Bits

Detecting Baloney

Baloney is foolish, senseless, or absurd words and ideas. Spotting it belongs in everyone’s kit for defending their own mind. My pointers:

Read and listen to the late Carl Sagan and to Michael Shermer.
Start with Sagan’s baloney detection kit from The Demon-Haunted World. It is summarized at The Mind Collection.
Two good clips: Shermer, clip one and Shermer, clip two.
Be careful with YouTube and with social media feeds in general. Depending on the topic, they are built to stir feelings.
Build your own list of trusted sources. Do not rely on whatever the feed serves.
Check a claim against several credible outlets before you accept it.
Use the tools. AI and open data make checking a basic fact quick, as long as you check the AI too. Staying deluded about basic realities is a refusal to engage, not a lack of means.
Count the people who would have to keep the secret. Many conspiracy theories assume that hundreds of ordinary people can keep a secret for years. Most of us struggle to keep one for a weekend. Shermer’s conspiracy detector says: “The more people involved, the less realistic it becomes.” A 2016 model by David Robert Grimes found that conspiracies of a thousand people or more “quickly become untenable and prone to failure”.
Ask how big and how fair the sample is. The ten or fifteen people you know are not the country. Nobody has to visit every pizzeria to estimate how much pizza Americans eat, because a fair sample gives the answer with high confidence.