stereotyper from contact with the enormous variety of people, the multiplicity of ways of being human"

He talked about the issue of stereotyping in science and the harm this caused his field, but it can really be seen as an insight in why people so easy start to do it once the culture makes it acceptable. It is easier. It does save the trouble of thinking. Looking at people as individuals is hard, takes energy and is prone to come back and bite you. Much easier to just reduce people to single bits of information and follow what ever the cultural accepted stereotyping (ie discrimination) that the environment allow.

If that could be done automatically, we could skip a lot of time consuming, expensive research. Church and Turing already proved there are no general solutions to the Entscheidungsproblem.

On the other hand, if you were thinking of some sort of service that provides "authoritative" verification, you've only moved the problem. The service can be faked (or corrupted) just as easily. Similarly, we already have many historical examples where restraints on media are (de facto) used against political enemies.

What we need is a way to educate people with the scientific method and just enough logic to implement it practically. Sagan discussed this problem in "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark", which I regularly recommend to anybody that seems to need his "Baloney Detection Kit"[1].

[1] https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/03/baloney-detection-k...

I call it the daemon-haunted world.

(The reference is to Sagan's book "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark".)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(computing)

This is sort of a fantasy of mine - having every public school teach a brief course on "not getting tricked".

In my fantasy world, it's a several-week guide to common ways people lie and mislead the public. One section is on interpreting statistics. Another is probably on comparing scientific papers to the news stories they spawn. Another on 'paltering' and all the things a given statement doesn't say. The 'fun' section covers cold reads, famous hoaxes, and a general sense of how to not end up believing in every silly story you hear. You could use The Demon Haunted World as a readable source textbook for a lot of it.

It's a pipe dream, of course. You'd need teachers who could teach it, which is a tall order to begin with, and then you'd need to find a way to give out examples without offending half the parents in the school when every examples (astrology, crystal healing, and so on) is going to cross somebody.

But damn, even if it didn't take completely, wouldn't it be nice to at least have a shared framework to talk about this stuff?

Profound injustice in favor of averages is not an acceptable social trade off. This is why countries enact general discrimination laws, making it illegal to judge people based on single bits like gender and race.

When I read it, it made a lot of sense. It is quite obvious if you look into it, that people's hallucinations or visions are strongly correlated with their current culture or world view. So you if you see something inexplicable, you are going to call it a ghost for example, but a medieval knight will call it a demon, but maybe someone from 2100 will call it a perturbation of the higgs-field or whatever makes sense then.

Quite interesting effect actually.

Atlas Shrugged is an important intellectual work whether you agree with the philosophy or not. It's a long slog, but worth reading to understand the people who follow it. It will just take a long long time. I read it when I was doing regular coast to coast flights.

The Demon Haunted World is vintage Sagan. Very well worth readying, though as an HN member it's probably preaching to the choir.

He has a really good section on UFO sightings, which he compares to stories about abduction by demons from Medieval times.

His main explanation for the increase in UFO stories in the second half of the 20th century is the decline in other forms of abduction myths, like the demon one. People report seeing what they're expecting to see based on the stories they've been exposed to.

The massive increase in aircraft obviously helped too.

> It is claimed by apologists for the Reagan administration that, whatever the exaggerations in capability, some of it intentional, SDI was responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union. There is no serious evidence in support of this contention. Andrei Sakharov, Yevgeny Velikhov, Roald Sagdeev, and other scientists who advised President Mikhail Gorbachev made it clear that if the United States really went ahead with a Star Wars programme, the safest and cheapest Soviet response would be merely to augment its existing arsenal of nuclear weapons and delivery systems. In this way Star Wars could have increased, not decreased, the peril of thermonuclear war. At any rate, Soviet expenditures on space-based defences against American nuclear missiles were comparatively paltry, hardly of a magnitude to trigger a collapse of the Soviet economy. The fall of the USSR has much more to do with the failure of the command economy, growing awareness of the standard of living in the west, widespread disaffection from a moribund Communist ideology, and - although he did not intend such an
outcome - Gorbachev's promotion of glasnost, or openness.
Ten thousand American scientists and engineers publicly
pledged they would not work on Star Wars or accept money from the SDI organization. This provides an example of widespread and courageous non-cooperation by scientists (at some conceivable personal cost) with a democratic government that had, temporarily at least, lost its way.

* I know Sagan isn't exactly a historian, but I'll choose his assessment of space war technology over other people's.

If you mean the reading list the parent post mentioned, I must disagree. Carl Sagan's books are about scientific divulgation. In fact, "The Demon Haunted World" isn't about conspiracy theories but about the scientific method and how it differs from pseudoscience, and how to avoid falling prey to tempting but irrational ideas (what he calls "The baloney detection kit"). The other book by Sagan is likewise about science, not about persecution or being "an outlier".

Noam Chomsky's book is different. Of course, writings about the control of the media by the few and the manipulation of public opinion can, when looked through the warped lens of someone with a persecution complex, look like confirmation that "they" are after you. But Chomsky isn't paranoid, he is political.

I'm less familiar with the rest of the books, but at a quick glance they don't seem to have a hint of paranoia to me.