Human beings are always inferring, always using observations to refine our judgments about the various competing theories that jostle around inside our mental representation of the world. We are very confident, almost unshakably confident, about some of our theories (“The sun will rise tomorrow,” “When you drop things, they fall”) and less sure about others (“If I exercise today, I’ll sleep well tonight,” “There’s no such thing as telepathy”). We have theories about big things and little things, things we encounter every day and things we’ve run into only once. As we encounter evidence for and
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