You can urge people not to believe anything based on meager evidence until you are blue in the face, but you will never succeed—because, as it turns out, believing things based on meager evidence is what people do. I don’t mean that we do this occasionally: only when we are thinking sloppily, say, or only if we don’t know any better, or only en route to screwing up. I mean that believing things based on paltry evidence is the engine that drives the entire miraculous machinery of human cognition.
