Knowing Things Is Hard

Truth Sandwich (George Lakeoff, 2018?): trying to refute an idea can spread it, because your audience is probably not the audience that was first exposed. Another name is prebunking (but committing publicly to a position on something has dangers: if you turn out to be wrong, it will be harder to admit that).

Telephone, Game of: as stories are retold or texts are copied they change.

Research Incumbency Rule: “Once an article is published in some approved venue, it is taken as truth. Criticisms which would absolutely derail a submission in pre-publication review can be brushed aside if they are presented after publication. This is what you call ‘the burden of proof on critics.'”

Power of Fiction: many people’s understanding of the world they live in owes a lot to fiction. Even if you know how something worked in a past society, someone in the past may have had different ideas if they had little or no direct experience. And many people still get their ideas about the past from Asterix comics or Shakespeare plays or computer

Persona: writers and poets often speak in voices which are not their own voice. Its dangerous to assume that a love song is about a love affair that the author really had, or that the politics of a chronicle are the politics which the author would express over a jug of beer.

Partisanship: many people much of the time are more interested in supporting their faction than finding the truth. Many of the customs of science were created to keep debates from becoming dominated by parties outside of science, but parties within science can emerge (eg. debates about the Anglo-Saxon migration into Britain).

Panglossianism: we do not live in the best of all possible worlds.

Nirvana Fallacy: just because something has a flaw does not mean that its useless.

Gell-Mann Amnesia: if someone is wrong about things we know a lot about, we rarely assume that their views on topics we don’t know about are just as wrong.

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the art