I will always miss Carl

Carl Sagan on science and belief: There's a lot we don't know. It's what I believe. But that doesn't mean that every fraudulent claim has to be accepted. We demand the most rigorous standards of evidence especially on what's important to us.

This exchange exemplifies one of the things I think is best about Carl Sagan, and one of the things I intend to emulate as an educator and a scientist. Carl is great at the charismatic, empathetic emotional communication. In order to make this point about how important it is that we demand evidence for the thing we want to be true, he goes deeply personal -- he talks about how much he misses his parents, and how much he wants to just speak with them again for five minutes. His voice breaks a little when he says it. He brings authenticity to the conversation simply by being unabashedly and almost naively authentic. He says this, and you know how he must feel, because he communicates with everything he is how he feels. And when he says, 'because I want to speak with them again so badly, I have to demand rigorous evidence from anyone who says they can do that for me,' you know that he's right.

What I intend to emulate is his ability to communicate authentically by being unafraid to be authentic. No rancor, no anger, just sincerity.

Orson Scott Card and Science Meritocracy

The rest of the article is Card's usual fooferall. But -- "But science is not done by majority vote -- particularly not by majority vote that was intensely pressured and cajoled by homosexual activists."

So that's sort of interesting. Science isn't done by majority rule, that's true. But science is sort of "done" by consensus. It's not a vote, per se-- there's nobody who tallies up the fors and againsts and says "Sorry guys, global warming it is, global cooling lost by ten points." But there is a consensus that emerges as expert scientists are convinced by compelling evidence and begin moving their work towards further investigations that rely on that compelling evidence. It's almost more like a herd thing than like a town hall thing.

Policy does get done by majority vote. And Policy bases itself on lots of different kinds of information -- only one of which is science. I do think that's how it ought to be. There are a lot of kinds of questions that science doesn't answer well. Like "What is the *meaning* of blue?" or "Have you ever really *looked* at your hands, on weed?" I'm kidding. Like, "If a certain stable segment of the population experiences attraction to the same sex, are we right to continue discriminating against them?" Science doesn't ask or answer that question - it asks "Is there a certain stable segment of the population that is attracted to the same sex?"