Reddit Reddit reviews How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

We found 17 Reddit comments about How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life
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17 Reddit comments about How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life:

u/YoungModern · 24 pointsr/exmormon
u/kameboy · 4 pointsr/AskPhysics

Address the root cause, not the symptom. They have misunderstood science, the scientific method and sprinkled conspiracy theory on top. They probably harbor a distrust in science as a whole.
Luckily for you, the topic at hand is more accessible to laymen than physics; it's introductory philosophy of science, but you can avoid the academic jargon.

You have to establish trust in science first. Questions you need to raise and discuss are (in no particular order):

  • what is science and what is it not? (I.e., what is pseudo-science and demarcation)
  • what is the scientific method?
  • what counts as evidence? (Also evidence levels, from opinion to randomized controlled trials for instance).
  • what counts as proof?
  • whose burden is it to provide evidence or proof?
  • what is research? (Present them an actual paper, many have never seen one. Take for instance one by Einstein, LIGO's gravitational waves or why not Angela Merkel).
  • where is research? (Present them to journals, etc.)
  • peer review
  • how can we trust science?

    Obviously you need to learn these topics first. Use a book on philosophy of science or equivalent. In my country it happens to be a mandatory very short course for all engineers.

    How you go about introducing these topics to them depends on their personality. You can discuss IRL, motivating them to take a course or, if they'll read it, give them an book such as the one above or something simpler. Regarding conspiracy there are plenty of fun books, especially on self-delusion, like How we know what isn't so or You are not so smart. The latter is also a podcast.

    In general avoid using youtube as a source, but if they won't listen to anything else there's a ton of videos raising the topics above, see the veritasium channel for instance.
u/narwhalpolis · 4 pointsr/science

I'm a vegetarian. But I don't have qualms with eating locally grown fish/livestock on rare occasion. So maybe! If I'm ever over there. Also, great response.


This book may be of interest to you btw: http://www.amazon.com/How-Know-What-Isnt-Fallibility/dp/0029117062/ref=cm_lmf_tit_1

u/-paradox- · 3 pointsr/medicalschool

I'm currently reading this, heh. Figured it's one way I could prepare myself in dealing with patients.

u/WordSalad11 · 3 pointsr/explainlikeimfive

It's hard to make sense of the world without an understanding of basic science and statistics. Our brains are constantly looking for patterns and associations. We make a large number of correct observations, but also a good number of false ones. Rejecting a false observations relies on our rational thinking to overcome our emotional response. If you have a child who gets a bunch of vaccines, and two months later start to exhibit signs of autism, your first instinct is probably to blame the vaccine. Your baby is fine before hand, and not okay afterwards. It's only be going back and testing this observation in a scientific manner can we determine if this is an anomaly, or factual. Before you dismiss these people, look at how many irrational beliefs you harbor. Do you believe that basketball players have hot streaks? Clutch hitting in baseball?

A good book about perceptual biases, etc:

http://www.amazon.com/How-Know-What-Isnt-Fallibility/dp/0029117062

u/mandragara · 3 pointsr/TrueAtheism

I would also like to recommend "How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life" - From a footnote in one of Sagan\Dawkins\Hitchens' works, can't remember who exactly. Good book

http://www.amazon.com/How-Know-What-Isnt-Fallibility/dp/0029117062

u/Athegnostistian · 2 pointsr/atheism

A brief search on Amazon brought up these:

http://www.amazon.com/How-Know-What-Isnt-Fallibility/dp/0029117062/ref=cm_lmf_tit_1
http://www.amazon.com/People-Believe-Weird-Things-Pseudoscience/dp/0805070893/ref=pd_cp_b_2

What do you think?

And I must say, I like your approach: First teach him critical thinking, and then, if necessary, point out to him that religion is one of the fields where he should apply the rules of scepticism. If he's not too deluded (which I'd expect since he wasn't indoctrinated as a child), he will probably come to the only reasonable conclusion.

u/cpqarray · 2 pointsr/atheism

I've been reading this book and am about 1/3 of the way through. The author makes some really good points about how we arrive at beliefs and the mechanisms we use to discredit things that conflict with those beliefs. I can't go thought point by point in the entire book but here is a couple things he brings up:

>People's preferences influence not only the kind of information they consider, but also the amount they examine. When the initial evidence supports our preferences, we are generally satisfied and terminate our search; when the initial evidence is hostile, however, we often dig deeper, hoping to find more comforting information, or to uncover reasons to believe that the original evidence was flawed.

and

>The important point here is that although evidence and reality constrain our beliefs, they do not do so completely. For nearly all complex issues, the evidence is fraught with ambiguity and open to alternative interpretation. One way that our desires or preferences serve to resolve these ambiguities in our favor is by keeping our investigative engines running until we uncover information that permits a conclusion we find comforting.

u/ursisterstoy · 1 pointr/religion

Define the features you place on this word "god."


All of this proves what I call god doesn't exist.

God has one or more of theses features:

  • transcendent mind
  • telepathy
  • magic
  • consciously controlling reality
  • using nothing to make something

    Why these things fail:

  • every mind we know about requires a physical brain and people used hyperactive agent detection to decide things without minds have them
  • many versions of god exist in imagination yet nobody can prove any of them for reality
  • violates physics and never observed
  • without a mind this is impossible
  • everything comes from something before it (until you reach a scientific nothing which is still something in the philosophical sense)

    Also :

  • the kalam's cosmological argument is about a first state of existence not a first being
  • if god is greater than anything we can think of by also existing it is complex requiring a precursor
  • god can't evolve from simple to complex failing kalam and anselm before anything else exists
  • outside of reality means imaginary
  • http://www.humanreligions.info/hyperactive_agent_detection.html takes the facts and explains them logically
  • https://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0029117062/65536-21 shows how intellect is flawed
  • the levels of cognition are instinct, intellect, and knowledge
  • knowledge means knowing things, when you know facts you know the truth
  • verifiable facts require empirical evidence
  • I provided evidence
  • you provided argument to the stone
  • just because god is obvious to you doesn't mean it exists
  • if you can't show me god exists you don't know that god exists
  • if you can't prove me wrong you don't know that I don't know god doesn't exist
  • if you define god as something that obviously does exist I don't consider it god
  • my definition of god does not exist
  • if I'm wrong prove it

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_the_stone - since you say I'm wrong and can't prove it

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_assertion - since you say evolution proves god but you can't prove that either.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/01/31/the-four-scientific-meanings-of-nothing/

    The scientific nothing used for a universe from nothing is not the same thing as a philosophical nothing. The philosophical nothing is never observed and may not exist except outside all existence. Nothing at all can exist outside all existence because that is no place and no time with no properties whatsoever. Outside existence doesn't exist basically.

    What happened before the big bang? Nobody actually knows and that is okay. Everything after the big bang was completely natural and we have no indication that before it was any different. "God did it" is only valid in a fact debate if you can prove it.

    The deist god literally uses magic to take a philosophical nothing and turning it into something yet has no place or time to exist within. The theist god is based on religious text and those fail on things we can test easily.
u/0ldgrumpy1 · 1 pointr/EverythingScience

Certainly. You aren't racist ... but.. black lives matter dont understand black people are racist too. You aren't one of those crazy anti science global warming denialists... but ... celebrities and nazi pedophiles, right? And denialists shouldn't be picked on because because they are pointing out some science is dodgy. And while you can split hairs by carefully saying " I didn't say" this or that, it was carefully implied which allowed you to imediately deny that was your intention when you are called on it. Please read the book, follow it with https://www.amazon.com/How-Know-What-Isnt-Fallibility/dp/0029117062 and https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman-ebook/dp/B004R1Q2EG

u/XIllusions · 1 pointr/askscience

I'm not trying to sound like I'm attacking you here, and this will likely be my last post.

I just want to say anecdotes are NOT evidence because the conditions are unknown and uncontrolled. Another good read about that here. They can be extremely misleading. At best, they are observations that can serve as the basis for deciding to study something. I know what you mean, but this is a really important point. I also didn't miss the part where you mention the treatment could have been something you didn't know about (like steroids). This is an example of why anecdotes cannot be evidence. I also think the secret steroid thing doesn't need to come into this discussion; I have heard similar reports of acupuncture effects.

I did not mean to single out your memory in particular, but I wanted to make the point that with anecdotes memory IS an issue. Check out this book. Our recollection of events can be significantly distorted, though its hard to believe.

The articles I cited above address your point of a dog having no concept of treatment and placebo. Most likely true! But my point was that the placebo effect can appear because of perception or situations around the animal - i.e. there are other factors involved.

You can't know "it wasn't some postivie experience for her that perked her up" or anything else. Even the stress you mentioned might have contributed to the placebo effect for all we know. I don't see how you can say the possible explanations I provided are out of the question.

Again, I don't want to sound like I'm being a jerk or attacking you. I did want to address how science views anecdotes. It sounds like we are on the same page at any rate. My points were just that placebo effect is a broad term that encompasses a lot of errors and bias and that it may well exist in animals.

u/themisanthrope · 1 pointr/videos

Not necessarily. Being educated doesn't mean you're not indoctrinated by nonsense, or possess critical thinking skills. Educated people are quite capable of believing in nonsense. I think it's more complicated than just education - it's when and how you educate the person, who they are surrounded by, what culture they grew up in, etc.

There's a great book called "Why People Believe Weird Things" that addresses the issue. My favorite book on the subject of belief is probably "How We Know What Isn't So". If you're interested in epistemology, or how beliefs are shaped, these two books give interesting insight.

u/Wavicle · 1 pointr/reddit.com

I recommend you read How we know what isn't so for understanding what is wrong with using yourself and/or those you know as the reason spanking does not cause violence.

Spanking is correlated with increased violent behavior later in life. Is that because violent kids are more likely to get spanked? Maybe. Is it only those who got badly spanked (abused) that end up violent? Maybe. Is it only those who got spanked capriciously? Maybe.

It doesn't really matter that we don't know if those confounding factors are more important or not. You cannot say that spanking doesn't cause violent behavior when the two are correlated unless you have data that shows either that they are not actually correlated or that they have another cause. Your sample set sucks and the conclusion you draw from it is a hasty generalization.

u/millertime3227790 · -1 pointsr/DepthHub

Interesting discussion. I remember readinging Thomas Gilovich's How We Know What Isn't So: The Infallibility of Human Reasoning and one of the points he made was that in sports, the away team almost always receive harsher punishments from referees and are viewed as aggressors and penalized more.

He stated that the reasoning for this was that the darker colors away teams wear are associated with violence and aggression in western society so it is easier for referees to inadvertently reach biased conclusions so that a 50/50 call might actually be 45/55 or whatever.
Source

Perhaps this viewpoint on color carries on to race and 'colors' our perceptions of others subconsciously.

u/ThetamingoftheMew · -23 pointsr/GamerGhazi

Honestly, get into STEM. Get everybody into stem. The reason people fall for psuedo-science so much is a fundamental lack of scientific literacy.

Even though the war that's being fought is cultural, it's only been made possible by the dynamics today by scientific literacy. Jordan Peterson himself has a background in clinical psychology and has years of Academic experience behind him, so he knows how to structure his talks to hit the right notes of the audience he has. The platforms that's enabling us to have these discussions are built by HTML, CSS, PSP and Python programmers. Mathematicians and statisticians structure and analyse the data that's used to gauge voter preferences and target impressionable people with propaganda and advertisements. If you're not extremely educated in this landscape, you're going to lose. It's easy to shit on people like Zucc as being an emotionless lizard man now but he created the platform that arguably controls a good amount of the public discourse.

We have computers in our pockets, and the majority of the people that use them don't even know how they work. If you haven't the privilege to get into a science or technology field then at least start reading books like Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World and some Thomas Gilovich.