Science, Baloney detection kit

Michael Shermer is the founder of the skeptics society and bases the ideas here and below upon original work by Carl Sagan, who now recently deceased was and still is one of the USA's most well known and globally respected scientists. In his book "the Demon Haunted world" he presents his baloney (meaning nonsense) detection kit. It is used by skeptics to find good science and to dismiss bad or psuedoscience. This clip below gives a good introduction. The kit is useful for us to help us establish knowledge that is trustworthy.



These ideas are useful for our discussion and the essay title: Art upsets; science reassures. Discuss.

You can see a written summary of these arguments here

Michael Shermer states further:
Clearly, there are no foolproof methods of detecting baloney or drawing the boundary between science and pseudoscience. Yet there is a solution: science deals in fuzzy fractions of certainties and uncertainties, where evolution and big bang cosmology may be assigned a 0.9 probability of being true, and creationism and UFOs a 0.1 probability of being true. In between are borderland claims: we might assign superstring theory a 0.7 and cryonics a 0.2. In all cases, we remain open-minded and flexible, willing to reconsider our assessments as new evidence arises. This is, undeniably, what makes science so fleeting and frustrating to many people; it is, at the same time, what makes science the most glorious product of the human mind.



The Author:
Michael Shermer is founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and author of
The Borderlands of Science.