On Being Certain
Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not, Inspired By Science-Based Medicine’s Harriet Hall
I came upon this wonderful post over at Science-Based Medicine:
Neurologist Robert A. Burton, MD has written a gem of a book: On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not. His thesis is that “Certainty and similar states of ‘knowing what we know’ arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason.” Your certainty that you are right has nothing to do with how right you are.
Within 24 hours of the Challenger explosion, psychologist Ulric Neisser had 106 students write down how they’d heard about the disaster, where they were, what they were doing at the time, etc. Two and a half years later he asked them the same questions. 25% gave strikingly different accounts, more than half were significantly different, and only 10% had all the details correct. Even after re-reading their original accounts, most of them were confident that their false memories were true. One student commented, “That’s my handwriting, but that’s not what happened.”
Dr. Phil usually comes across as quite reasonable and logical, and has even advised against using psychics on previous shows. At the start of this particular episode, he claimed to be a skeptic in matters of the paranormal. And Dr. Phil did indeed question some of Van Praagh’s assertions-but this was done rather light-heartedly, while still promoting Van Praagh’s book.
You may have heard this one before. Some say the safest place to be during a lightning storm is in a car because of the rubber tires because the rubber tires will effectively 
This argument, commonly known as 
Which religion is right for you? Does that right religion just happen to be the one your family believes? Maybe, but maybe not; a new study shows that almost half of American adults leave their childhood faith to change religions or abandon religious affiliation altogether.
