What you believe to be true is influenced by how much you want it to be true. The more something helps you deal with uncertainty, the lower the bar is for you to believe it’s true.

We are built with an almost infinite capacity to believe things because the beliefs are advantageous for us to hold, rather than because they are even remotely related to the truth.

There’s a thing in the legal world called Gibson’s Law, which states that, “For every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD.”

People can be led to believe and defend almost anything, because the goal of a belief is often not to discover what’s true – it’s to justify past actions, or protect your reputation, or provide hope when it’s lacking, or to maximize your income, or to signal to others that you belong to the tribe.

Memories of past events are filtered. You keep what makes sense and throw out the confusing details.

The dangerous thing is that beliefs based on experience seem evidence-based. But when we’re overwhelmed with observations in a complex world, we cherry-pick the most attractive evidence to appease our simple, story-loving minds.

It is far easier to fool yourself into believing a falsehood than admit a mistake. Changing your mind is rarer than it should be, leading us to cling to false beliefs.

when you change your mind you can feel like all the hard-fought effort you put into establishing your previous beliefs was wasted.

when you change your mind, moving from one belief to another, it can be hard to take the new belief seriously – changing beliefs offers proof that the new belief may be short-lived, especially in the eyes of others.

A lot of times we’re not interested in truth – we’re interested in the elimination of uncertainty, and that fact alone causes us to believe things that have little relation to reality.