Carl Sagan, one of the great scientist-communicators to the general public of the past century, author of the 1980 book Cosmos and host of the 1980 TV series of that name, has a list of ideas for how to evaluate any kind of claim, a “Baloney Detection Kit”, described many times and recently posted again here: 9 questions Carl Sagan encourages you to ask before believing anything anyone has to say.
Briefly:
- Independently confirm ‘facts’
- Encourage debate
- There are no authorities, but there are experts
- Spin more than one hypothesis
- Don’t become attached to a hypothesis because it’s yours
- Quantify
- Examine every link in a chain of arguments
- Occam’s Razor
- Always consider if a given hypothesis can be falsified; beware if not
