Ben Domenech Quotes

Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover will prove. And if the Thinker thinks passionately enough, the Prover will prove the thought so conclusively that you will never talk a person out of such a belief, even if it is something as remarkable as the notion that there is a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft ("GOD") who will spend all eternity torturing people who do not believe in his religion.

Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking processes attempt to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organizing our life.

…the majority of men do not think in order to know the truth, but in order to assure themselves that the life which they lead, and which is agreeable and habitual to them, is the one which coincides with the truth.

The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it.

But people as a rule believe only what they want to believe, and if you tell them anything else they'll call you a trouble-maker and get rid of you and never give you your job back, even if what you said is proved spot on right by time.

The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.

Your job as a scientist is to figure out how you're fooling yourself.

Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.

The average man believes a thing first, and then searches for proof to bolster his opinion

Men first make up their minds (and the smaller the mind the sooner made up), and then seek for the reasons; and if they chance to stumble upon a good reason, of course they do not reject it. But though they are right, they are only right by chance.

When people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.

The key to all fanatical beliefs is that they are self-confirming....(some beliefs are) fanatical not because they are "false", but because they are expressed in such a way that they can never be shown to be false.

This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.

To hold an idea and convince ourselves we arrived at it rationally, we go in search of evidence to support our view.

From time to time, everyone distorts. We all tend to believe what supports our side of the question and doubt what weakens it. When we are under stress, we tend to believe what we need to believe.

This is in us: a certain sense of denial, a certain sense of groupthink. This is not something that sits on one party line or the other. We've seen it in all permutations throughout history, and at the core of it is a certain insistence that what we want to be true is now true, and what we don't like is now false.

You can convince yourself of just about anything when you want to believe a conspiracy theory.

In the long run my observations have convinced me that some men, reasoning preposterously, first establish some conclusion in their minds which, either because of its being their own or because of their having received it from some person who has their entire confidence, impresses them so deeply that one finds it impossible ever to get it out of their heads.

True believers just don't see things the way they are, because if they did, they wouldn't be true believers anymore.

It is in the nature of human beings to bend information in the direction of desired conclusions.

We see what we want to see, and observation conforms to hypothesis.

People who believe their unquestioned thoughts cannot see what is obvious and directly in front of their faces at all times, because they are invested in what they believe to be true. As long as they live out of an unquestioned mind, they must continue to argue with what they believe is happening rather than the reality of what is really happening.

Ever since I learnt about confirmation bias I've started seeing it everywhere.