The Demon-Haunted World

Carl Sagan was prescient in so many ways. And he was wrong in other ways -- which he readily admits and connects back to the scientific process underpinning everything in the book.

While not quite a timeless tome through and through, there are a number of sections (especially the final chapter) that perfectly frame the loss of proper skepticism, especially at a time we need it most now with artificial intelligence deepfaking us all out. I thought it'd be a bit easier to read re: popular science, but it's hard to appreciate how much browbeating was needed in the realm of alien conjecture in the 80s and 90s. But there were a fair few films about that so I get it!

What's worth your time reading in here is the patterns that seem real at the time but are very much provable otherwise. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and it's scary how fast and far our attention has been fragmented and how that will create a host of downstream issues. And this is not the luddite or elitist in me coming out, where I'm telling you to read long novels and watch classic cinema. It's the same thing he mentions time and time again (and similar to what Charlie talked about in Poor Charlie's Almanac with his "latticework of mental models") where you can use some simple techniques to sniff out BS. That doesn't mean the lack of evidence supporting magical 7D dimensions says I can't believe in whimsy and miracles and other fantastical things -- I simply need to be cognizant that it's dangerous to invest outsized time/money/energy into those vs. tried-and-true-and-provable techniques like building some muscles on my Ride1Up CF Racer1 eBike, exercising my writing and cognitive abilities with this kind of reflection, and other provable techniques leading to real-world gain should come first before venturing too far into the fantastical. And with artificial intelligence and the abundance of non-rigorous "news" and other items flooding my brain, these anti-BS mental models. And the other side of the coin is being wary of anyone lacking imagination -- plenty of scientific discovery started with a vision but then became proven.

Now I've done enough preaching and I'll continue unpacking this one over time. These are raw thoughts and there's a lot of other items to like this book, e.g. it's very well researched with on-point quotes, historical facts, and some perfectly illustrative tales of the horrors of witch burnings and demons and aliens too, of course. And his ideas on education in one of the last few chapters too (which rekindled the notion of "Mister Brian's Laboratory" and making real claims about real things provable amidst endless clickbait hyperbole).

Recommended, but put on your history cap and maybe take it a bit slower than I did, as an alternative palate cleanser to something like A Confederacy of Dunces which is next on the docket for me courtesy of my brother.

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