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Facts Versus Beliefs
Why we humans reliably ignore reality in favor of adhering to simple ideas
“I don’t care what the facts are! I know what I know!”
How many times have you heard statements of this kind? For all that we humans love to self-aggrandize and imagine ourselves to be reasoning animals, the evidence is clear: countless studies over the last seventy years have shown that we generally act first and then invent reasons to explain our behavior only after commencing the action itself.
That is to say, we live inside a mental world of perpetual self-delusion. Reason plays little or no part whatsoever in the realm of human activity. And that’s not surprising. We evolved under conditions of scarcity. Meanwhile, when the human brain makes one of its rare attempts to perform thinking tasks it burns up around 30% of the body’s blood glucose. That’s energy that was far more frequently required to power muscles, either to escape from predators or to forage for food. In our evolutionary past, calories were scarce and uncertain and so we evolved to avoid as much as possible making unnecessary efforts. For the most part, thinking was an unnecessary effort.
This strategy worked well for us throughout 98% of our evolutionary history and permitted us to survive despite not being particularly fast, not having powerful muscles or bone-crushing jaws, and not…
