(highlight:: Here’s a universal reality: What you believe to be true is influenced by how much you want it to be true. The more something helps you deal with uncertainty, the lower the bar is for you to believe it’s true.
It’s been like that forever. Describing the Great Plague of London, Daniel Defoe wrote in 1722: “The people were more addicted to prophecies and astrological conjurations, dreams, and old wives’ tales than ever they were before or since.” You’ll believe just about anything that offers hope when a plague is killing a quarter of your neighbors.
Visa Founder Dee Hock once said, “We are built with an almost infinite capacity to believe things because the beliefs are advantageous for us to hold, rather than because they are even remotely related to the truth.”)
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(highlight:: Physicist Max Tegmark writes in the book This Will Make You Smarter:

The core of a scientific lifestyle is to change your mind when faced with information that disagrees with your views, avoiding intellectual inertia, yet many of us praise leaders who stubbornly stick to their views as “strong.” The great physicist Richard Feynman hailed “distrust of experts” as a cornerstone of science, yet herd mentality and blind faith in authority figures is widespread. Logic forms the basis of scientific reasoning, yet wishful thinking, irrational fears, and other cognitive biases often dominate decisions.)
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: Here’s a universal reality: What you believe to be true is influenced by how much you want it to be true. The more something helps you deal with uncertainty, the lower the bar is for you to believe it’s true.
It’s been like that forever. Describing the Great Plague of London, Daniel Defoe wrote in 1722: “The people were more addicted to prophecies and astrological conjurations, dreams, and old wives’ tales than ever they were before or since.” You’ll believe just about anything that offers hope when a plague is killing a quarter of your neighbors.
Visa Founder Dee Hock once said, “We are built with an almost infinite capacity to believe things because the beliefs are advantageous for us to hold, rather than because they are even remotely related to the truth.”)
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: Physicist Max Tegmark writes in the book This Will Make You Smarter:

The core of a scientific lifestyle is to change your mind when faced with information that disagrees with your views, avoiding intellectual inertia, yet many of us praise leaders who stubbornly stick to their views as “strong.” The great physicist Richard Feynman hailed “distrust of experts” as a cornerstone of science, yet herd mentality and blind faith in authority figures is widespread. Logic forms the basis of scientific reasoning, yet wishful thinking, irrational fears, and other cognitive biases often dominate decisions.)
- View Highlight
-