Ontology:Q36,03

Demon-Haunted World (Sagan 1995) 1-1-1

Core characteristics[edit]

item type: Z (wiki feature; pronounced C) 1-1-1
pronounced [P] label [string] (L): Demon-Haunted World (Sagan 1995) 1-1-1; E:Demon-Haunted World; E:DemonHauntedWorld
pronounced [P] alias (en) [string]: --
QID references [Item] 1-1-1: --
field, scope, or group [Item]: philosophy of science
case of [Item]: secular philosophy against religion (proposed; STM) 1-1-1; anticommunist work (proposed; ES) 1-1-1
URL: --
prototype notes: --

Bibliographic information[edit]

author

Carl Sagan

title (en)

: The demon-haunted world: Science as a candle in the dark

Bibliographic information (1995 hardcover)[edit]

edition number

1

publication date

1995

medium

hardcover

page count

: 457

publisher

Random House

printed in

United States

ISBN

0-394-53512-X

Prototype notes[edit]

Carl Sagan was lucky to land the best professors -> Demon Haunted World. I find it pretty funny I cite this book for Careerism more than for secular philosophy against religion

Motifs[edit]

Carl Sagan's professors / "I learned planetary astronomy from its only full-time practitioner at the time, G.P. Kuiper" -> this is the problem. you obtained a highly expensive rank good that is genuinely difficult to get and you're under the illusion everyone can just choose to get it.
wonder versus skepticism / the two elements of science, skepticism and wonder -> this is blatantly missing the third element of ontology.
United States people are scientifically illiterate because they didn't choose to become smart -> if he'd only taken this lack of education as a material reality instead of a botched Ideal he'd come to understand Marxism better.
Religions are not the only fortress for protecting pseudoscience -> that's fair.
magic ritual
Trotsky and scientific thinking
The dissolved Soviet Russia is the real Russia / Communists ruined science because they only handed science to experts, but the dissolved Soviet Union is the real Soviet Union and the country didn't build itself up through every single individual being thoroughly educated and improved individually -> this is like saying that the United States immediately after dissolving the central government and all the state governments and ripping up the constitution is the real United States. it's very anarchist in a weird way except that if you did the thing it would make everybody fight each other over the same rank goods and businesses and ability to make decisions for other people and create so-called "hierarchies".
hermetically-sealed compartments of knowledge
meme model of fringe science / "Darwinian natural selection of doctrines" -> here this is used more neutrally without any connection to people-groups and cultures; meme theory has turned into an assembly theory. but it still seems very doubtful.
Magic ritual is not distinguishable from religion -> I subjectively prefer this framing, but it should be noted this is not the way it's done in progressive anthropology, where the two things are separated.
scientific method versus applied field
the wonder of the universe
Magic ritual is not distinguishable from religion -> I subjectively prefer this framing, but it should be noted this is not the way it's done in progressive anthropology, where the two things are separated.
invisible garage dragon
witch trial as treason
Whenever we test our models against the world we are doing science (Sagan) -> yes.
Authorities must prove their contentions like anyone else (Sagan) -> this is good in isolation but very curious out of the mouth of a Trotsky supporter. if you applied that to Trotsky you'd realize things are way more complicated than you think
thought 2: at what point is it okay to become AronRa and flatly say: "evolution is a fact."
The word spirit doesn't prove souls / The word spirit doesn't prove souls exist -> my first thought on why this was in the book was some Christians totally say this. they think that "God" in a language equals there being a God, although when you get into structuralist linguistics you'd see that having a word for something doesn't really mean it refers to much of anything at all, it only means that people believe it to be different from other words, not even that the words do refer to different things. looks like Sagan was going into Einsteinian religion though
if there was something better than science, I would advocate that -> this always gets me because of how quickly the people that say this dismiss dialectical materialism and a potential science of populational development
Contradiction between old and new ideas is a form of filtration / "separates the wheat from the chaff" (remark on peer review process and filtration of scientific models) / "the gauntlet of criticism" -> he literally said filtration in other words
I'm very fond of this idea, leave it alone / I'm very fond of this idea, please leave it alone (Sagan, Faraday; positive side) / devote those neurons to ideas that better explain the data (negative side)
Newtonism-Einsteinism -> the motif of physicists rejecting Newtonian mechanics when Einsteinian mechanics came along, while still integrating the lessons of Newton. it's so lost on Sagan how this applies to Communism, so I'll give just a little hint.

Motifs (subjective)[edit]

Atheist science communicators are social-science illiterate / You can't understand science illiteracy without a serious science of sociality, social groups, and culture
who are "we"? -> in DHW, it appears to be "professors and capitalists", while capitalists have no incentive to let professors have primary control over "we".
Do people desire survival over sovereignty? / you can pray or you can inoculate (statement on effectiveness of science versus magic ritual) -> I feel like we really got a pile of strange data on this during Covid. there were a bunch of people who really seemed not to desire surviving as much as creating a materially independent Confederate culture, which religion served the purposes of but vaccines produced by somebody else didn't. in a lesser way which is nowhere near as bad, there were a couple incidents where people in Africa rejected science and promoted folk religion because ultimately they wanted populational independence and the chance to develop things in Africa, they were just a little mistaken about what kinds of things those might be.