ANT210H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: James Alcock, Parapsychology, Precognition
Document Summary
Still, we can formulate a general outline of what might constitute a weird thing as we consider specific examples. For those of us in the business of debunking bunk and explaining the unexplained, this is what i call the. My easy answer will seem somewhat paradoxical at first: smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons. The facts of the world come to us through the colored filters of the theories, hypotheses, hunches, biases, and prejudices we have accumulated through our lifetime. We then sort through the body of data and select those most confirming what we already believe, and ignore or rationalize away those that are disconfirming. Most of us most of the time come to our beliefs for a variety of reasons having little to do with empirical evidence and logical reasoning (that, presumably, smart people are better at employing).
