Science Literacy

Sagan's analogy in *The Demon-Haunted World* is more structural than it first appears: he wasn't just comparing percentages but mechanisms of enforced ignorance — laws against teaching slaves to read, and a culture that produces science without teaching people to evaluate it. Thirty years later, Bridle's *New Dark Age* argues that even Sagan's prescription (more popularization, more wonder) is insufficient, because the systems delivering knowledge to us are themselves opaque and shaping what we can think. The Brockman anthology lands the punch: a public that encounters *more* science through social media may become *less* scientifically literate, because the filtering has shifted from expert review to algorithmic curation and tribal trust. Sagan wanted citizens who could read the evidence; Bridle wants citizens who can read the infrastructure that selects which evidence reaches them. The concept node's tension with "Faith vs. Reason" turns out to be a distraction — the real opposition is between science literacy and *system opacity*, a neighbor the graph hasn't yet named.