The Skeptics Society & Skeptic magazine

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in this issue

An Easy Guide to Baloney Detection

• Sagan’s “Fine Art of Baloney Detection”
• Sagan’s Ten Tools for Detecting Baloney
• Shermer’s Baloney Detection Questions
• How Not to Get Fooled (Even by Yourself)
• avoiding sloppy arguments and common thinking mistakes
• navigating the news and online media

By Daniel Loxton. This issue’s cover features a digital illustration by Daniel Loxton with Samantha May. Modeling provided by Vika M-S.

from the Introduction

Hello!

In this special issue of Junior Skeptic we’ll learn many valuable tricks for sorting truth from nonsense. We need them! We’re bombarded by claims every day of our lives. Friends tell us stuff. Labels and advertisements make claims about products. Books and websites make claims about the world. TV and YouTube channels show us amazing sights and tell us astonishing stories. But some of the things we hear sound too good to be true. How do we tell the difference between fact and baloney? Let’s find out!

Background

This special issue of Junior Skeptic is inspired in part by astronomer Carl Sagan’s 1987 Parade magazine article “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection” and his 1996 book The Demon-Haunted World. It is loosely adapted from the Skeptics Society’s 2001 The Baloney Detection Kit booklet by Michael Shermer and Pat Linse.

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