We build our understanding of the emotion... - Will Storr - Quotes.Pub

We build our understanding of the emotional world through the myths and legends of our culture. We are all, in part, made of fairy tales.

Fairy tale Quotes Legends Quotes Story Quotes

Will Storr Quotes

We are incapable: ever since Eve's crime, we've been born this way - outlaw failures, fucking and sinning with callous abandon as the planet we've been given withers around us.

Whenever and whatever happened to alter the boy's view of the world so radically, from the moment that it happened, Mackay's story becomes one of subservience to the contrary will within him that he calls God.

The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science Quotes

First and foremost, health and safety,’ she said. ‘If a UFO lands, you must wait until it’s stopped completely before approaching. Only invite the ETs to come closer if it is absolutely safe to do so. If anyone gets zapped, the first-aid kit is in the back of my tent.

The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science Quotes

We are betrayed by our maps of salience. They plot our narratives, identify our enemies and then coat them in distorting layer of loathing and dread. We feel that hunch - withdraw - and then conduct a post factum search for evidence that justifies it. We are motivated to fight our foes because we are emotional about them, but emotion is the territorial scent-mark of irrationality.

Emotion Quotes Evidence Quotes Irrationality Quotes

the only thing necessary to trigger tribal behaviour in humans is the creation of two completely arbitrary groups. Leave them alone in a room and watch it all begin:

The Heretics Quotes

we go through our social lives convinced that everything we are saying, doing and feeling is being closely examined by those around us even though, in reality, they are all preoccupied with themselves, equally convinced the spotlight is on them.

The Heretics Quotes

But once more, here I am - confronted with the counter-intuitive notion that intelligence is no protection against strange beliefs.

The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science Quotes

I know that I am not right about everything, and yet I am simultaneously convinced that I am. I believe these two things completely, and yet they are in catastrophic logical opposition to each other.

The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science Quotes

People say, “I wouldn’t have done that.” But they haven’t been exposed to any of the things, culturally, that might have made them do it. And the warning I take is that the number of people in a group who will stand out against these cultural forces are much smaller than you think, and you’re probably not one of them. In fact, I think you can probably tell if you are because you’re pretty bolshie already. If you’ve got a good career, and you’re pretty sociable and you’re going up the hierarchy and all the rest of it, where are you going to get your sudden revolutionary spurt from?

The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science Quotes

Intelligence is no protection against strange beliefs.

The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science Quotes

Exposure to a mixed body of evidence made both sides even more convinced of the fundamental soundness of their original beliefs.' Confirmation bias is profoundly human and it is appalling. When new information leads to an increase in ignorance, it is the opposite of learning, the death of wisdom.

Bias Quotes The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science Quotes

By the time you have reached adulthood, your brain has decided how the world works–how a table looks and feels, how liquids and authority figures behave, how scary are rats. It has made countless billions of little insights and decisions. It has made its mind up. From then on in, its treatment of any new information that runs counter to those views can sometimes be brutal. Your brain is surprisingly reluctant to change its mind. Rather than going through the difficulties involved in rearranging itself to reflect the truth, it often prefers to fool you. So it distorts. It forgets. It projects. It lies.

The Heretics Quotes

We typically have a bias that tells us we are less susceptible to bias than everyone else.

The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science Quotes

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