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Shermer—Why People Believe Weird Things

Shermer—Why People Believe Weird Things. 3 main reasons: Hope springs eternal Thinking can go wrong in general ways Thinking can go wrong in particular ways. Shermer. How open-minded is too open-minded?

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Shermer—Why People Believe Weird Things

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  1. Shermer—Why People Believe Weird Things

  2. 3 main reasons: • Hope springs eternal • Thinking can go wrong in general ways • Thinking can go wrong in particular ways

  3. Shermer • How open-minded is too open-minded? • Excessive credulity—believe a lot of strange things without convincing evidence; easily taken in by others • Excessive skepticism—may miss new ideas

  4. Shermer • Examples of public interest in pseudoscientific ideas in our culture: television shows, movies, books, speakers, unusual religions, alternative unproven medical practices, astrology, ESP, witches, aliens, talking to the dead, ghosts, personal psychic experiences, dowsing, Bermuda Triangle, creationism, Scientology, faith healing, life after death, Bigfoot, etc.

  5. Shermer • What is pseudoscience? Claims made so that they APPEAR scientific, even though they lack plausibility and supporting evidence

  6. Hume’s Maxim • Hume’s Maxim: “. . . No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.” (sometimes asked “which is the greater miracle?”)

  7. 25 Fallacies • 1. theory influences observations (fallacy would be belief that seeing is believing) • 2. observer changes the observed • 3. equipment constructs results (what we know often depends on our technology to study) • 4. anecdotes do not make a science, no matter how many are collected

  8. 25 fallacies • 5. Scientific language does not make it a science • 6. bold statements do not make claims true (but they do sell books and lead to television appearances) • 7. heresy does not equal correctness (some people the public laughs at actually ARE wrong)

  9. 25 fallacies • 8. burden of proof: is on one making claim, not on skeptic • 9. rumors do not equal reality (see urban legends websites) • 10. unexplained is not inexplicable • 11. failures are rationalized (e.g., Uri Geller explaining spoon-bending failure)

  10. 25 fallacies • 12. after the fact reasoning: easy to make up an explanation after observation; harder to predict • 13. coincidences happen, and may be more likely than you think • 14. representativeness, availability heuristics bias our perceptions

  11. 25 fallacies • 15. emotive words and false analogies • 16. ad ignorantum arguments: appeal to ignorance—belief that if you can’t disprove it, then it must true • 17. ad hominem: attacking person, not their ideas • 18. hasty generalization

  12. 25 fallacies • 19. Overreliance on authority • 20 either-or thinking; no shades of gray • 21. circular reasoning • 22. reductio ad absurdum and slippery slope: taking to illogical extreme; assuming things will increasingly get worse

  13. 25 fallacies • 23. Effort inadequacies, need for certainty, control, & simplicity • 24. problem-solving inadequacies, such as overconfidence, confirmation bias, hindsight bias • 25. ideological immunity—anything that contradicts strongly held beliefs will be a hard sell

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