Conversation

Notices

1. Robert McNees (mcnees@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 20-Dec-2022 13:56:45 UTC Robert McNees

   Carl Sagan passed away #OTD in 1996. In his final interviews he left us with two messages that are even more relevant today: one emphasizing the importance of a science literate public, the other a warning about how hard it is to extract ourselves when we’ve been conned.

   • Robert McNees (mcnees@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 20-Dec-2022 13:59:47 UTC Robert McNees

     in reply to

     “If the general public doesn’t understand science and technology, then who is making all of the decisions about science and technology that are going to determine what kind of future our children live in, some members of congress? There are only a handful who have any background in science at all, and some of them don’t even want to know about it.” — Carl Sagan

   • Robert McNees (mcnees@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 20-Dec-2022 14:00:42 UTC Robert McNees

     in reply to

     “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” — Carl Sagan

   • Robert McNees (mcnees@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 20-Dec-2022 14:05:24 UTC Robert McNees

     in reply to

     Here is the video of Carl Sagan’s final interview.
     https://youtu.be/U8HEwO-2L4w

   • mmby (mmby@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 20-Dec-2022 14:13:34 UTC mmby

     in reply to

     @mcnees I sometimes think that the best mimicry of charlatans is a tinge of science, giving validity to what is essentially ideology or a bunch foregone conclusions.

     With applied science sometimes eating the world, and technologists raising their hands as if just the messenger, I feel that Sagan wanted us to look for deeper understanding than that:

     "Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves…"

   • David 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 (davidstalane@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 20-Dec-2022 22:15:16 UTC David 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

     in reply to

     @mcnees Movie Script (Draft): Scientist/Warlock invents wormhole to send signals back to 1996 (like the Deja Vu story) and tells The Grim Reaper to take Mitch McConnell instead of Carl Sagan 🙏

   • Dr. Meece (drmeece@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 20-Dec-2022 23:36:21 UTC Dr. Meece

     in reply to

     @mcnees Hi, I feel like the second Sagan quote might be from his book "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" published in 1995

   • oscarbeau@mastodon.social's status on Wednesday, 21-Dec-2022 19:53:40 UTC OscarBeau

     in reply to

     @mcnees Could have been written today! What a loss Sagan has been.

   • westcoastrj@mastodon.social's status on Sunday, 25-Dec-2022 15:57:47 UTC WestCoastRJ

     in reply to

     @mcnees And here we are.

   • Robert McNees (mcnees@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 14:40:45 UTC Robert McNees

     in reply to

     The subject of those quotes had been on his mind for a while.

     Here is a prescient passage Carl Sagan wrote one year before that last interview, in his book “The Demon Haunted World.”

   • Robert McNees (mcnees@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Dec-2023 14:43:06 UTC Robert McNees

     in reply to

     Replace “crystals" and “horoscopes" with "cell phones” and "facebook” and it could be mistaken for something written yesterday.