/lit/ - Literature

Definitely not anything by the hack de Beauvoir.

The hungry caterpillar.

The less intellectually equipped? Anything by Eco.

>>3989747
This book wanted to make me gag as a scientist. No, not a computer scientist, no not a social scientist. I am a functional ACS certified chemist, 100% atheist.

Does he give statistical rigor to his claims?
no.
What allows him to justify his claims based on incidental, non controlled experiments and call that science?
no. Shit isn't even empiricism.
Does he allow peers to review his claims?
no. He shuts down rivals.
What's his main method for striking down ideas?
Occam's razor, which if used in any scientific paper is grounds for getting your forever tarnished and your paper throw in the trash can.
Does he assume a realm of skepticism to avoid the confirmation bias?
no.
Does he know about Godel's Theorm of Incompleteness?
no.

I am at heart a 100% atheist to the core, and reading the bible doesn't get me so furiously tempered. I never have wanted to burn a book before, but this is just mudslinging disguised as a pop sci book. As I say, /r/atheism before it's time.

inb4 agnost shit.
I was raised secular without any strong traditional backgrounds in monotheism. If I were to be religious it would be polytheism, which is what my heritage is. Suck a dick if you doubt my religious history

>>3989726
lmfao @ any philosophy after WW2
especially these social theorists

>>3989843

Sagan was a popularizer of science, and should be treated with the respect due to the popularizers of anything else (that is to say, fuck all). His wholesale adoption as paragon of secular thought by retarded teenagers on the internet is appropriate beyond the power of language to convey.

>>3989843
I like his writing style though...
it seemed like it was a little more moderate than other pop sci books about religion, but as far as I could judge it didn't read like it was written by a scientist, not even in the way that Asimov writes fiction, and certainly not non-fiction

anyway pic related
I can't find an English version of the table but its from General Rhetoric
metaplasms (morphology), metataxes (syntax), metasememes (semantics), metalogisms (logic) as operated upon by suppression, addition, suppression-addition, permutation

>>3989848
are you serious or just an idiot?

>>3989726

that, Eroticism, Discipline and Punish, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Beyond Good and Evil

>>3989843
Sagan fuck your girlfriend or something?

>>3989869
*it's
what a terrible mistake to make when describing a book about language

Inner Experience is very good too, or at least the parts written "with necessity—in accord with my life" rather than "the laudable concern of creating a book."

i hate how sagan has been appropriated as a talisman by euphoric neckbeards. the man was a genuinely engaging and informative writer and maybe the best popular ambassador for science there has been. cosmos was a great show and a great book.

hume's treatise and spinoza's ethics
shit's cray

>>3989893
>spinoza's ethics
great

>>3989843

Lay off the steroids. This is a gateway book or a usual member of the "must reads" science-bent lists. It's philosophical and introspective. It's not science:the theoretical minimum. Obviously, not the book for the choir.

I don't consider it a popsci book. It's a meta more than anything else.

>>3991579
>vague

>>3989892
>euphoric neckbeards
you mean that group you retards keep referencing that doesn't actually exist.

>b-but i saw it being upvoted on reddit a bunch

stop internalizing 4chan scrutiny, you shitlord.

>>3989843
i love how babby's first chemistry set thinks that everything written about science needs to be falsified and loaded with citations to papers and studies.

that's how science works, yes, but books aren't science. you find this book at the library, not excerpted in journals. fucking into context, loser.

>>3991709
it's called autism

>>3991704
spend some time on /r/atheism and then come back and tell me fedora-wearing neckbeard atheist idiots that think they're smarter than everyone else based solely on their atheism don't exist.

>>3989843

You're smart. Can I has you as friend?

>>3993345
>appeals to namedropping that you don't understand and haven't heard of
>necessarily 'smart'

punch yourself infinite amount of times, idiot

>>3989843
are you sure you read the same book I did? It's a bunch of essays on science history and society. It neither applauds atheism or denigrates religion, though he takes a dim view at times of people who want to ban the study of evolution. I'd say he's no martin gardner, isaac asimov or willy ley, but he appeals to the layman.

Seriously, it's like you read an Aubrey and Maturin novel and started spitting about the history of the napoleonic wars.

I hope i can write something some day that gets this strong a reaction.