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The Demon-Haunted World
Sagan's 1995 masterwork of scientific literacy — the book that articulated the <em>baloney detection kit</em> and warned of a civilization exquisitely dependent on technologies it does not understand.
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, published in 1995, is Sagan's fullest statement of the case for scientific thinking as a civilizational practice. The book addresses UFO claims, psychic phenomena, alien abductions, faith healing, conspiracy theory, and the cognitive machinery that makes human beings susceptible to each — and introduces the baloney detection kit as a practical toolkit for evaluating extraordinary claims. Its famous warning — that 'we've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology' while 'hardly anyone understands science and technology' — has become, in the AI age, prophetic in ways Sagan did not live to see.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book was written during Sagan's final illness, with substantial assistance from Ann Druyan. It is both a technical manual for critical thinking and a sustained argument about why such thinking matters civilizationally. Sagan's diagnosis: a society that depends on complex systems it cannot evaluate is a society vulnerable to
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