There's a lot of baloney flowing around the mighty intertubes, and given the intentions of StrangeQuarks.ca, I decided it's worthwhile to have our own static page devoted solely to fostering scepticism in our members and readers alike.
First a bit of history. Carl Sagan was the first to propose the notion of the Baloney Detection Kit in his fantastic book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. It's a fairly straight-forward set of ideas that should really be taught to each and every person on the planet. In education, the middle grades of primary school are ideal because while kids are capable of detecting lies, they're more inclined to believe adults in the absence of any evidence. By fostering scepticism at an early age, we can develop a far more rational, positive, technologically-advanced, and progressive society than anything that presently exists on our planet.
The Baloney Detection Kit is pretty short, as far as tool kits go, but they're easily understood and make a convenient check-list when attempting to validate someone's claim. There are several versions of the kit, but the version I like most is presented by Michael Shermer on RDF TV via YouTube (video below).
The Baloney Detection Kit (Shermer's version)
- How reliable is the source of the claim? What's their credibility in the area? Are they qualified to speak on the subject?
- Does the source make similar claims? Are they often found making claims of the same magnitude?
- Has the claim been verified by somebody else? Anyone can make any claim, which is why we expect those claims to be verifiable by others.
- Does this fit with the way the world works? Is the claim remotely realistic? Is it even logical?
- Has anyone tried to disprove the claim? Any claim can be dressed up to look real if nobody has bothered to try to falsify it.
- Where does most of the evidence point? It's easy to cherry pick some data that supports a claim, but what about all the rest of the evidence? Where is it pointing?
- Is the claimant playing by the rules of science? Do they have a theory they are trying to specifically prove in order to fit an ideological agenda, or have they developed a theory out of a body of evidence?
- Is the claimant providing "positive" evidence? - or is their evidence specifically a lack of evidence itself?
- Does the new theory account for as many phenomena as the old theory? - or does it only describe a select subset of what has already been explained? In other words, does it expand our understanding by encompassing more territory than the old theory?
- Are personal beliefs driving the claim? If they already believed their claim to be true before ever testing it, then they are subject to a confirmation bias and a blindness to contradictory evidence.
