[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/