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

by Steven Novella

This research follows other research demonstrating that imagining an event is often enough to create the false memory of that event. Imagination activates many of the same brain areas that a true memory would. In essence, a memory of the imagination may over time become indistinguishable from a memory of a real event—and a false memory is born.

Whenever you find yourself saying, “I clearly remember…” stop! No, you don’t. You have a constructed memory that is likely fused, contaminated, confabulated, personalized, and distorted. And each time you recall that memory you reconstruct it, changing it further.

—David Hume

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.

Confirmation bias leads to a high level of confidence: We feel deep in our gut that we are right. And when confronted by someone saying we’re wrong or promoting an alternate view, there is a tendency to become defensive, even hostile.

The Dunning-Kruger effect does not just apply to other people—it applies to everyone. That’s why the world is full of incompetent, deluded people—we all are these people.

There is also a need to remind ourselves that people who disagree with us are just people. They are not demons. They have their reasons for believing what they do. They think they’re right just as much as we think we are right. They don’t disagree with us because we’re virtuous and they are evil. They just have a different narrative than we do, one reinforced by a different set of facts and subjective judgments. This doesn’t mean that all views are equally valid. It does suggest we should strive to focus on logic and evidence, not self-serving assumptions of moral superiority.

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

An argument makes some connection between a premise and a conclusion. An assertion just states conclusions (or premises) without supporting them.

Non Sequitur From Latin, this term translates to “it doesn’t follow,” and it refers to an argument in which the conclusion does not necessarily follow from the premises. In other words, a logical connection is implied where none exists. This is the most basic type of logical fallacy, and in fact all logical fallacies are non sequiturs.

An ad hominem argument is one that attempts to counter another’s claims or conclusions by attacking the person rather than by addressing the argument itself.

The term “poisoning the well” refers to a form of ad hominem fallacy. This is an attempt to discredit the argument of another by implying that they possess an unsavory trait, or that they’re affiliated with beliefs or people that are wrong or unpopular. A well-known form of this, which has its own name—Godwin’s Law or the reductio ad Hitlerum—refers to an attempt at poisoning the well by drawing an analogy between another’s position and Hitler or the Nazis.

Skepticism is largely a systematic effort in metacognition, which means understanding how we think and avoiding common mental pitfalls.

The human mind is like a sailboat on a sea with strong currents and a steady wind. We tend to just follow the currents of our biases and can easily be manipulated and blown about. Metacognition allows you to grab the rudder, to work the sails and head toward reliable conclusions, even against the current and into the wind.

Confirmation bias is a tendency to notice, accept, and remember information that appears to support an existing belief and to ignore, distort, explain away, or forget information that seems to contradict an existing belief. This process works undetected in the background of our minds to create the powerful illusion that the facts support our beliefs.

Torture the data, and it will confess to anything. —Ronald Coase

As Dr. Miller explained, once you attribute a cause to an untestable supernatural force, a proposition that cannot be disproven, there is no reason to continue seeking natural explanations as we have our answer.