On Pseudoscience, Misinformation and Disinformation
“We have built a civilization where the things that determine our lives are understood by almost nobody. “ From Demon Haunted World - Carl Sagan 1995
Carl Sagan was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, and science communicator (1934–1996) widely regarded as one of the most famous scientists of the 1970s and 1980s. He was a professor of astronomy at Cornell University and the director of its Laboratory for Planetary Studies, where he conducted seminal research on planetary atmospheres, particularly the runaway greenhouse effect on Venus and the seasonal changes on Mars.
Sagan published his last book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark in 1995 (with some sources citing a 1996 publication date for the hardcover edition) knowing that he was dying. The book was published just one year before his death.
Sagan played a pivotal role in the American space program, serving as a consultant to NASA and working on the Mariner, Viking, and Voyager missions. He co-founded The Planetary Society, helped design messages sent into space on the Pioneer and Voyager probes, and advocated for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
Beyond his scientific contributions, Sagan was a celebrated science popularizer who co-wrote and hosted the groundbreaking PBS television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. He authored over 20 books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Dragons of Eden and the bestseller Cosmos, using his platform to promote scientific literacy, critical thinking, and nuclear disarmament.
Many of the ideas articulated in Sagan’s A Demon-Haunted World are outlined below.
The technologies affecting our daily lives and that of our entire global society have changed beyond recognition since 1995. Here are a few examples: the internet, smartphones, social media, algorithms, proliferation of surveillance technologies in every aspect of our lives, streaming TV, medical advances in microbiology (gene splicing, targeted and personalized medical treatments, etc.), AI chatbots and agents, climate change, quantum computing, robotics and artificially created organoids to name a few.
We are all now dependent on and put our trust in our fossil fuel and energy infrastructure including our electricity grid, our transportation systems, our communications systems and our financial systems. We have become totally dependent upon everything from factory farming, to big businesses, to our heating and refrigeration systems, to the Internet, and even to our PCs and our smartphones to support our daily lives. How many of us really knows how to build an AI agent to automate our routine tasks or even how to resolve a technical issue when a problem or unwanted side-effect arises with one of the devices, apps or systems which we now rely upon daily?
At the same time, we are navigating these technologies and associated issues, we face a constant barrage of misinformation, disinformation or worse from politicians, terrorist groups, unvetted self-proclaimed experts, news and social media, unconstrained AI chatbots, hackers and spammers. Many of us are influenced by pseudoscience or by misinformation, disinformation and some of us have forgotten how to think rationally or intelligently let alone how to question either long-held beliefs or to recognize disinformation.
We now live in a global civilization in which the most crucial elements and infrastructure supporting it profoundly depend on science and technology and an accurate understanding of their implications, of how they interact and of their shortcomings. Most people today are totally at a lost for understanding these technologies let alone the implications and dangers inherent with them. We can no longer survive without this understanding and the full implications of so many interacting parts.
This lack of understanding when coupled with manipulative media, dogma and fixed beliefs is a prescription for disaster. We have been able get away with not correctly understanding the technologies and their implications, as we have so far, but sooner or later this mixture of ignorance, vested interests and selfish pursuit of money, power and influence will blow up in our faces.
In the modern world, we all live in societies that are more and more tribal and driven by self-interests. This is true on national, international, regional and cultural levels and even individually. When was the last time you changed your mind about something that was important? I’m referring to something real, something important such as a belief has been held for years and then dropped because new information came in and was accepted by you as fact.
The world today that humanity has built does not reward people who change their minds and especially their beliefs. It rewards picking a group or team early and staying loyal to it forever. It rewards sounding certain, even when there is no reason to be. It punishes almost ruthlessly, the one habit Sagan believed kept civilization honest. It is the three words: “I don’t know.” This phrase is one of the rarest things you hear in public or even private conversations today. This phrase means that the question is real. It means that the answer matters, and that the person articulating it is not currently in possession of the answer.
If someone cannot admit to this phrase, it likely means they are close-minded. It means that it is likely that they will not be able to learn anything new let alone correct any long-held beliefs that they may have. If someone can’t be open to questions, it is difficult to learn, and difficult to revise thinking or beliefs. If they can’t critically evaluate their assumptions or beliefs, they are essentially close minded.
Someone who is confidently wrong about things that matter is also a danger to us all. They don’t know what they don’t know and think they know it all. (see the Dunning-Kruger effect). These people tend to be easy to manipulate. They don’t need to be convinced of anything new. They only need to confirm what they already believe in language that flatters them.
A society that has lost the ability to think clearly is not a society that must be oppressed by force. It’s a society that volunteers to do so. It hands itself over willingly, gratefully even, to whoever speaks loudest, tells the most comfortable story, repeats it often, and asks the least of their attention.
The death of an open society doesn’t necessarily happen by “voting the bums out”, by civil unrest, or by a dramatic coup with tanks in the streets. It comes quietly. People still vote. People still argue with each other online. People still feel absolutely certain about things. But the certainty is borrowed, taken from whoever made them feel most seen and most safe and most validated in what they already believed.
In the second half of Sagan’s book, he describes a “baloney detection kit”. For anyone who wants to defend their own minds, this is a set of learnable and practical mental habits. It available to anyone willing to use them that protects oneself from being deceived by themselves or by others and who will quietly twist evidence to keep them from changing their minds.
Sagan’s “Baloney Detection Kit” is built around questions one asks before accepting something as true. These questions include “Who has independently verified this claim or am I taking one person’s word for it? Is it repeatable? Are there alternative explanations that haven’t been considered? What would have to be the case for this idea to be wrong, and is there any evidence for that? Who benefits if I believe this, and is that benefit influencing how the information was presented to me? In Sagan’s view, the most important question to ask is “How does one know what they think they already know?”
If people would ask these questions of their own beliefs or of the things that they would swear are obvious, they would not be the same person at the end of the day. So much of our own thinking turns out to be borrowed thinking or conditioning by so called society’s authority figures, especially those with the loudest voices, that we never bothered to inspect let alone criticize.
It is genuinely freeing once you get past the initial discomfort of questioning your beliefs, because you finally start to know which beliefs you actually hold for valid reasons, and which ones are just decorations or conditioning from someone else who may have influences years ago before you have the knowledge, judgment, or critical thinking skills to do so effectively. The entire health of our global civilization, depends on how many of Earth’s citizens are willing to do this type of introspection on themselves.
Humanity is capable of extraordinary achievements and creativity if we choose to do so. Just look at the creative arts. This capability runs through everything even when the diagnosis is brutal. As Einstein once said (in paraphrase) “you can’t solve a problem unless you know you’ve got one and understand its implications”. A discordant future is preventable but only if enough people decide to prevent it. It takes more than just credentialed authorities or experts in universities or scientific research institutions. It also takes ordinary people choosing in every day moments to ask one more question and examining the evidence before accepting an answer.
According to Sagan, science is not only compatible with spirituality. It is a profound source of spirituality. What that means when you really think about it, is that our reality the one that honest scientific critical thinking reveals, is more astonishing than any story we could ever invent about it. The pseudoscience or falsehoods that someone may believe in is small , cheap and disposable, the kind of wonder that breaks the moment you press upon it.
The actual cosmos is vast beyond imagination and we are each made of pieces of it (e.g. atoms and molecules manufactured in stars) and so is everyone you have ever known, loved or hated. Figuring that out requires no shortcuts and no comfortable lies and no manipulative media or authority figures. It requires someone willing to look honestly and to think critically. We don’t all need to become scientists to do that. We just need to become honest seekers , people who refuse the cheap story when a more appropriate one is available, even when the truer one is more difficult to accept or takes considerably more time and effort to discover and understand. These are people who can tolerate not knowing long enough to actually expend the effort to find truth. To have a lasting and sustainable society, these are the kinds of people we desperately need a lot more of.
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