alt Hacker News>Eh, hard to say what is magic and what is not.
I don't think it is?
I had to look up what specifically Sagan's errors about history were and yes it looks like he popularized a lot of bad mythology (I referenced this site[0]). I have to admit I believed a lot of this myself at one time. But I think there's a difference between the plausible but wrong and the impossible. If he'd said he thought Atlantis was real, or gone on about Tartaria or the great Ice Wall, that would be a lot closer to magical thinking.
Although it is a lot easier to be led astray by plausible lies than implausible ones. It seems like Sagan is certainly guilty of not being critical about narratives that reinforced his worldview.
[0]https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/02/05/carl-sagan-was-...
>> Eh, hard to say what is magic and what is not.
> I don't think it is? I think there's a difference between the plausible but wrong and the impossible.
I find that the word "magic" is very overused by smart people online as a sort of thought-terminating cliché. It's a vague concept and I'm not always sure what they mean by it.
It's often extremely hard, even for top minds, to tell apart magic and science ahead of time. Think of Einstein mocking quantum physicists for believing in "spooky action at a distance". Of course if you still don't believe in quantum entanglement today then you are being irrational, but that's only because science has (mostly) settled the question, nothing to do with how magical or plausible the concept may sound.
Someone defending astrology will tell you that the gravity of the moon affects their bloodstream like it affects the tides of the ocean. That doesn't hold water if you sit down and do the math of course, but the same is true if you bother to check the dates for events in ancient history.