unfortunately you can't trust people's facts

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.

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

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

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

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.

our quantitative

understanding of elasticity is shortterm we can estimate what a price reduction will do this week in this quarter but we cannot estimate the effect that consistently lowering prices

Argumentative Theory of Reason (Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber): You cannot reason someone out of a position which they did not reason themselves in to, yet hearing other views helps you develop your own. If we were always as cautious and unsure as the evidence warrants, little ancient history would be written!

Identity Protection: most neurotypicals identify strongly with groups which they imagine themselves to be members of, and defend those groups against criticism. Those groups make up all kinds of stories about their origins and past actions and teach them as true. History is the science of discovering truth about the past, so it always conflicts