our beliefs come in bundles. That makes it hard to remove or replace one without affecting the others—and it gets harder as the belief in question gets more central. In this respect, beliefs are like the beams in a building or the words in a sentence: you can’t eliminate one and expect the fundamental soundness or fundamental meaning of the overall system to remain unchanged. As a result, being wrong sometimes triggers a cascade of transformations so extensive that the belief system that emerges afterward bears almost no resemblance to its predecessor.
