The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe

Introduction

The essence of skepticism --> How to we know what to believe and what to doubt?
How do we know anything?
Things this book aims to teach:
- How our brains fail us
- How we prefer simple/clean stories
- How bad our memory is
- How biases impact our thinking
- Failures of society
- Imperfections in the institutions of science, learning, and journalism
Cynicism is cheap
- It holds back progress
Skeptics combine science, philosophy, psychology, and all the flaws/biases of being human to evaluate claims and beliefs

See also: Critical thinking
Term was coined by Carl Sagan
Approach to knowledge that prefers beliefs and conclusions that are reliable and valid over anything comforting or convenient
Scientific skeptics rigorously apply science to reason about their thoughts and opinions
Different from philosophical skepticism
- Philosophical skepticism is a position of almost permanent doubt
  - Can we actually know anything?
  - What is the nature of knowledge itself?
Start with doubt and try to separate truth from fantasy, wishful thinking, biases, and tradition
Tools used to parse reality:
- Respect for knowledge and truth
  - Try to be as reality-based as possible
  - Subject claims to a rigorous process of evaluation
  - The world is knowable due to the laws of nature
- Promotion of science
  - Science is the only legitimate way to investigate and understand the natural world
  - We must defend and spread the use and understanding of scientific methods
- Promotion of reason and critical thinking
- Science vs pseudoscience
  - Seek to expose pseudoscience
  - You must understand how science can go wrong
- Ideological freedom / free inquiry
  - Science and reason can only flourish when ideology is not imposed
- Neuropsychological humility
  - We must know how we deceive ourselves, the limits of our perception and memory, the biases and fallacies of our cognition, and how to mitigate all these flaws
- Consumer protection
  - Expose fraud and deception
  - Combat misinformation

See also: Perception, Self-deception
Memories are constructed from our imperfect perceptions filtered through beliefs, biases, and morphed over time
- They are the stories we tell ourselves
We give preference to things we perceive that reinforce continuity
Declarative memory
- Explicit memory
- Factual knowledge stored in long-term memory
- Consciously recalled
- Episodic memory
  - Autobiographical memory
  - Memory of events in our lives
- Semantic memory
  - Factual memory about the world
  - Two components stored separately
    - Truth status of something (is it true or false?)
    - The source of the memory
Procedural memory
- Implicit memory
- Automatic
- Involves learning to do motor tasks (throwing a ball, etc.)
It's always good to be skeptical of our own memories

Memories are flawed during construction and get worse over time
Recalling a memory involves reconstructing and updating it
"Lost in the mall" study
- People were given a pamphlet that contained memories from childhood
- 3/4 memories were true
- 29% "remembered" the false story with vivid detail
Many adults can be convinced they committed a nonexistent crime after just three hours of police interrogation
We often contaminate each other's memories if we discuss them
- Court room witnesses can't meet because of this

Perceptions are not a passive recording of the world
- Optimized for functionality
Your brain "patches" blindspots in your vision
- Only the fovea records images in details
  - The fovea is very small
Our brains project movement into the future to account for delays in processing time
Alien hand syndrome
Inattentional blindness
- When someone fails to notice an unexpected stimulus in plain sight
- The gorilla basketball video
Change blindness
- Colour Changing Card Trick

Coincidence
Tendency to interpret events as if caused by a conscious agent instead of natural forces or chaotic events
- Often leads to conspiracy theories
May be important to the development of religion

Hypnagogia
Often paired with sleep paralysis
- ~8% of people experience sleep paralysis
"maere" is Old English for "female demon who suffocates people in their sleep"
- This is where "nightmare" is derived from

The biases process of defending something we are emotionally attached to
Triggered by cognitive dissonance
We need to make concerted effort when thinking about things related to ideology
- Factual beliefs about the world shouldn't be a source of identity (they may need to be updated/changed)
Always remind yourself that the people disagreeing with you are people
- They have reasons to believe what they do just like you do
- Everyone has their own narrative