The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake

by Steven Novella

An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge.

Once I learned about common logical fallacies I started to notice them everywhere. This makes you a big hit at parties (ahem). This is partly the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon—once you stumble upon an obscure word or fact, you encounter it again and again, seemingly against the odds. This is part simple coincidence but also part perception bias. You’ve likely encountered the word or fact before, but you just didn’t notice it.

We love to get feedback from our listeners, but a few years ago one SGU listener e-mailed to complain that a segment we were running at the time, This Week in Skepticism, was clearly biased toward women, likely as part of some feminist agenda. That sounded like a factual claim, so I quickly tallied up the hundred or so installments of that segment and found that the segment focused on a woman 15 percent of the time, on a man 45 percent of the time, and did not focus on an individual 40 percent of the time. I thanked the listener for pointing this out and vowed we would spend more time focusing on female scientists and skeptics.

The power of confirmation bias is that it works tirelessly in the background, filtering vast amounts of data, until you have a compelling illusion that the evidence supports your belief. In a way, your own brain is gaslighting you, convincing you that reality is different than it actually is and giving you false confidence. It can be incredibly difficult to shake a belief that is supported by a huge construct of confirmation bias. Doing so would involve admitting that you can be profoundly wrong about something that you are sure is correct because you’ve just seen too much evidence in its favor. It can be unsettling to realize how vulnerable we are to such biases—but that’s a humbling and necessary step toward critical thinking.

The appeal to nature is a logical fallacy based upon the unwarranted assumption that things that are natural are inherently superior to things that are manufactured. Additionally, it relies upon a vague definition of “natural.”

The fundamental attribution error is a cognitive bias in which we ascribe other people’s actions to internal factors such as personality while rationalizing our own actions as being the result of external factors beyond our control.

We’re quick to conclude we’re the victim of circumstance, and we tend to be acutely aware of external factors that influence our thoughts and behavior. For other people, however, we tend to assume they are driven predominantly by internal factors having to do with their disposition and qualities. This is the fundamental attribution error (also called the correspondence bias).

We are all very charitable to ourselves. Imagine if we were as habitually charitable to others. With an open mind and before reaching any conclusions, we can ask other people why they did or said what they did. It’s also okay to simply withhold judgment, to recognize that life is complex and we likely don’t have enough information to judge a situation. We love to have opinions about celebrities or people in the news, often based on the flimsiest information. When a more complete story emerges, it’s often different than what many people assumed.

An anomaly is something that sticks out because it doesn’t seem to make sense or it appears to contradict established knowledge or scientific theory. The fallacy of anomaly hunting comes from looking for anything unusual, assuming any apparent anomaly is unexplainable, and then concluding that it is evidence for one’s pet theory.

Good science uses observations about the world that are as objective, quantitative, precise, and unambiguous as possible. It uses these observations to test hypotheses and specifically to try to disprove those hypotheses. Those that survive repeated genuine attempts to disprove them are used to build theories that provide an explanatory framework for how the world works and to make predictions about future observations.

All sciences have their technical jargon. The purpose of jargon is simply to express complex technical concepts in precise terminology. Subtle distinctions can often be very important, and colloquial language may not have the precision necessary to unambiguously convey the necessary meaning.

People tend to use themselves for calibration—anyone more skeptical than you is a denier, and anyone less skeptical than you is a true believer.

As part of this strategy, they will likely appeal to the fact that scientific knowledge has changed over time. If scientists were wrong in the past, they can be wrong now. Of course, no one denies that current scientific knowledge is provisional—that misses the point entirely. They are essentially making a false analogy between a prior belief that wasn’t well established and one that is currently very robust, even rock-solid.

It’s also good social media hygiene not to share or spread news that you haven’t vetted yourself. If there isn’t time to do a reasonable investigation, fine, but it stands to reason that one shouldn’t share an article as if it’s valid news when you have no idea.