Carl Sagan:
There’s two kinds of dangers. One is what I just talked about. That we’ve arranged a society based on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology, and this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. I mean, who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don’t know anything about it?
And the second reason that I’m worried about this is that science is more than a body of knowledge. It’s a way of thinking. A way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan political or religious who comes ambling along. It’s a thing that Jefferson laid great stress on. It wasn’t enough, he said, to enshrine some rights in a Constitution or a Bill of Rights. The people had to be educated, and they had to practice their skepticism and their education. Oherwise we don’t run the government—the government runs us.
https://speakola.com/ideas/carl-sagan-science-last-interview-1996
@Flick He was ahead of his time.
@sullybiker He really was, and it’s only got worse in the last thirty years.
@Flick I started to become aware around 2007 of this weird science groupie-ism (for want of a better word) that started happening around people like Dawkins. They became celebrities and people forgot science is a method, not a belief system.
