A Carl in the Dark

Recently I've been reading Carl Sagan's 1995 book The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. With this book, Sagan attempts to explain to the layperson why science gives us a method superior to religion and psuedoscience for interpreting the world. I needed a voice like that because lately I've been feeling overwhelmed by the prevalence of shoddy reasoning and blatantly biased discourse masquerading as cold truth.

Sagan's guilty of some bias himself. In talking about those scientists who fail to adhere to the pure philosophy of the scientific method, he implies they're not representative of true science, while he assumes the worst examples of religious practitioners are representative of religion. But it is a balm to hear someone extol the virtues of critical thought which I really think is scarcer now than in the mid-'90s.

Do we like being criticized? No, no scientist enjoys it. Every scientist feels a proprietary affection for his or her ideas and findings. Even so, you don't reply to critics, Wait a minute, this is a really good idea, I'm very fond of it; it's done you no harm, please leave it alone. Instead, the hard and just rule is that if the ideas don't work, you must throw them away.

The benefit to science is obvious. But I've noticed people have a harder time accepting real criticism of art now, too. Art critics have always garnered some amount of hatred, and certainly critics are often capable of bias, presuming their subjective dislikes provide evidence for objective flaws in a work of art. But so often now I see perfectly reasonable criticisms attacked with mobs of people accusing the critic of simply being hateful and mean. This has led to a widespread phenomenon now of YouTube critics prefacing their videos by saying they're not telling people they can't enjoy the work being criticised. People shouldn't have to be told, but they very clearly do need to be.