Quotes About Belief

Anything that makes it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias beliefs. A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.

Leaders of large businesses sometimes make huge bets in expensive mergers and acquisitions, acting on the mistaken belief that they can manage the assets of another company better than its current owners do.

poor evidence can make a very good story.

We are pattern seekers, believers in a coherent world, in which regularities (such as a sequence of six girls) appear not by accident but as a result of mechanical causality or of someone's intention. We

Our answer was that when called upon to judge probability, people actually judge something else and believe they have judged probability.

high subjective confidence is not to be trusted as an indicator of accuracy (low confidence could be more informative).

His System 1 constructed a story, and his System 2 believed it. It happens to all of us.

For example, people: believe that they use their bicycles less often after recalling many rather than few instances are less confident in a choice when they are asked to produce more arguments to support it

When you are in a state of cognitive ease, you are probably in a good mood, like what you see, believe what you hear, trust your intuitions, and feel that the current situation is comfortably familiar.

if you follow your intuition, you will more often than not err by misclassifying a random event as systematic. We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.

Klein and I eventually agreed on an important principle: the confidence that people have in their intuitions is not a reliable guide to their validity.

People can overcome some of the superficial factors that produce illusions of truth when strongly motivated to do so.

you were primed to think of old age, you would tend to act old, and acting old would reinforce the thought of old age.

beliefs. A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.

Familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.

Mnoge umiruje ?injenica da sveštenici još uvek postoje, da hodaju zemljom, da služe mise, da se mole i ponašaju kao da ?ovek ima dušu i kao da postoji nada za ljude. Tako i sam mislim kad vidim sveštenika koga ne poznajem. Ali kada se pogledam u ogledalo, to više ne funkcioniše.

Nobody, said Humboldt, had a destiny. One simply decided to feign one until one came to believe in it oneself. But so many things didn't fit in with it, one had to really force oneself.

În realitate, nimic nu te re?ine acolo unde toat? lumea crede c? trebuie s? r?mâi.

Die Menschen sind gutgläubig, sie erwarten keinen Betrug. Wer hört schon einem anderen zu, wer konzentriert sich aufs Gerede des Nächsten, alle sind doch mit den Gedanken anderswo.

Now I understand that one of the important reasons for going to college and getting an education is to learn that the things you've believed in all your life aren't true, and that nothing is what it appears to be.

There is no God and Mary is his mother." —GEORGE SANTAYANA, AMERICAN-SPANISH PHILOSOPHER (1863–1952), AMERICAN PRAGMATIST (SORT OF)

Epistemology: The study of knowledge. It basically asks, What is a rational test for knowability? How can we know for certain what is real? How can we know which propositions are true and which are not? What are basic principles of certainty? Epistemology attempts to lay down the line between knowledge and mere belief. It is one of the main topics of philosophy, along with logic, ethics, and metaphysics.

As a devoted follower of Anthroposophy—Rudolf Steiner's early-twentieth-century spiritual philosophy that comes with comprehensive rules of conduct—Johanna did not believe in inoculating her children against whooping cough. Steiner had declared that "these inoculations will influence the human body in a way that will make it refuse to give a home to the spiritual inclinations of the soul." So Johanna did not vaccinate her children.

The pragmatic piece of James's decision is that believing in a free will feels intuitive. It is fundamental to what feeling human is all about; it is basic to being an "I." That is, right up until we find it useful or comforting to believe that uncontrollable forces determine our actions. Then we are back in "the devil made me do it" territory.