Sagan @ MindSay

If you have not watched this, you should go right now.

Without Sagan, there would be no Southern Fried Skeptic. I found the end particularly moving.

Vision

So, last night I had this dream that I was at one of those Oprah conferences. One of my Canadian friends is all about Oprah, so maybe that's what brought it on. I never watch stuff like that, being a sci-fi/Buffy The Vampire Slayer person. Anyways, there was a guest singer, who was sort of Neil Diamond, but he looked like the Goldheart character from Babylon 5. I didn't hear what Oprah said as there were all sorts of other things going on: at least I got in free. In real life, I bet those conferences are expensive.

I had a second dream, that I was a high-school student in a school that glossed over anything based on real science, and taught the students creation theory. The teacher was trying to penalize me for advocating evolution as a viable explanation for life on earth. He went out for a while. I tried to write the basics of how the scientific method works for the other students, but the chalk produced only barely-visible, weak marks. Meanwhile, the teacher's intellectually-misleading comments were bold and easy to read. Eventually, I was talking to a gray-haired woman who was a principle, and she was sympathetic and was helping me get out of the school.

Inspired by that last dream, I started reading Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" again (which I currently have out on loan from the library and had abandoned for other books). It's an excellent work, and a real eye-opener about human nature. People are scared witless (literally) of being wrong, for one thing. They're also fearful of ambiguity: superstitions --like the previously-common one that all your problems are caused by witches-- give certainty.  In the short term, it's easier to blame a witch and go to a faith-healer than to sit down and, through trial and error, learn that you have a bacterial infection and can be cured by, say, a treatment derived from a form of mold. Science takes work and patience. Its most "sacred" precepts change when better evidence is found for a new theory. Thus, people who like pat, absolute answers tend to distrust it immensely, even while reaping its benefits.

The book is scary in some ways, especially where it talks about human history. Many of the same underlying mental shortcuts that justified the Inquisition show up again and again (if you're accused of being a witch, you must be a witch). Our judicial system is one of the saving graces we now have in place; perhaps it is unsurprising that those who would return us to a rule of superstition and fear (DeLay, the Christian Coalition) rail against it.

On a related note: my own suspicion is that if you were to call a large sample of American households and ask someone to describe a few of the basic concepts underlying the scientific method (forming a hypothesis that can be tested, running experiments, blinds and double-blinds, peer verification, etc.), about 90% of the people you talked to would not be able to come up with a coherent answer. And that includes the roughly 25% of the population with at least bachelor degrees. If I'm right, we've been very lucky so far. Most intelligent people pick up some ability to think critically (lest they loose all their money to used car salesmen). But it's worrisome that magical thinking often can not be distinquished from scientific thinking. This leaves the stage ripe for decision-making via pure, unchecked emotion; any demagogue who can exploit the big ones --awe, fear, false hope-- will have that much of an easier time rising to a position where he can destroy real hopes, and real lives.