- Chemtrails
Reason for rejection: Persistent contrails are documented in photographs, films, and scientific papers from the 1940s onwards. What has changed is the volume of air traffic, which makes them more visible, and the existence of the internet,…
- Flat Earth
Confirmation Bias
- Ghosts
Belief in ghosts remains common (roughly a third to a half of adults in UK and US surveys) because the brain is a pattern-detecting, agency-attributing machine, and the cost of a false positive ("something is there") was historically lower…
- Prayer
Why prayer feels answered. Most things prayed for are things that often happen anyway: the illness that remits, the job that comes through, the lost keys. Those are remembered; the rest are filed under "wait" (Confirmation Bias, Regression…
- Psychics and Mediums
How it is done. A reading consists of statements that are true of almost everyone (Forer Effect), rapid-fire guesses that the sitter completes ("I'm getting a J, John, James, a father figure?"), the quiet dropping of misses and the loud re…
- Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism
Reliability is not all or nothing, and the pattern of our unreliability is what evolution predicts. Our faculties are good at medium-sized objects, faces, and social threat, and bad at probability, large numbers, the very small, and anythi…
- Experiential Argument
Confirmation Bias
- Eyewitness Testimony Argument
Confirmation Bias
- Astrology and Tarot
Why it persists. Horoscopes are written to be unfalsifiable (Popper's Razor): a prediction that "a challenge at work may test your patience" cannot fail. Readings are flattering, they are about the most interesting subject in the world to…
- Flat Earth
Confirmation Bias
- Don Quixote
The oldest book on this list and the best portrait of a mind that has arranged its perceptions around a belief. Quixote is not stupid; he is intelligent, learned and consistent, and every piece of evidence against his world is absorbed int…
- How to Have Impossible Conversations
The second problem is evidence. The book presents its methods as if they were established, but the support is anecdote, a handful of studies on motivational interviewing in clinical settings, and the authors' own experience. There is very…
- Made in America
The companion to The Etymologicon on this list, and the same lesson in a different accent: words carry their history and tell you nothing about how they must be used now. It is also a cheerful corrective to the kind of cultural confirmatio…
- Thinking, Fast and Slow
Confirmation Bias
- Cold reading
The main tools: Barnum statements that fit almost anyone (Forer Effect); "shotgunning", a rapid spray of names, initials and conditions from which the sitter picks the hit; the rainbow ruse, which attributes a trait and its opposite at onc…
- Street Epistemology
Confirmation Bias
- Jordan Peterson vs 20 Atheists -Surrounded - Jubilee
It is also possible that these example, when encountered, are more memorable to Peterson as the fit with his existing beliefs; and example of Confirmation Bias
- Arthur Conan Doyle
Confirmation Bias
- Daniel Kahneman
Confirmation Bias
- Forer Effect
It works because such statements are true of almost everyone, because people search their memory for confirming instances (Confirmation Bias), and because being described feels like being understood. It is stronger when the subject believe…
- Out group Homogeneity
Confirmation Bias
- Pareidolia
Confirmation Bias
- Survivorship Bias
Confirmation Bias
- Survivorship Bias
Confirmation Bias
- Cherry-picking
Confirmation Bias
- Appeal to Popularity
Universal belief is a reason to ask why people believe, and the answer is often available: Hyperactive Agency Detection, Pareidolia, Confirmation Bias, and upbringing between them explain most of the beliefs that every culture shares.
- Texas Sharpshooter
Closely related to Confirmation Bias, Survivorship Bias and Cherry-picking, and to the Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc error of inferring cause from sequence.
- Occam's Broom
Confirmation Bias
- Steelmanning
It protects me from Confirmation Bias. The weak version of the other side is the version I would prefer to be true, and the preference is the warning sign.
