Comment by McAlpine5892 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by McAlpine5892 | Hacker News Reader

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I am quite literally in the middle of reading this now [0]. This would be great required reading for high school students. Anyone that runs across this comment should put it at the top of their reading list.

Most frustratingly, many people know how to be properly skeptical. To use Sagan's example, it comes out in full-force any time someone buys a used car. Never trust the dealer. Everybody knows that.

I really appreciate that Sagan refrains from looking down on anyone. It's all too easy to do and I am guilty of it at times. It also leads to a much more useful conversation. Sagan provides hope that we can educate better. Compared to say, Dawkins, who I think has ultimately hurt the cause. Nobody will listen when they feel insulted.

> So sad to see its worst predictions come true.

The most recent bit of the book I read involved James Randi. I was curious about the guy so I did some other reading. Randi gave out an annual "award" called the "Pigasus Award" to fraudsters and similar. Mehmet Oz received the award [1] three times. Now Oz runs Medicaid!

Sadly, we've lost Sagan and Randi. Sometimes it feels like the world has lost any sort of check against gullibility. To paraphrase from the book, many scientists are particularly not equipped to call these scammers out. Scientists wrestle with nature - nature has laws. Trying to call out the Oz's of the world is hard because they don't play by the rules of reason.

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[0] https://archive.org/details/B-001-001-709

[1] https://www.latimes.com/health/la-xpm-2011-apr-01-la-heb-dr-...

> Sadly, we've lost Sagan and Randi.

I had the privilege of meeting both Sagan and Randi at different points. Along with Paul Kurtz, also sadly gone now, these were some of the most in influential people in the beginnings of the modern skeptical movement. If you aren't familiar with Prometheus books and CSICOP (now CSI), look them up. You'll find years worth of groundbreaking skeptical reading material.

> I had the privilege of meeting both Sagan and Randi

If the story is even remotely interesting and something you'd be willing to share I would really appreciate the read.

Will definitely look into those books. Thanks for the recs.

The stories aren't all that interesting. I met Sagan at a talk about SETI that he gave in, oh, it must have been about 1981, at the MIT Haystack observatory. He did a meet and greet session after the talk, and was very gracious. Randi, I met in 1990 when he gave a talk about skepticism at the University of Rochester. Like Sagan, he had a meet and greet afterward. He was very quirky and funny.

I came to this book too late for the core message to resonate as far as mindset and methods (yeah, yeah, I found this path and walked at least this far on it already, you're preaching to the choir, should have read this when I was like 10 or 12 I guess...) but did make the mistake of dismissing an absolute chorus of warnings about anti-intellectualism from Sagan and a dozen other authors I read as a kid and in my 20s (which warnings, yes, were a significant component of this book)

They were all from roughly the same time period, and I thought their focus on that particular issue was overblown. A relic of the time they'd lived through and their efforts, which efforts had gotten us here, where anti-intellectualism is a curiosity, periodically an annoyance, but not a threat. Sure, we could swing back toward that being a real concern, but it'd take a while. We'd see it.

What's weird is I could also list a bunch of ways that we were swinging back toward it. I think on some level I just didn't believe that these kinds of big shifts backwards could happen, actually and not just in shootin'-the-shit discussions with friends, in my lifetime. Bumps on the road of progress, sure, but going backwards entirely? I even shied away from labeling authoritarian-enabling changes, policies, or actions "fascist", even as I literally protested some of them in the street—well, that's alarmist, surely. It's silly and childish that I was embarrassed of the term.

It's so damn foolish when I look back on it. I had so many of the particulars right, but just couldn't believe in something so big actually happening, I guess. I'd have told you that sure, it could, if you'd asked, even outlined a plausible path from here to there based on recent and current goings-on... but I didn't believe it might happen. Not really.

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