Why Do I Trust This?
Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved? — Carl Sagan
Human beings are fallible.
Very smart people make costly errors all the time. And sometimes they get repeated.
They happen in all fields: engineering, biology, finance, business, etc. That’s not to belittle human accomplishments. The progress we have made as a human race is miraculous.
Having said that, we need to keep in mind that we have psychological flaws that determine our behavior and that we’re, well human. We make mistakes all the time.
As the Russian proverb goes, trust, but verify.
To give you a simple example, let’s say you’re reading a book on sleep from a neuroscientist, one that has taught at Harvard Medical School. The book also happens to be an international bestseller.
You’d be inclined to let your skeptical guard down and defer, right?
It just so happens that this book is real (Why We Sleep), it has a lot of stellar reviews on Amazon and… it’s riddled with major errors that has since become publicized.
