Maria Popova wrote a Brain Pickings blog post titled The Baloney Detection Kit: Carl Sagan’s Rules for Bullshit-Busting and Critical Thinking.
In this post she summarized a chapter titled The Fine Art of Baloney Detection from Sagan’s book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.
« Through their training, scientists are equipped with what Sagan calls a “baloney detection kit” — a set of cognitive tools and techniques that fortify the mind against penetration by falsehoods… But the kit, Sagan argues, isn’t merely a tool of science — rather, it contains invaluable tools of healthy skepticism that apply just as elegantly, and just as necessarily, to everyday life. »
The post lists the 9 tools as well as 20 fallacies of logic and rhetoric.
Articles of Interest 