It's early yet, and time will tell whether Hoagland's paper gets widespread attention. I should point out, as delicately as I can, that you've done a little yourself to draw attention to it. Hard to say yet whether you pulled back from the precipice in time. I wouldn't have raised the question of a response if you hadn't started the ball rolling.

The important thing isn't to make the psuedoscientists go away, it's to challenge them for the hearts and minds of the public; the public that nowadays is called upon to make policy judgments on complex scientific issues, and that has a lot of influence over funding of science. I'm thinking of the broad value of public dialogue about science (not least, including what psuedoscientists might convince the public constitutes science). I can't think of a meaningful public debate about a scientific question since the Scopes Trial, and I believe the relative invisibility of genuine scientists on the public scene is a significant factor in the present deplorable state of scientific literacy. From the point of view of the masses, the real scientists won't condescend talk to them, while the psuedoscientists are hungry to talk to anyone who can't escape. Who will win by default?

Everyone should look into a mirror; it doesn't take a cult figure or a Svengali to enable someone to lift themselves from ignorance.

Quite so, and in some eyes there was a Cult of Sagan; "Messiah of Rationalism" is a self-defeating contradiction. But even though a lot of people don't really get the meaning of science, I think it was still positive, on balance, that he influenced opinion in a positive way even among people who didn't appreciate the essence of his message.

It's true that there will always be a small number of people sufficiently self-motivated to overcome society's negative messages (peer pressure, don't be a "grind" or a "nerd", etc.; the perception that science is so difficult as to be inaccessible to mere mortals) to raise themselves up by their own boostraps to embrace science. But there's an even larger number people who could so with a little encouragement. We've already established that you don't consider this something appropriate for you, but do you think that, in principle, there's a general obligation for a scientist, somewhere, to "shoulder this burden"?

--Robert