The Scientific Baloney Detection Kit

This is long, my story of the evolution of the Cosmos series, and how Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan and Neil Degrasse-Tyson show (showed) their colors.

Carl Sagan knew the rules of baloney detection, having popularized them in his books, and by respecting and living them mostly, in his career as an astronomer and author of accessible science for the public. But late in life, he was corrupted by love, marrying Ann Druyan, one of the assistants who worked on Cosmos with him. I can’t say it was her fault the he violated his own rule near the end of Cosmos, and started flinging BS instead of being a force for reason and dispassion. But it is so ironic and sad to me that at the end of the Cosmos mini-series, Sagan demonstrated how he, the writer and definer of the rules on baloney detection, in the end was corrupted, and granted himself an exemption from the rules. What did he do?

At the end of the original Cosmos series, Sagan first proposed an interesting question. That question was part of the wrap up episodes during which he began speculating about the future, and dealing with some interesting but unknown things, often debated by many people, and badly in need of some Baloney Detection. Some of the questions of great interest are related to the notions of intelligent life on other planets, alien visitation and UFOs.

Of course we don’t know of any other intelligent life on any other planets. As a sort of guess about the possibility, though, Sagan outlined the so-called Drake Equation, and briefly discussed whether there was any reason to conclude what the evolution of intelligent life on Earth was a common event or a rarity. In fact there are many things in our own history that can be used to make a case for rarity. But physics got us here, and those rules occur everywhere. So maybe life and intelligence as an evolutionary phase are common. It’s an open question.

But if intelligence and advanced civilizations are common, isn’t part of the evidence that we haven’t found them, so far? Where are the others, why wouldn’t they already be here to pay a visit? Clearly, Sagan clearly believed other intelligent life must be out there, as he wrote the book Contact to explore the notions of how we might find them. But he also details the problems. Relativistic travel times, and huge time lags that any communication based on radio waves would take is one, living for centuries on long space journeys between stars is another. Clearly some advanced state of travel, bending space time, worm-holes, etc, is necessary to make visiting in person a common event. And these things, as they say in court, are not yet in evidence. So Sagan concluded in Cosmos that any evidence for current visitation by ETs is weak and better explained by human psychology than by physical evidence on the ground, sightings of unknown phenomena in the sky, or abduction stories. And I approve of his very sensible, very Ockham-like approach. This is the modern scientific consensus on this issue.

Then Sagan went on to speculate about the notion of intelligence as an ultimate destroyer of advanced species, as an inevitable phase in their evolutionary development. That is a very interesting question. But in this case, it was no longer and honest, scientific question, but a ploy for Sagan to introduce a wildly speculative pet theory of his. That was the idea of nuclear winter. Clearly, we humans do have the ability to wreak great havoc on our own habitat, perhaps enough so to make it a wasteland, possibly even ending in our extinction. And although we have not (yet) destroyed ourselves with nuclear weapons, the “KNOWN RATIO” of intelligent species which build civilizations and practice science, and then make tools which can destroy themselves, right now stands at 100%. This idea clearly frightens and disturbs Sagan. And it disturbed me, too, when in elementary school, I had to do drills where I sat under my desk with my hands clasped around the back of my head for an hour or more. Duck and cover, anyone?

But the question is still just a question. It has not been answered. It might never be answered. But Sagan is through questioning now, and starts laying down the law, and it is here that Sagan went off the rails. He wants his great educational summary to end on an alarmist rant, a sop to his own fears, concluding the whole brilliant series with an implication that this question of intelligence destroying itself with it’s own immature use of dangerous technology was more than likely true than false. It was subtle, and not stated outright, but he concludes what was otherwise a very good show about the advancements of human knowledge due to science, tacitly implying that his own ideas of nuclear winter had already withstood much scientific scrutiny and were as well accepted as the other scientific notions advance throughout the series. In fact they had NOT yet been exposed to any scrutiny at all. And by now, only 30 short years later, they are almost completely discredited. Before he died, I believe Sagan himself regretted his Cosmos speculations about nuclear winter.

It was so ironic that that the teacher, the scientist, ended the series by showing that he was willing to throw out all the rules as a sop to his own emotional bias. Was his bias bolstered by the beliefs of his new wife, who is very much a leftist, pro-Malthusian, perhaps misanthropic person. She exhibits her true colors later, and so maybe we can conclude that those feelings and beliefs influenced the late episodes of Cosmos, too.
Which spoiled the ending of an otherwise terrific series.

Side bar: I also have problems with the editing of Cosmos, which included far too many pregnant pauses and meaningful looks to the heavens and cheesy music, which I believe were meant to convey Sagan’s sense of awe about the Universe. A little of that went a long way, and some judicious snipping would have resulted in a more crisp presentation.

Well, now Sagan is gone, and we come to the first refresh of Cosmos, by his widow, Ann Druyan. This was the same content, with an UPDATE of this final portion about humans destroying themselves due to immature or premature uses of intelligence to kill ourselves off. And surprise, surprise, the refresh downplays the now, pretty much universally discredited notions of nuclear winter, but then instead goes all-in on Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming as the mechanism of our destruction. She shoe horns in plenty of WAGs and alarmist eco-propaganda, giving that wildly speculative content the blessing of being part of Cosmic and Cosmos canon, implicitly blessed with the credibility of Sagan and all the great scientists throughout history combined to give us the knowledge that show imparts. Bullshit. Sagan had a toe in the water, but was never a high priest of CAGW, and who, I think, if you could have pried him away from Druyan for a while, would have gagged at the pseudo-science being advanced out of academe and federal research today. She was the true believer, and this became her Cosmos cause.

Then, finally, Druyan decides to remake Cosmos altogether. And she hires Neil De Grasse-Tyson to be the spokesman. He, like me, is a huge fan of her late husband. Now, instead of being a last minute, “what if” question that only tacitly suggested an answer in the refreshed series, CAGW has now been advanced to scientific fact, replete with the same old unscientific crap about the 97%, bold assertions that CO2 is going to kill us and we must stop driving and burning fossil fuels. I absolutely hated this remake of Cosmos. It will someday become an embarrassment to Tyson. Druyan, I don’t believe, can be embarrassed. She’s like AOC and Bernie Sanders in that regard. Their feelings are more important than what can be objectively proved.

The point of this long rambling personal history is that the idea of a bullshit detector should always be front and center in all scientific questioning. It was a crucial and central idea to her own late husband. And yet Ann Druyan and her main spokesman, Tyson set that idea completely aside to advance Druyan’s own irrational and emotional prescriptions for human civilization, with regard to the burning of fossil fuels.

Another great, non-fiction book by Sagan was “The Demon Haunted World.” Why do we humans have demons and superstitions? Why and how do these things hurt us and cripple and systematically corrupt various parts of our civilization, knowledge or politics? Why is it so hard to erase certain kinds of superstitions, and why do the same kinds of things keep popping up with a slightly new face? Angels are now becoming Aliens was a question posited by that book. While not in the book, a great question inspired by it is do Spanish Inquisitions, witch burnings, beliefs in anal probing by space aliens and CAGW fears share a common psychological explanation or need? Can populations ever be politically rational, or should they aspire to be? Sagan might have been a positive influence in answering some of those questions, but Druyan is clearly not. Dr. Tyson is deep in muck, but might still be redeemed, if he will once again let pre-Druyan Sagan, and not Druyan herself, guide his thinking on the idea of bullshit detection.