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

by Steven Novella

We are all children and there are no adults. There are no ultimate authority figures; no one has the secret; there is no revealed knowledge; and there is no place to look up the definitive answers to our questions (not even Google).

Other studies have also shown the lack of any relationship between confidence in a memory and its accuracy. We tend to think that vividness and confidence predict accuracy, but they don’t.

The Dunning-Kruger effect describes the inability to evaluate one’s own competency, leading to a general tendency to overestimate one’s abilities.

Motivated reasoning is the biased process we use to defend a position, ideology, or belief that we hold with emotional investment.

Factual beliefs about the world shouldn’t be a source of identity, because those facts may be wrong, partly wrong, or incomplete.

I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody’s easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method. —Neil deGrasse Tyson

The goal of critical thinking and skepticism is to have the most valid position possible, and this means accounting for the best possible arguments that challenge our position.

if you want to test your hypothesis, try to prove it wrong. Do not only look for evidence to prove it right.

Science doesn’t say—and cannot say—that all life on earth was not created in an instant by an all-powerful designer. It is agnostic toward such a belief. It can only say that such a hypothesis is outside the realm of science, because it cannot be tested scientifically. That’s methodological naturalism.

Rather than accepting constructive criticism as a necessary part of the process, the pseudoscientist feels persecuted.

ID proponents have carefully crafted their premise: design = intelligence, evolution = random. Then all they have to do is show the appearance of design in nature and claim that ID is verified.

If you are searching for sacred knowledge and not just a palliative for your fears, then you will train yourself to be a good skeptic. —Ann Druyan

For it is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false. —H. L. Mencken

Realize that you will never achieve the goal of ridding yourself of bias and error. All you can do is remain vigilant and work hard to keep them to a minimum. And while you’re keeping that light focused inward, recognize that you have sacred cows, ideas that are part of your identity and will cause you emotional pain to change.

It’s not easy. Being wrong will still hurt the ego. You need to get to a place where refusing to correct an error will hurt more.

Thinking for yourself is an endless freak show. But you work through to at least a reasonable tentative answer by following a logical process that respects facts and accuracy.