Quotes About Beliefs

The amount of evidence and its quality do not count for much, because poor evidence can make a very good story. For some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs. Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous - and it is also essential.

Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous—and it is also essential.

only test of rationality is not whether a person's beliefs and preferences are reasonable, but whether they are internally consistent. A rational person can believe in ghosts so long as all her other beliefs are consistent with the existence of ghosts. A rational person can prefer being hated over being loved, so long as his preferences are consistent. Rationality is logical coherence—reasonable or not.

In the context of attitudes, however, System 2 is more of an apologist for the emotions of System 1 than a critic of those emotions—an endorser rather than an enforcer. Its search for information and arguments is mostly constrained to information that is consistent with existing beliefs, not with an intention to examine them. An active, coherence-seeking System 1 suggests solutions to an undemanding System 2.

your beliefs should be constrained by the logic of probability.

Statistical results with a causal interpretation have a stronger effect on our thinking than non-causal information. But even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or beliefs rooted in personal experience.

Many decisions are based on beliefs concerning the likelihood of uncertain events such as the outcome of an election, the guilt of a defendant, or the future value of the dollar.

The dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved. The psychologist Paul Slovic has proposed an affect heuristic in which people let their likes and dislikes determine their beliefs about the world.

System 1 runs automatically and System 2 is normally in a comfortable low-effort mode, in which only a fraction of its capacity is engaged. System 1 continuously generates suggestions for System 2: impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings. If endorsed by System 2, impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs, and impulses turn into voluntary actions. When

A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed.

More generally, the financial benefits of self-employment are mediocre: given the same qualifications, people achieve higher average return by selling their skills to employers than by setting out on their own. The evidence suggests that optimism is widespread, stubborn, and costly. Psychologists have confirmed that most people genuinely believe they are superior to most others on most desirable traits - they are willing to bet small amounts of money on these beliefs in the laboratory.

System 1 continuously generates suggestions for System 2: impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings. If endorsed by System 2, impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs, and impulses turn into voluntary actions. When all goes smoothly, which is most of the time, System 2 adopts the suggestions of System 1 with little or no modification. You generally believe your impressions and act on your desires, and that is fine—usually.

System 1 provides the impressions that often turn into your beliefs, and is the source of the impulses that often become your choices and your actions.

The defining feature of System 2, in this story, is that its operations are effortful, and one of its main characteristics is laziness, a reluctance to invest more effort than is strictly necessary. As a consequence, the thoughts and actions that System 2 believes it has chosen are often

The psychologist Paul Slovic has proposed an affect heuristic in which people let their likes and dislikes determine their beliefs about the world.

psychologist Paul Bloom, writing in The Atlantic in 2005, presented the provocative claim that our inborn readiness to separate physical and intentional causality explains the near universality of religious beliefs.

As we navigate our lives, we normally allow ourselves to be guided by impressions and feelings, and the confidence we have in our intuitive beliefs and preferences is usually justified. But not always. We are often confident even when we are wrong, and an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are.

Zu viele Leute hielten ihre Gewohnheiten für Grundregeln der Welt.

The principles that explain why some genes are transmitted more successfully than others also explain why some beliefs are transmitted more successfully than others.

Es saludable analizar críticamente nuestra visión de mundo, el tejido de creencias que constituye el marco de referencia desde el cual evaluamos nuestro entorno. Es una hiedra espinosa enraizada en nuestra mente, que se adhiere a nuestro ser interceptando la luz, y que necesita de un jardinero que sepa dónde cortar. Ha crecido alimentada por el continuo proceso de educación formal e informal que determina nuestra panera de pensar y actuar.

G. K. Chesterton, an English journalist who wrote extensively about his Christian beliefs in the early part of the twentieth

You are your stories. You are the product of all the stories you have heard and lived—and of many that you have never heard. They have shaped how you see yourself, the world, and your place in it.

And I know that the younger generation is doing things that are so ingenious. And for them it's not a matter of a political belief or an environmental stance. It's really just common sense.

There was only one trial of Galileo, and yet it seems there were a thousand—the suppression of science by religion, the defense of individualism against authority, the clash between revolutionary and establishment, the challenge of radical new discoveries to ancient beliefs, the struggle against intolerance for freedom of thought and freedom of speech.