The Dragon in the Garage and the Age of Infinite Certainty

 

Copyright: Sanjay Basu

Carl Sagan gave us one of the cleanest mental tools ever built.

It looks simple. Almost childish.

A person says there is a dragon in the garage. You go to see it. You find nothing. Then the claims begin to shift. The dragon is invisible. It floats. It breathes heatless fire. It leaves no tracks. It cannot be detected by any instrument. Every test fails. Every test is answered with a patch.

At first it sounds like a joke. It is not a joke.

It is a diagnosis.

Sagan was not merely making fun of superstition. He was doing something harder. He was showing how bad thinking survives. He was showing how belief protects itself when reality refuses to cooperate.

That little dragon has grown up since Sagan wrote about it. It now has Wi Fi, a ring light, and a premium subscription. It lives on social media. It appears in politics. It appears in health claims. It appears in investment scams. It appears in AI hype. It appears in our family WhatsApp groups before breakfast.

The dragon is doing very well.

What Sagan was really pointing at

Most people remember the image. Fewer remember the blade hidden inside it.

The point is not whether dragons exist. The point is what counts as evidence.

If a claim makes no contact with the world, then it does not matter how confident the speaker sounds. It does not matter how sincere they are. It does not matter how many followers they have. It does not matter if the claim is emotionally useful.

A claim that cannot be tested is not automatically false. It is worse than that. It becomes insulated. It becomes unaccountable. It becomes impossible to distinguish from fantasy.

That is the real issue.

Sagan was trying to defend something fragile and precious. He was defending the difference between a statement about reality and a story we tell ourselves.

That difference is civilization.

I mean that literally.

Science is not a pile of facts. It is a method for humiliating our own certainty. It is a discipline of being wrong in public and then correcting course. The dragon in the garage is what happens when that discipline breaks. Every failed test becomes a reason to believe harder.

You can build religions on that. You can build cults on that. You can build markets on that too.

The moving goalpost is the dragon’s favorite trick

There is a pattern here and once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

First comes the dramatic claim.

Then comes the request for trust.

Then comes the test.

Then comes the retreat.

Then comes the patch.

Then comes a moral accusation for doubting.

This is the full lifecycle.

The dragon starts visible. Then it becomes invisible. Then undetectable. Then sacred. Then your skepticism becomes the problem.

That last step matters. It is always the last step.

Because if the claim can survive every failed test, it no longer lives in the world of evidence. It lives in the world of identity. And once it reaches identity, argument gets harder. Now you are not questioning an idea. You are threatening a tribe.

This is why intelligent people fall for nonsense. Not because they are stupid. Because the dragon is rarely sold as a fact. It is sold as belonging.

Sagan understood this. He was gentle in style, but not naive. He knew that people do not cling to ideas only because they are convinced. They cling because the idea helps them stay socially intact.

The garage has become global

Sagan wrote in a different media age. The garage was local then. One person. One claim. One visitor.

Now the garage is algorithmic.

Now a thousand dragons are launched every hour.

One says a miracle cure is being hidden. Another says a secret cabal runs everything. Another says a technology will end all work by next summer. Another says a coin with a cartoon frog is the future of civilization. Another says a blurry video proves a cosmic revelation. Another says a chatbot is conscious because it wrote a poem about loneliness.

And each dragon comes with a support kit.

Screenshots without context.

Charts without sources.

Clips without the full interview.

Threads built from confident half truths.

A tone of certainty that is meant to substitute for evidence.

We have tools now that can produce polished nonsense at industrial scale. Text. Audio. Video. Images. Fake documents. Fake experts. Fake consensus. The old dragon had to work hard. The new dragon has automation.

This is not just a misinformation problem. It is an epistemology problem. That is a fancy word for a simple thing. How do we know what we know.

If we lose that, we lose the plot.

Why this matters for AI right now

This is where Sagan feels almost unnervingly current.

We are living through an AI gold rush. Some of it is real. A lot of it is important. I work close enough to the machinery to respect what these systems can do. The progress is not imaginary.

But the dragon is in this garage too.

People make claims about models with absolute confidence. Then the caveats arrive.

It understands like a human.

Well not exactly.

It reasons.

Well not consistently.

It is safe.

Well in most normal use.

It is unbiased.

Well that depends on data and deployment and guardrails and who is asking and what incentives exist.

It is conscious.

No. Stop.

This is where Sagan helps. He gives us a posture. Not cynicism. Not blind enthusiasm. A posture.

Test the claim.

Define the terms.

Ask what would count as evidence.

Ask what would falsify it.

Ask if the goalposts move after every benchmark.

Ask if the demo survives contact with production reality.

Ask if the same result appears outside the founder video.

Ask if the miracle disappears when you remove the edit cuts.

If the answer to every challenge is a new exemption, you may be standing in front of a dragon.

And in AI the costs are not small. Bad claims shape budgets. They shape policy. They shape jobs. They shape infrastructure bets. They shape public fear. They shape the stories we tell about human intelligence itself.

So yes, this matters.

The emotional comfort of dragons

There is another reason this thesis still hits hard.

Dragons are comforting.

A clean, dramatic falsehood can feel better than a messy truth. A conspiracy can feel better than randomness. A miracle cure can feel better than uncertainty. A grand theory can feel better than patient work.

The dragon offers narrative relief.

Sagan knew this too. He did not write like a machine. He wrote like someone who understood wonder. He loved mystery. He just refused to counterfeit it.

That is the part many people miss.

Scientific thinking is not the enemy of awe. It is the enemy of fake awe.

Real wonder survives testing. In fact it gets stronger. The universe is not less beautiful because we can measure it. It is more beautiful because it does not need our tricks.

The stars do not need marketing.

Black holes do not need engagement strategy.

Quantum mechanics does not need a fake guru whispering over ambient music.

Reality is already strange enough.

The moral side of evidence

This is not only an intellectual issue. It is moral.

When someone makes a claim that cannot be tested and asks others to organize their lives around it, there is an ethical problem. They are asking for power without accountability.

That is what the dragon in the garage really is. It is a request for authority with no burden of proof.

We should be careful here. Not every personal belief needs to be turned into a lab experiment. Human life has poetry, faith, grief, ritual, private meaning. We are not machines.

But the minute a claim enters public action, money, medicine, law, education, policy, or mass persuasion, the burden changes. Then evidence matters. Then the garage door opens.

And when it opens, we do not owe the dragon respect. We owe the public honesty.

A small practical method for daily life

Sagan’s metaphor is elegant because you can use it in five minutes.

When you hear a strong claim, ask a few plain questions.

What exactly is being claimed.

What observable thing should happen if it is true.

What observable thing should not happen if it is true.

What evidence would change the claimant’s mind.

What evidence would change mine.

If nothing can change anyone’s mind, then the conversation is not about reality. It is about theater.

This simple method has saved me time, money, and blood pressure.

It also improves writing, frankly. It forces you to separate what you know from what you feel. Both matter. They are not the same thing.

The dragon and the mirror

The hardest part is this.

We all have a dragon.

Not just other people. Not just the internet. Not just politicians and grifters and loud men with podcasts.

Us.

We all have one cherished idea we protect a little too quickly. One story we patch when evidence arrives. One belief that gets an extra exemption because it is ours.

That is why Sagan remains useful. He does not only expose fraud. He exposes self deception.

His essay is a mirror in the shape of a garage.

If you read it well, the goal is not to feel smarter than the believer. The goal is to become more honest with yourself.

That is rarer. And harder.

Why I still return to this piece

I return to Sagan because he managed something almost impossible.

He defended reason without sounding sterile.

He defended evidence without sounding arrogant.

He defended skepticism without killing wonder.

That balance is badly needed now.

We live in an age of synthetic confidence. Everyone is certain. Everyone is publishing. Everyone is performing certainty in public. The incentives reward speed, outrage, and grand claims. Quiet doubt does not trend.

But doubt is not weakness. Good doubt is hygiene.

Good doubt keeps us from worshipping our own stories.

Good doubt keeps technology from becoming mythology.

Good doubt keeps politics from becoming fever.

Good doubt keeps us human.

So yes, the dragon is still in the garage.

It always will be.

The question is whether we bring a flashlight, a notebook, and the courage to say what we actually found.