[eafer]

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.

[RichardCA]

Sagan made solid contributions to Planetary Science in the 60's and 70's.

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.

[eafer]

People like Sagan have a worldview in which we are all either rational robots that only believe in "science", or else silly magic-believers that can't think by themselves. Of course Sagan himself proves that this is wrong: you can be a great scientist while believing a lot of silly nonsense about the ancient world, and about crab evolution apparently.

[krapp]

Believing silly nonsense which is still plausible isn't the same category of error as believing in magic.

Also I don't think skeptics hold the worldview you ascribe to them. You seem to have a particular grudge against Sagan.

[eafer]

I actually kinda like Sagan, Cosmos is seriously gorgeous (though Vangelis does a lot of the heavy lifting there). I'm just kinda tired of the whole "Library of Alexandria" myth that comes up constantly around nerdy forums such as this one.

> 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.

[krapp]

>Eh, hard to say what is magic and what is not.

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-...

[eafer]

>> Eh, hard to say what is magic and what is not.

> 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.

[RichardCA]

A lot to unpack here. He espoused a worldview where human beings are "star stuff", a way for the Universe to be self-aware.

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.

https://marijuana-uses.com/mr-x/

[Fricken]

"As I write, the number-one videocassette rental in America is the movie Dumb and Dumber. “Beavis and Butthead” remain popular (and influential) with young TV viewers. The plain lesson is that study and learning—not just of science, but of anything—are avoidable, even undesirable.”

Mike Judge's satire was lost on Sagan. Carl took his knee-jerk reaction and ran with it.

[jhbadger]

I think it was lost on a lot of the audience at the time as well, who saw Beavis and Butthead as cool rather than a critique of anti-intellectualism. That's the problem with satire in general -- no position is so absurd that somebody won't take it at face value rather than satire.

[eafer]

I just found out that his story about the Heike Crabs is also complete baloney. That makes me sad, it was really such a great story.

[jgoewert]

Really? I think Joel is the one full of 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?

[eafer]

Damn that lying Joel... who is Joel lol?

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.

[BeetleB]

Did he make the stuff up, or did he get them from (now considered) poor sources?

[eafer]

I think "made up" is fair. I can't know what his process was and everybody makes mistakes, but almost every single thing he said about history was wrong in a way that was convenient to his narrative, and it's not like he ever retracted anything. Surely if he wrote a whole book about dealing with bullshit he could have used that opportunity for some reflection about his past mistakes, now that would have been interesting to read.

[pu_pe]

Do you have a specific source for this claim? I have read through what someone else posted in this thread (https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/02/05/carl-sagan-was-...) and while some details are indeed incorrect, a lot of it is nitpicking or common misconceptions from his time.

[eafer]

You think it's nitpicking because you don't care much about truth when it comes to history, and that's perfectly fine. But it's weird to complain about other people's baloney while spreading your own, and I think in his position as a trusted science communicator he should have been more responsible about this stuff.

[pu_pe]

No, I think it's nitpicking because it truly is in some cases. Science communication is about simplifying things and making shortcuts while keeping things engaging. Of course Sagan didn't go into a tangent about the first use of the word barbarians or whether ancient greeks would define robots the same way we do. That's pedantic.

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.

[SoftTalker]

I loved watching Cosmos when I was a kid but as I got older I developed a dislike for Sagan. He strikes me as supremely arrogant and probably insufferable to be around. I don't know that of course, I never met him. Just a feeling.

[palmotea]

> 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.

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.