Knowing Things Is Hard

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

Vi Hart’s Internet Votes (written 2015, published 2017):

On the internet, content rises to the top if it wins the popular vote. But unlike modern implementations of democracy, you get as many votes as you have time to give, all day every day, and most of those votes are taken by web companies without asking. And unlike the popular vote in democracy,

Confirmation Bias: Most people are much better at making up arguments for something they want to believe or against something they don’t want to believe than at finding the truth. This is one reason why academia is based around debates.

Anecdote: its wise not to trust them unless you have checked an original source. All too often the story that you use to represent a situation in miniature was made up by a journalist in 1928 or an opera writer in 1782. See Friedman’s Law of Anecdotes for more details.

Kaiser Josef Wrote Don Giovanni Syndrome (Phil Paine): we often give rulers credit for things that just happened when they were alive. If you asked the oligarchs of any declining place, they will tell you that they and their ancestors were the source of all wealth and creativity, when in fact the elites took over as the growth and newness were falt

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

Predictions, like advice, often tell you more about the person giving them than about the world.

Halo Effect (Skepdic): if someone sounds wise, we tend to assume he or she is honest and good-looking. If someone is a criminal, we tend to expect that they cheat at senet and wear rumpled black.