Housing bubbles, holy wars, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the lunar landing: all of these came about as the result of belief. Plainly, then, our beliefs don’t just have financial and material consequences. They also have political, legal, intellectual, cultural, and even corporeal ones. And, crucially, they have emotional and psychological consequences as well. Again, I’m not talking about the emotional consequences of being wrong about a belief, a topic we’ll get into later. I’m talking about the emotional consequences of merely believing it—the way that building a gravitational-wave observatory
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