The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Sagan made an awesome good case for embracing scientific skepticism, while pointing out its short-comings when deciding moral values over scientific data that might be used to advance unethical practices. The only thing that bothered me, personally, was the overtly acceptance of religion as a complementary way of advancing our spirituality (whatever that means).

Apesar de ser um livro de mais de 25 anos, as inquietações de Sagan relacionadas ao obscurantismos, superstições e credulidade são mais relevantes do que nunca. Imagino que ciente das maravilhas comunicativas do mundo moderno, sobretudo a internet, esperar-se-ia maior alfabetismo científico e o fim de crenças despropositadas, contudo isso não se manifestou.
O livro exibe uma sucessão de evidências dos demônios que assolam o mundo, alguns mais assustadores do que outros, mas todos eles tão reais quanto o éter.
Essa é uma leitura imprescindível para um primeiro contato com o pensamento e método científico.

Meh, i liked much of what this book had to say but much of the examples used and data provided are at this point 20-30 yrs out of date.

This book was published in 1995 and while the underlying concepts and message is very relevant with how much has changed over the past 25yrs its hard to say how the state of our education system now is relative to then.

As an example sagan laments the lack of science based educational media but today we have things like curiosity stream, numerous science baaed non fiction books, youtube science channels, many tv networks devoted to educational programming, improved science education in schools etc...

While there is for sure a segment of society that is willfully or otherwise ignorant of scientific literacy they are the small vocal minorty.

Overall I still enjoyed this book but for sure not feeling it much more than a 3

3.5/5. Interesting book but I feel that it did not age well.
The first chapters were dry and thus a bit hard to read. Sagan focuses a lot on alien abduction and UFO sightings which I am not really interested in. And I feel like today nobody believes in crop circles and alien abductions anymore anyway so it was kind of redundant. Later on there is also a random Maxwell chapter where Sagan discusses the physics of electromagnetism which I am not sure really did fit into this book as I thought this book is about pseudoscience and skepticism, but maybe I just didn't get it.
As dry as the first chapters were, I felt that towards the end the chapters became more interesting though and apart from the focus on aliens Sagan did make some excellent points when he discusses science as means of progress of humanity, hallucinations, influence of politics on science, science and freedom, etc.
So I guess I would recommend the book. It was not bad by any means but I think that it didn't age too well.