The Fine Art of Baloney Detection (1995) | Hacker News Reader

The Fine Art of Baloney Detection (1995)

fermatslibrary.com

68 pointstchalla27 comments

I was born into a charismatic Christian cult and escaped in my early 20s, left to pick up the pieces of a completely shattered world view. No one in my life, at that point, really understood the internal turmoil I was in. This piece in particular and, in general, all of the Demon Haunted World couldn't have come at a better time for me. It gave me the tools I needed to overcome a lot of the biases and crazy charismatic thought patterns that were established at a very early age. I will forever be indebted to Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan for making my life a lot more bearable and for helping me out of the existential quagmire I was stuck in.

> charismatic Christian cult

These words don't go together. Cults are definitionally aberrant, i.e., non-Christian. Many of us in high Christian orthodoxy would certainly regard the entire charismatic movement as heterodox at best.

Lest anyone should cry "no true Scotsman," the difference is Christianity has a well-defined view of orthodoxy, as propounded by Scripture and understood by the Church going back to its earliest days. The Apostles' Creed, Nicene Creed, etc. are excellent examples of a united, cross-denominational understanding recognized by all except the cults. That's not to say we don't disagree about some of the particulars in other areas, but all Christian churches believe in "one holy, catholic (universal), apostolic, Church."

Edit to add: I'm sorry you had trouble with a cult. I know there's a lot of real pain caused by many of these groups. Come check out the real thing. We'd love to have you.

You took someone’s painful experience with a cult and No True Scotsman’d it into a sales pitch for your religion.

There is a time and a place for everything. And for the record, having also left an evangelical cult that tried really hard to get me to hate myself because of my sexuality, I’m not too sold on any branch of Christianity at this point. The last thing I’d wanna hear after telling people about my experiences like that is “but have you tried my flavor of Christianity?”

The word "cult" is just a way for mainstream religions to look down on non-mainstream religions. "Cult" is definitionally aberrant because mainstream religions have defined it for their own convenience. Certainly cults have high potential for abuse, but then again, we've seen quite a bit of that in mainstream churches too.

It's also a bit silly to cite the harms done by cults when the "high Christian Orthodoxy" espoused the crusades, the inquisition, pogroms--the "high Christian Orthodoxy" is responsible for far more death and suffering than any of the small cults that spun off of it. And you can't distance yourself from that and claim the Nicene Creed which predates all of it. The Nicene Creed which is your supposed proof that you're the "real Christians" was written at the Council of Nicea, which was convened by Constantine I in 325, just 8 years after he had his soldiers slaughter Donatists[1], a group of Christians who opposed Constantine's attempts to unify the various churches. The document you claim shows the unity of your religion was practically written in the blood of Christians who refused to unify.

I'll happily admit that the vast majority of modern Christians are kind, decent people, on two conditions: 1. That you extend the same courtesy to members of other religions (including so-called "cults"), and 2. That you refrain from proselytizing on HN.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donatism

> According to the World Health Organization, smoking kills three million people every year worldwide. This will rise to ten million annual deaths by 2020

We're up to 7 million according to the CDC, not 10:

> Worldwide, tobacco use causes more than 7 million deaths per year[0].

Sagan predicted 7 million in growth and we only saw 4 million. That's a ~40% overstatement. And in the very next sentence from the CDC:

> If the pattern of smoking all over the globe doesn’t change, more than 8 million people a year will die from diseases related to tobacco use by 2030.

While we're on the subject of skepticism and 'baloney detection' whenever somebody says X will happen in Y years there's usually a bit of baloney in there. It's a well-meaning practice to present bad scenarios to create social change but it happens so often that when somebody says "The oceans will rise X feet in Y years!" I get skeptical. Then I get in trouble for being skeptical which just makes me more skeptical...

[0] - https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast...

I have found one of the best ways to be a skeptic is to be clear what you are skeptical about. Example: are you skeptical that the oceans will rise at all or just that they won't rise to X level? Skepticism is often interpreted as dismissal which shuts down dialogue. I like to think the point of skepticism is to further dialogue not shut it down. The last thing charlatans want is dialogue. They thrive on monologue. That's the skeptic's power, to me at least.

>While we're on the subject of skepticism and 'baloney detection' whenever somebody says X will happen in Y years there's usually a bit of baloney in there.

Agreed.

One of the most popular New Year’s Day posts here was a popular tech personality with his 2019 predications that definitely had Trump removed from office.

I look forward to bringing that up next New Years, not because I’m a Trump fan, but because if all these Ms Cleo fortune tellers are so smart I wonder why they waste time with blogging.

Was it the one where he also assigns a probability rate to his prediction? i.e. "Trump will be removed from the presidency - 90%", and then at the end of the year he calculates all his predictions (which are True/False by nature) and weighs them based on how certain he was to determine a marker of how accurate he is.

Yes! That’s the one I think. Thanks, that’ll help me find it next year for the thread that will invariably have the same predictions :)

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/25/predictions-for-2019/

I think he actually predicted that Trump would remain the president, but I've always found the predictions post as strange. It seems like he's making a bunch of safe bets and scoring them safely, and then declaring himself accurate as a result. "What everything thinks is most likely is probably most likely, so you should listen to what I have to say" would be the takeaway, which isn't that interesting.

There’s always an implicit (or explicit) “if conditions X, Y, and Z hold” on these statements. That prediction wasn’t wrong, conditions just changed, largely because predictions like this managed to wake people up to the dangers.

Ignoring the unstated assumptions in these statements isn’t really skepticism.

You are missing something really important though. Those kind of claims usually start with the phrase, "If X continues at the current rate..."

Just in the last few years we (in the U.S. at least) reached the lowest rates of smoking ever recorded, which surely accounts for the lower rate of deaths at least in part.

The CDC in the 90's couldn't have known how effective the aggressive campaign against smoking would end up being over the next 20 years. They had to make a prediction based on the rates of smoking they had at the time, and that's really all you can ever do.

Are you suggesting that we shouldn't try to predict anything because what if we're wrong?

I feel you are not taking into account the importance of "unless something changes". I see the publication date of this as being 1997. That was around the time when globally it started to be conceivable that restaurants and public areas and even bars could be areas that were smoke-free. Changing the norm seems to have lowered the number of smokers and thus smoking deaths.

You scoff at these projections but I feel that turning your energy a bit and focusing it at how these projections indeed were used to good effect would get you closer to the truth than what appears to be your assumption that nothing was done and the projections were false. So much has changed in the intervening 22 years.

Maybe I wasn't clear enough because I'm seeing a lot of the same comment here.

At some point anybody who's producing statistics and projections has to decide what's more important between accurately predicting the future and changing the future. Is being truthful more or less important than being revolutionary? It's fine and noble to want a better future but it introduces a bias into projections and how they're reported.

Carl Sagan was more than smart enough to know that society was likely to learn the dangers of smoking and to act accordingly. I'm guessing he had his public prediction which he put in his book that deaths due to smoking will rise to ten million but if you asked him over coffee when he wasn't driving home a socio-political rant about Big Tobacco he would probably produce a lower number more in line with what has actually happened.

If this sort of convenient number selection happens in a lecture about baloney detection we should probably expect it to happen in other places, too.

Keeping with apples to apples comparison, the WHO says that more than 8 million a year die from smoking, for a growth of 5 million per year over 22 years, which is not that far below 7 million. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tobacco

I met Carl Sagan at a talk he gave at a local astronomy telescope in the 70's when I was just a kid. He pointed me to CSICOP (Now just CSI), and it made a huge impact on my young mind by leading me down the path of skepticism. I've always been incredibly grateful to that man for his approximately two minutes of personal advice.

www.skepticalinquirer.org/about

And yet Sagan was one of the biggest promoters of the “Drake Equation” which takes advantage of the fact that humans are really bad at very large and very small numbers to make it seem like alien civilizations, of which we have never had any evidence of, are widespread throughout the universe.

This was just baloney wrapped in numbers.

I think you misspelled “hypothesis.”

The Drake Equation is perfectly reasonable. You just have to interpret it as “these assumptions imply aliens” rather than “there are definitely aliens.”

It is not, because at least 3 factors of the equation are incredibly difficult to estimate. About as difficult as estimating the probability of an alien encounter. So the equation is basically useless.

And what’s the term for a figure that’s hard to estimate but which you guess at anyway? An “assumption.”

Yes, and in this case, an unreasonable one.

The Drake Equation doesn't imply anything about the number of aliens in the universe, you can get any answer you want by putting in values for each of the factors.

I think the Drake equation is fine if you accept that even von Neumann probes are basically impossible to achieve. Space is simply too hard for everything.

> Commercial culture is full of similar misdirections and evasions at the expense of the consumer. You’re not supposed to ask. Don’t think. Buy.

> Paid product endorsements, especially by real or purported experts, constitute a steady rainfall of deception. They betray contempt for the intelligence of their customers. They introduce an insidious corruption of popular attitudes about scientiﬁc objectivity. Today there are even commercials in which real scientists, some of considerable distinction, shill for corporations. They teach that scientists too will lie for money. As Tom Paine warned, inuring us to lies lays the groundwork for many other evils.

It's gotten so much worse since Sagan wrote this. I wonder what he'd think of the advertising monstrosity we have today, courtesy of Google, Facebook, etc.

I wonder how long until there's a well developed product placement ad system in podcasts. Everyone is skipping livereads so they'll sprinkle ad names within the content.

This fermatslibrary.com website is a great idea. I've been looking for a curated list of academic papers to read. They should be promoted like great literature.

The software they are building that augments long form writing works cleanly in the browser. Hopefully they have a long-term sustainable business model to keep this going.

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