[eafer]

I wonder how well Sagan's own "baloney" holds up against his kit. Historians despise the guy for all the stuff he made up about the library of Alexandria, Hypatia, Eratosthenes, etc... People still repeat a lot of that to this day.

[RichardCA]

Sagan made solid contributions to Planetary Science in the 60's and 70's.

His role as PBS educator, SF author, etc. needs to be considered as a separate thing.

I also loved James Burke and his Connections series, but as it got into the later seasons the so-called "connections" got tenuous and sometimes quite strained.

You can go through all the classic PBS science shows and find problems, Stephen Hawking's Universe was basically unwatchable because they refused to engage with the math.

[eafer]

People like Sagan have a worldview in which we are all either rational robots that only believe in "science", or else silly magic-believers that can't think by themselves. Of course Sagan himself proves that this is wrong: you can be a great scientist while believing a lot of silly nonsense about the ancient world, and about crab evolution apparently.

[Fricken]

"As I write, the number-one videocassette rental in America is the movie Dumb and Dumber. “Beavis and Butthead” remain popular (and influential) with young TV viewers. The plain lesson is that study and learning—not just of science, but of anything—are avoidable, even undesirable.”

Mike Judge's satire was lost on Sagan. Carl took his knee-jerk reaction and ran with it.

[jhbadger]

I think it was lost on a lot of the audience at the time as well, who saw Beavis and Butthead as cool rather than a critique of anti-intellectualism. That's the problem with satire in general -- no position is so absurd that somebody won't take it at face value rather than satire.

[eafer]

I just found out that his story about the Heike Crabs is also complete baloney. That makes me sad, it was really such a great story.

[jgoewert]

Really? I think Joel is the one full of it.

Human directed selection is a thing.

Have you ever seen a pug or do I need 58 articles with a bibliography 20 miles long to tell you they exist?

[BeetleB]

Did he make the stuff up, or did he get them from (now considered) poor sources?

[eafer]

I think "made up" is fair. I can't know what his process was and everybody makes mistakes, but almost every single thing he said about history was wrong in a way that was convenient to his narrative, and it's not like he ever retracted anything. Surely if he wrote a whole book about dealing with bullshit he could have used that opportunity for some reflection about his past mistakes, now that would have been interesting to read.

[SoftTalker]

I loved watching Cosmos when I was a kid but as I got older I developed a dislike for Sagan. He strikes me as supremely arrogant and probably insufferable to be around. I don't know that of course, I never met him. Just a feeling.

[palmotea]

> I wonder how well Sagan's own "baloney" holds up against his kit. Historians despise the guy for all the stuff he made up about the library of Alexandria, Hypatia, Eratosthenes, etc... People still repeat a lot of that to this day.

Yeah, but he's a saint of science-fandom, so don't question him. Instead, admire and follow him, and encourage others to do likewise.