I wonder how well Sagan's own "baloney" holds up against his kit. Historians despise the guy for all the stuff he made up about the library of Alexandria, Hypatia, Eratosthenes, etc... People still repeat a lot of that to this day.
His role as PBS educator, SF author, etc. needs to be considered as a separate thing.
I also loved James Burke and his Connections series, but as it got into the later seasons the so-called "connections" got tenuous and sometimes quite strained.
You can go through all the classic PBS science shows and find problems, Stephen Hawking's Universe was basically unwatchable because they refused to engage with the math.
Also I don't think skeptics hold the worldview you ascribe to them. You seem to have a particular grudge against Sagan.
> Believing silly nonsense which is still plausible isn't the same category of error as believing in magic.
Eh, hard to say what is magic and what is not. Sagan's beliefs about the ancient world could have been fixed with a five minute conversation with an expert. He just didn't care enough to do that, and for some reason that attitude is common among so-called skeptics when it comes to history.
I don't think it is?
I had to look up what specifically Sagan's errors about history were and yes it looks like he popularized a lot of bad mythology (I referenced this site[0]). I have to admit I believed a lot of this myself at one time. But I think there's a difference between the plausible but wrong and the impossible. If he'd said he thought Atlantis was real, or gone on about Tartaria or the great Ice Wall, that would be a lot closer to magical thinking.
Although it is a lot easier to be led astray by plausible lies than implausible ones. It seems like Sagan is certainly guilty of not being critical about narratives that reinforced his worldview.
[0]https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/02/05/carl-sagan-was-...
> I don't think it is? I think there's a difference between the plausible but wrong and the impossible.
I find that the word "magic" is very overused by smart people online as a sort of thought-terminating cliché. It's a vague concept and I'm not always sure what they mean by it.
It's often extremely hard, even for top minds, to tell apart magic and science ahead of time. Think of Einstein mocking quantum physicists for believing in "spooky action at a distance". Of course if you still don't believe in quantum entanglement today then you are being irrational, but that's only because science has (mostly) settled the question, nothing to do with how magical or plausible the concept may sound.
Someone defending astrology will tell you that the gravity of the moon affects their bloodstream like it affects the tides of the ocean. That doesn't hold water if you sit down and do the math of course, but the same is true if you bother to check the dates for events in ancient history.
And this worldview does not exclude spiritual thinking, it just channels it in a specific direction.
Yes, he said our brains are made from the same matter as everything else, but it does not follow that he espoused any sort of strict materialism.
The truth is more subtle and nuanced than that.
If you are interested in getting inside his head, I recommend reading the Mr. X article.
Mike Judge's satire was lost on Sagan. Carl took his knee-jerk reaction and ran with it.
Human directed selection is a thing.
Have you ever seen a pug or do I need 58 articles with a bibliography 20 miles long to tell you they exist?
Of course human directed selection is a thing, when did I ever say otherwise? This is the problem with the Sagan types, you actually think that baloney is fine as long as it's sciencey-sounding baloney.
There are a few good examples of significant errors in the link I cited which I think are substantial - the portrayal of Hypatia is a big one. I just wondered whether there were more discussions about other history topics he got wrong, since you yourself mentioned that "almost every single thing" he said was wrong.
Yeah, but he's a saint of science-fandom, so don't question him. Instead, admire and follow him, and encourage others to do likewise.