Erroneous Belief Quotes

Only if you are afraid of looking foolish, and I would have looked far more foolish if I persisted with an erroneous belief.' Eragon said. Why, little one, you just said something wise!'Saphira teased.

It is right that we should stand by and act on our principles; but not right to hold them in obstinate blindness, or retain them when proved to be erroneous.

The criminal misuse of time was pointing out the mistakes. Catching them―noticing them―that was essential. If you did not in your own mind distinguish between useful and erroneous information, then you were not learning at all, you were merely replacing ignorance with false belief, which was no improvement. The part of the man's statement that was true, however, was about the uselessness of speaking up. If I know that the teacher is wrong, and say nothing, then I remain the only one who knows, and that gives me an advantage over those who believe the teacher.

If you did not in your own mind distinguish between useful and erroneous information, then you were not learning at all, you were merely replacing ignorance with false belief, which was no improvement.

Could a machine ever be said to have made its own decisions? Could a machine have beliefs? Could a machine make mistakes? Could a machine believe it made its own decisions? Could a machine erroneously attribute free will to itself? Could a machine come up with ideas that had not been programmed into it in advance? Could creativity emerge from a set of fixed rules? Are we – even the most creative among us – but passive slaves to the laws of physics that govern our neurons?

Although they had been honed like hawks toward the guns since early childhood, Cuthbert and Alain still carried an erroneous belief common to many boys their age: that their elders were also their betters, at least in such matters as planning and wit; they actually believed that grownups knew what they were doing.

people often make correct predictions on the basis of erroneous beliefs and defective prediction strategies.

Only if you are afraid of looking foolish, and I would have looked far more foolish if I persisted with an erroneous belief.

When the web started, I used to get really grumpy with people because they put my poems up. They put my stories up. They put my stuff up on the web. I had this belief, which was completely erroneous, that if people put your stuff up on the web and you didn’t tell them to take it down, you would lose your copyright, which actually, is simply not true. And I also got very grumpy because I felt like they were pirating my stuff, that it was bad. And then I started to notice that two things seemed much more significant. One of which was… places where I was being pirated, particularly Russia where people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading around into the world, I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated. Then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in Russia, it would sell more and more copies. I thought this was fascinating, and I tried a few experiments. Some of them are quite hard, you know, persuading my publisher for example to take one of my books and put it out for free. We took “American Gods,” a book that was still selling and selling very well, and for a month they put it up completely free on their website. You could read it and you could download it. What happened was sales of my books, through independent bookstores, because that’s all we were measuring it through, went up the following month three hundred percent. I started to realize that actually, you’re not losing books. You’re not losing sales by having stuff out there. When I give a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people say, “Well, what about the sales that I’m losing through having stuff copied, through having stuff floating out there?” I started asking audiences to just raise their hands for one question. Which is, I’d say, “Okay, do you have a favorite author?” They’d say, “Yes.” and I’d say, “Good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book, put up your hands.” And then, “Anybody who discovered your favorite author by walking into a bookstore and buying a book raise your hands.” And it’s probably about five, ten percent of the people who actually discovered an author who’s their favorite author, who is the person who they buy everything of. They buy the hardbacks and they treasure the fact that they got this author. Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it, and that’s how they found their favorite author. And I thought, “You know, that’s really all this is. It’s people lending books. And you can’t look on that as a loss of sale. It’s not a lost sale, nobody who would have bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free.” What you’re actually doing is advertising. You’re reaching more people, you’re raising awareness. Understanding that gave me a whole new idea of the shape of copyright and of what the web was doing. Because the biggest thing the web is doing is allowing people to hear things. Allowing people to read things. Allowing people to see things that they would never have otherwise seen. And I think, basically, that’s an incredibly good thing.

The spectacular incident of the stones serves as a kind of red herring in this respect. Many researchers have adopted the erroneous belief that where there has been one incident, there must be others. To offer another analogy, this is like dispatching a crew of meteor watchers to Crater National Park because a huge asteroid struck there two million years ago.

Preference, n. A sentiment, or frame of mind, induced by the erroneous belief that one thing is better than another.

The capacity for erroneous belief is very great, especially where it coincides with convenience.

Cuthbert and Alain still carried an erroneous belief common to many boys their age: that their elders were also their betters, at least in such matters as planning and wit; they actually believed that grownups knew what they were doing.

If our ideas and beliefs are held with an awareness of abstracting, they can be changed if found to be inadequate or erroneous. But if they are held without an awareness of abstracting-if our mental maps are believed to be the territory-they are prejudices. As teachers or parents, we cannot help passing on to the young a certain amount of misinformation and error, however hard we may try not to. But if we teach them to be habitually conscious of the process of abstraction, we give them the means by which to free themselves from whatever erroneous notions we may have inadvertently taught them.

The solution is not to encourage ever more people to become famous, but to put greater efforts into encouraging a higher level of politeness and consideration for everyone, in families and communities, in workplaces, in politics, in the media, at all income levels, especially modest ones. A healthy society will give up on the understandable but erroneous belief that fame might guarantee that truly valuable goal: the kindness of strangers.

A person's conclusions can only be as solid as the information on which they are based. Thus, a person who is exposed to almost nothing but inaccurate information on a given subject almost inevitably develops an erroneous belief, a belief that can seem to be "an irresistible product" of the individual's (secondhand) experience.

I thought: What did I do to deserve these tragedies? This is too much. This is grossly unfair. I still think that, sometimes, even though I know full well I am exemplifying the just-world fallacy, which is the erroneous belief that the world is fair. We are socialized to think that. It makes the world feel more predictable if we believe good behavior is rewarded and bad behavior punished. The problem is that we then subconsciously believe people who suffer must deserve it. It’s what allows us to look away, to turn the television off. People sometimes say that everything happens for a reason. No. No, it does not. There was no reason for these terrible things to happen together. No reason at all. They just did.

But where is it written in the Gospel that we are instructed to hate anyone, however erroneous their beliefs might be?

know full well I am exemplifying the just-world fallacy, which is the erroneous belief that the world is fair. We are socialized to think that. It makes the world feel more predictable if we believe good behavior is rewarded and bad behavior punished. The problem is that we then subconsciously believe people who suffer must deserve it. It’s what allows us to look away, to turn the television off. People sometimes say that everything happens for a reason. No. No, it does not. There was no reason for these terrible things to happen together. No reason at all. They just did.

Science is progressive and self-correcting: no significantly erroneous conclusions or false hypotheses can be sustained for long, as newer observations will ultimately knock down incorrect constructs. But over a long period of time, a consistent set of observations sometimes emerges that leads to a new framework of understanding. That framework is then given a much more substantive description, and is called a “theory”—the theory of gravitation, the theory of relativity, or the germ theory, for instance.

The recurrent and sadly erroneous belief that effortless enrichment is an entitlement associated with what is thought to be exceptional financial perspicacity and wisdom is not something that yields to legislative remedy.

Sometimes I think the urge to believe in our own worldview is our most powerful intellectual imperative, the mind's equivalent of feeding, fighting, and fornicating. People will eagerly twist facts into wholly unrecognizable shapes to fit them into existing suppositions. They'll ignore the obvious, select the irrelevant, and spin it all into a tapestry of self-deception, solely to justify an idea, no matter how impoverished or self-destructive.

...recent research suggests that presenting people with proof that their beliefs are incorrect doesn't change their minds. Instead, it actually reinforces their erroneous beliefs, as they work hard to defend them against fact and logic.

The word treatment is usually applied to a prayer that is made for some specific purpose, as distinct from a general prayer, which is really a visit with God. You must remember that a treatment is a definite practical action, having a definite object and a definite beginning and end. It is in fact a surgical operation on the soul. Let us suppose that you decide to heal a certain difficulty by prayer. You know that your difficulty must be caused by some negative thought charged with fear and located in the subconscious mind. You therefore turn to God, and remind yourself of His goodness, His limitless power, and His care for you. As you work the fear will begin to dissolve, and the awareness of the Truth corrects the erroneous beliefs themselves. Thank God for the healing that you believe will come—and then you keep your thought off the matter until you feel led, after an interval, to treat again. He sent his word, and healed them … (Psalm 107:20).

This is one of the reasons that the organized religions do not inspire me with confidence. Which leaders of the major faiths acknowledge that their beliefs might be incomplete or erroneous and establish institutes to uncover possible doctrinal deficiencies?

PREFERENCE, n. A sentiment, or frame of mind, induced by the erroneous belief that one thing is better than another. An ancient philosopher, expounding his conviction that life is no better than death, was asked by a disciple why, then, he did not die. "Because," he replied, "death is no better than life.

It doubtless seems highly paradoxical to assert that Time is unreal, and that all statements which involve its reality are erroneous. Such an assertion involves a far greater departure from the natural position of mankind than is involved in the assertion of the unreality of Space or of the unreality of Matter. So decisive a breach with that natural position is not to be lightly accepted. And yet in all ages the belief in the unreality of time has proved singularly attractive.

The only abyss that exists is the demonic sphere of consciousness created by the erroneous ideas and beliefs of the collective ego.

you have done any piece of work incorrectly, the very first step toward getting it right is to undo the wrong, and begin again from that point. We have believed wrong about God and about ourselves. We have believed that God was angry with us and that we were sinners who ought to be afraid of Him. We have believed that sickness and poverty and other troubles are evil things put here by this same God to torture us in some way into serving Him and loving Him. We have believed that we have pleased God best when we became so absolutely subdued by our troubles as to be patiently submissive to them all, not even trying to rise out of them or to overcome them. All this is false, entirely false! And the first step toward freeing ourselves from our troubles is to get rid of our erroneous beliefs about God and about ourselves.

There is humility in confession. A recognition of flaws. To hear myself say out loud these shameful secrets meant I acknowledged my flaws. I also for the first time was given the opportunity to contextualize anew the catalogue of beliefs and prejudices, simply by exposing them to another, for the first time hearing the words ‘Yes, but have you looked at it this way?’ This was a helpful step in gaining a new perspective on my past, and my past was a significant proportion of who I believed myself to be. It felt like I had hacked into my own past. Unravelled all the erroneous and poisonous information I had unconsciously lived with and lived by and with necessary witness, the accompaniment of another man, reset the beliefs I had formed as a child and left unamended through unnecessary fear. Suddenly my fraught and freighted childhood became reasonable and soothed. ‘My mum was doing her best, so was my dad.’ Yes, people made mistakes but that’s what humans do, and I am under no obligation to hoard these errors and allow them to clutter my perception of the present. Yes, it is wrong that I was abused as a child but there is no reason for me to relive it, consciously or unconsciously, in the way I conduct my adult relationships. My perceptions of reality, even my own memories, are not objective or absolute, they are a biased account and they can be altered. It is possible to reprogram your mind. Not alone, because a tendency, a habit, an addiction will always reassert by its own invisible momentum, like a tide. With this program, with the support of others, and with this mysterious power, this new ability to change, we achieve a new perspective, and a new life.

No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree. The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law. These two evils are of equal consequence, and it would be difficult for a person to choose between them. The nature of law is to maintain justice. This is so much the case that, in the minds of the people, law and justice are one and the same thing. There is in all of us a strong disposition to believe anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are “just” because law makes them so. Thus, in order to make plunder appear just and sacred to many consciences, it is only necessary for the law to decree and sanction it. Slavery, restrictions, and monopoly find defenders not only among those who profit from them but also among those who suffer from them.

In general children from low-income families are at risk of being failed by schools because of the erroneous belief that their parents lack ambition for them. A focus on the need for aspirations as widely set is necessary for closing the achievement gap between marginalized and privileged people. Yet an environment where students may not see themselves represented in person or on the page, what exactly are they inspiring to? Who sets those standards and are they achievable in the wider world without culturally sensitive and competent teachers?

The chief difficulty in regard to knowledge does not arise over derivative knowledge, but over intuitive knowledge. So long as we are dealing with derivative knowledge, we have the test of intuitive knowledge to fall back upon. But in regard to intuitive beliefs, it is by no means easy to discover any criterion by which to distinguish some as true and others as erroneous. In this question it is scarcely possible to reach any very precise result: all our knowledge of truths is infected with some degree of doubt, and a theory which ignored this fact would be plainly wrong.

Whatever we believe does, for us, in very fact exist. Our beliefs may be erroneous from the point of view of a happier belief, but this does not alter the fact that for ourselves our beliefs are our realities, and these realities must continue until some ground is found for a change in belief.

The criminal misuse of time was pointing out the mistakes. Catching them — noticing them — that was essential. If you did not in your own mind distinguish between useful and erroneous information, then you were not learning at all, you were merely replacing ignorance with false belief, which was no improvement.

Getting outside in winter is essential. The belief that we can't enjoy ourselves outdoors is largely responsible for the idea that winter is limiting; this perspective makes the world feel out of reach. But this view is erroneous and self-fulfilling. If we remain cooped up, we will feel winter's limitations, and our mood will drop, no matter how hygge we make it inside.

Of all the erroneous and superstitious beliefs of mankind that have supposedly been surmounted there is not one whose residues do not live on among us to-day in the lower strata of civilized peoples or even in the highest strata of cultural society. What has once come to life clings tenaciously to its existence. One feels inclined to doubt sometimes whether the dragons of primaeval days are really extinct.

Especially has the State been successful in recent centuries in instilling fear of other State rulers. Since the land area of the globe has been parceled out among particular States, one of the basic doctrines of the State was to identify itself with the territory it governed. Since most men tend to love their homeland, the identification of that land and its people with the State was a means of making natural patriotism work to the State’s advantage. If “Ruritania” was being attacked by “Walldavia,” the first task of the State and its intellectuals was to convince the people of Ruritania that the attack was really upon them and not simply upon the ruling caste. In this way, a war between rulers was converted into a war between peoples, with each people coming to the defense of its rulers in the erroneous belief that the rulers were defending them.

This was a helpful step in gaining a new perspective on my past, and my past was a significant proportion of who I believed myself to be. It felt like I had hacked into my own past. Unravelled all the erroneous and poisonous information I had unconsciously lived with and lived by and with necessary witness, the accompaniment of another man, reset the beliefs I had formed as a child and left unamended through unnecessary fear. Suddenly my fraught and freighted childhood became reasonable and soothed. ‘My mum was doing her best, so was my dad.’ Yes, people made mistakes but that’s what humans do, and I am under no obligation to hoard these errors and allow them to clutter my perception of the present. Yes, it is wrong that I was abused as a child but there is no reason for me to relive it, consciously or unconsciously, in the way I conduct my adult relationships. My perceptions of reality, even my own memories, are not objective or absolute, they are a biased account and they can be altered.

of activity in different sorts of substrate – organic, electronic, or otherwise? Could a machine communicate with humans on an unlimited set of topics through fluent use of a human language? Could a language-using machine give the appearance of understanding sentences and coming up with ideas while in truth being as devoid of thought and as empty inside as a nineteenth-century adding machine or a twentieth-century word processor? How might we distinguish between a genuinely conscious and intelligent mind and a cleverly constructed but hollow language-using facade? Are understanding and reasoning incompatible with a materialistic, mechanistic view of living beings? Could a machine ever be said to have made its own decisions? Could a machine have beliefs? Could a machine make mistakes? Could a machine believe it made its own decisions? Could a machine erroneously attribute free will to itself? Could a machine come up with ideas that had not been programmed into it in advance? Could creativity emerge from a set of fixed rules? Are we – even the

The disastrous idea that everything comes to the human psyche from outside and that it is born a tabula rasa is responsible for the erroneous belief that under normal circumstances the individual is in perfect order. He then looks to the State for salvation, and makes society pay for his inefficiency. He thinks the meaning of existence would be discovered if food and clothing were delivered to him gratis on his own doorstep, or if everybody possessed an automobile. Such are the puerilities that rise up in place of an unconscious shadow and keep it unconscious. As a result of these prejudices, the individual feels totally dependent on his environment and loses all capacity for introspection. In this way his code of ethics is replaced by a knowledge of what is permitted or forbidden or ordered. How, under these circumstances, can one expect a soldier to subject an order received from a superior to ethical scrutiny? He has not yet made the discovery that he might be capable of spontaneous ethical impulses, and of performing them—even when no one is looking.

We believe some people are more special, more beautiful, more capable, more influential, more intelligent, more gifted, and have a greater capacity for good than others, often based on material possessions and outer appearances. At the root, that is why we are engaged in a struggle now in the Congress led by one group of people who truly believes their role is to defend the privileges of the elite. They defend tax breaks for the rich and ask for trillions in cuts to the safety nets that protect the middle class, the elderly, the sick, and the poor, because, in essence, they believe one group is more important than the other, more deserving than the other, and one contributes more good than the other. This is actually an illusion that is blind to the interdependence of the entire creation, which unites the weak with the strong, the privileged with the poor, and the ugly with the beautiful. All the inequities of our world are basically attempts to actualize this erroneous belief. And that is why there is turmoil, because we are in conflict with the truth, working to manifest an idea that is false.

In the old days, a liberal and a conservative (a “dove” and a “hawk,” say) got their data from one of three nightly news programs, a local paper, and a handful of national magazines, and were thus starting with the same basic facts (even if those facts were questionable, limited, or erroneous). Now each of us constructs a custom informational universe, wittingly (we choose to go to the sources that uphold our existing beliefs and thus flatter us) or unwittingly (our app algorithms do the driving for us). The data we get this way, pre-imprinted with spin and mythos, are intensely one-dimensional.

The church sought to lock society inside an echo chamber, allowing the spread only of those books that supported it, and people trust the church because almost all the books supported it. Even illitirate laypersons who didn't read books were still awed by recitations of these precious texts or expositions on those content. That's how the belief in a supposedly infallible superhuman technology like the New Testament led to the rise of an extremely powerful but fallible human institution like the Catholic Church that crushed all opposing views as 'erroneous' while allowing no one to question its own views.

The nature of law is to maintain justice. This is so much the case that, in the minds of the people, law and justice are one and the same thing. There is in all of us a strong disposition to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are 'just' because law makes them so. Thus, in order to make plunder appear just and sacred to many consciences, it is only necessary for the law to decree and sanction it. Slavery, restrictions, and monopoly find defenders not only among those who profit from them but also among those who suffer from them.

The nature of law is to maintain justice. This is so much the case that, in the minds of the people, law and justice are one and the same thing. There is in all of us a strong disposition to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are "just" because law makes them so. Thus, in order to make plunder appear just and sacred to many consciences, it is only necessary for the law to decree and sanction it. Slavery, restrictions, and monopoly find defenders not only among those who profit from them but also among those who suffer from them.

The Cistercian monks built simple and harmonious buildings out of the local limestone, with plain colours and few ornaments. The plans involved regular repetitions: the doors, windows and roof vaults wouldn’t vary much, so that the eye would easily find points of reference. Everything felt solid and enduring. Our natural human frailty was to contrast with the immemorial tone of the masonry. The monks were particularly keen on cloisters: covered walkways opening onto a quiet central square around which one could take de-stressing walks even on a rainy afternoon. The abbey at Cîteaux was just one of thousands built with similar intentions over a period of hundreds of years. It’s not an accident that architecture that sets out to create a contemplative and serene atmosphere can easily get labelled ‘monastic’, though in truth there’s nothing inherently religious or Christian about the pursuit of calm. The longing for serenity is a continuing, widespread human need, although the overtly religious background to abbeys and monasteries has an unfortunate association: making calm places erroneously seem as if they were inherently connected to a belief in Jesus. We need to rediscover the search for calm as a fundamental ambition of all architecture, not least for the buildings of our own harried times.

The erroneous belief that science eventually leads to the certainty of a definitive explanation carries with it the implication that it is a grave scientific mis- demeanour to have published some hypothesis that eventually is falsified. As a consequence scientists have often been loath to admit the falsification of such an hypothesis, and their lives may be wasted in defending the no longer defensible. Whereas according to Popper, falsification in whole or in part is the anticipated fate of all hypotheses, and we should even rejoice in the falsification of an hypo thesis that we have cherished as our brain-child.

TB: You have that period where he swore to himself that he’d never do it again. That was the end of it. That he felt he had it under control. It was the deceptive fashion, you might say, in which that psychopathology withdrew into this dormant stage that (led) the individual (to the) erroneous belief that he got it out of himself. (..) he would try to indulge himself in normal activities. (..) a state of mind, that was without the fear, the terror, and the harm. But slowly, the pressures, tensions, dissatisfactions which, in the very early stages, fueled this thing, had an effect. (Yet) it was more self-sustaining and didn’t need as much tension or as much disharmony externally as it had before. (..) this condition would generate its own needs.

There is a tendency in the academic study of magic to characterise magical belief and practice as irrational. This tendency is the result of a misrepresentation and misunderstanding of the nature of magic and of its historical role in Western culture. This misrepresentation is dependent upon two erroneous interpretations of magical practice and belief. The first interpretation is derived from a religious view of the world and the second from an apparent scientific view of the world. Early biblical religion provides us with some of the first written documents that deal with magic. In this forum magic is depicted as evil and forbidden yet, most importantly, it is portrayed as being quite real. This understanding of magic prevailed in the Middle Ages when unorthodox and deviant religious practices were classified by the Church as magical. The scientific viewpoint dismissed magic in favour of the more objectively verifiable applications of scientific practices and beliefs. The Age of Enlightenment furthered this early scientific approach by characterising magic not only as inefficient but also as irrational when placed under the scrutiny of newly established scientific and empirical methods. These two understandings of magic, one as terrible and real, and the other as inefficient and wrong, continue to taint the western comprehension of magic.

When we are dealing with complexity, blaming without proper analysis is one of the most common as well as one of the most perilous things an organization can do. And it rests, in part, on the erroneous belief that toughness and openness are in conflict with each other. They are not.

It is with a similar motive that efforts are being made by some, in connection with the New Law promulgated by Christ Our Lord. Assured that there exist few men who are entirely devoid of the religious sense, they seem to ground on this belief a hope that all nations, while differing indeed in religious matters, may yet without great difficulty be brought to fraternal agreement on certain points of doctrine which will form a common basis of the spiritual life. With this object, congresses, meetings and addresses are arranged, attended by a large concourse of hearers, where all without distinction, unbelievers of every kind as well as Christians, even those who unhappily have rejected Christ and denied His divine nature or mission, are invited to join in the discussion. Now, such efforts can meet with no kind of approval among Catholics. They presuppose the erroneous view that all religions are more or less good and praiseworthy, inasmuch as all give expression, under various forms, to that innate sense which leads men to God and to the obedient acknowledgement of His rule. Those who hold such a view are not only in error; they distort the true idea of religion, and thus reject it, falling gradually into naturalism and atheism. To favor this opinion, therefore, and to encourage such undertakings is tantamount to abandoning the religion revealed by God.

1.10 Four Kinds of Predictive Validity for Intelligence Tests 1.10.3. Everyday Life The importance of general intelligence in everyday life often is not obvious but it is profound. As Professor Earl Hunt has pointed out, if you are a college-educated person, it is highly likely that most of your friends and acquaintances are as well. When is the last time you invited someone to your home for dinner that was not college-educated? Professor Hunt calls this cognitive segregation and it is powerful in fostering the erroneous belief that everyone has a similar capacity or potential for reasoning about daily problems and issues. Most people with high g cannot easily imagine what daily life is like for a person with low g. [...] Consider some statistics comparing low and high IQ groups (low = 75–90; high = 110–125) on relative risk of several life events. For example, the odds of being a high school dropout are 133 times more likely if you’re in the low group. People in the low group are 10 times more at risk for being a chronic welfare recipient. The risk is 7.5 times greater in the low group for incarceration, and 6.2 times more for living in poverty. Unemployment and even divorce are a bit more likely in the low group. IQ even predicts traffic accidents. In the high IQ group, the death rate from traffic accidents is about 51 per 10,000 drivers, but in the low IQ group, this almost triples to about 147. This may be telling us that people with lower IQ, on average, have a poorer ability to assess risk and may take more chances when driving or performing other activities (Gottfredson, 2002; 2003b).

a war between rulers was converted into a war between peoples, with each people coming to the defense of its rulers in the erroneous belief that the rulers were defending them. This device of “nationalism” has only been successful, in Western civilization, in recent centuries; it was not too long ago that the mass of subjects regarded wars as irrelevant battles between various sets of nobles

If you did not in your own mind distinguish between useful and erroneous information, then you were not learning at all, you were merely replacing ignorance with false belief, which was no improvement. The

...even when the pragmatist knows what conditions must be met in order to accept a belief as true, he still has no protection from error and wishful thinking. One need only believe that he is in Australia, and he wants to confirm it. He establishes this verification condition: if one is in Australia, then he can find kangaroos running wild. He then goes outside, and being in the Rocky Mountains, he comes across bears roaming wild. However, he believes they are kangaroos. Thus, the verification condition is (albeit erroneously!) satisfied. What this indicates is that Dewey's pragmatism does not escape the traditional epistemological question known as the ego-centric predicament.

I do not believe that all Eastern traditions reputed to have an esoteric value actually contain such value, since it is very often only nominal values that are represented. The esoteric is, far more often than not, a highly extroverted exercise in advertisement, gimmicks, and reliance upon hoary associations yoked to simplistic or erroneous belief ... What constitutes a traditional esoteric psychology is likely to remain a subject for disagreement amongst various parties, but one might venture to suggest that it would be invisible and unobtrusive by comparison with less esoteric manifestations of great secrets and prerogatives.

One nice touch about Christy’s discovery was that it happened in Flagstaff, for it was there in 1930 that Pluto had been found in the first place. That seminal event in astronomy was largely to the credit of the astronomer Perdval Lowell. Lowell, who came from one of the oldest and wealthiest Boston families (the one in the famous ditty about Boston being the home of the bean and the cod, where Lowells spoke only to Cabots, while Cabots spoke only to God), endowed the famous observatory that bears his name, but is most indelibly remembered for his belief that Mars was covered with canals built by industrious Martians for purposes of conveying water from polar regions to the dry but productive lands nearer the equator. Lowell’s other abiding conviction was that there existed, somewhere out beyond Neptune, an undiscovered ninth planet dubbed, Planet X. Lowell based this belief on irregularities he detected in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, and devoted the last years of his life to trying to find the gassy giant he was certain was out there. Unfortunately, he died suddenly in 1916, at least partly exhausted by his quest and the search fell into abeyance while Lowell’s heirs squabbled over his estate. However, in 1929, partly as a way of deflecting attention away from the Mars canal saga (which by now had become a serious embarrassment), the Lowell Observatory directors decided to resume the search and to that end hired a young man from Kansas named Clyde Tombaugh. Tombaugh had no formal training as an astronomer, but he was diligent and he was astute, and after a year’s patient searching he somehow spotted Pluto, a faint point of light in a glittery firmament. It was a miraculous find, and what made it all the more striking was that the observations on which Lowell had predicted the existence of a planet beyond Neptune proved to be comprehensively erroneous. Tombaugh could see at once that the new planet was nothing like the massive gasball Lowell had postulated, but any reservations he or anyone else had about the character of the new planet were soon swept aside in the delirium that attended almost any big news story in that easily excited age. This was the first American-discovered planet and no one was going to be distracted by the thought that it was really just a distant icy dot. It was named Pluto at least partly because the first two letters made a monogram from Lowell’s initials. Lowell was posthumously hailed everywhere as a genius of the first order, and Tombaugh was largely forgotten, except among planetary astronomers, who tend to revere him.

I suppose every human, holding the belief, erroneous or not, that they are under some sort of strange elemental peril that threatens their very being, comes to that same conclusion. It’s why Costco exists. A five-gallon barrel of tartar sauce gives you the illusion that your own mortality is in your control.

Our slow brain is where we do all our conscious and analytic work. It provides us with the tools of logic and reflection. When we engage it, our slow brain operates as a reflective, analytic thinking tool; it can gather data, analyze it, apply the rules of logic, and come to new conclusions. Our slow brain can call on a number of beliefs or rules and use them to guide a decision. It also can override the intuitions of our fast brain, a process we know as willpower. Our slow brain can also learn to identify and ignore erroneous signals from our fast brain, which is how we demonstrate self-awareness and wisdom. Unfortunately, our slow brain isn’t always engaged.

We are not our thoughts, beliefs, and emotions because these are subject to our own erroneous projections. We are not our roles, our past, personality, accomplishments, body, hopes, or fears. These labels are all fragments of what we believe to be true now. They are subject to constant change and distortion by the ego-self and therefore are not Reality.

During the Protestant Reformation, the slogans sola Scriptura and prima Scriptura became popular to summarize this conviction; they mean Scripture alone is our highest authority. This should not be confused with solo Scriptura, which is the erroneous belief that truth is only to be found in Scripture and nowhere else. Scripture itself tells us that God reveals truth to us in such things as creation and our consciences, but that the beliefs we may subscribe to from such forms of lesser revelation are to be tested by Scripture.

But while he wasn’t shy about correcting their erroneous interpretations of Scripture, there is no indication that Jesus ever thought his fellow Jews to have too high a view of Scripture. And if they had been wrong on such an essential matter, he would not have gone along with the flow. He would have corrected their beliefs about the Bible just as he chastised them for other “doctrines of men.

Pseudodoxia was a valuable source of this kind of information. Especially valuable was its resistance to popular myth. Yet one of its defining traits is that it gives space to the very myths and misconceptions it aims to explode, and its most interesting part—certainly for the modern reader, and perhaps also for Johnson—is not its defeat of erroneous beliefs, but rather the errors themselves, which by turns amuse, horrify, seduce and bewilder. So, for example, Browne reminds us that people used to believe that badgers have legs longer on one side than the other, that a beaver will bite off his own testicles to evade capture, and that a female bear gives birth to young that resemble blobs of jelly, which she (literally) licks into shape. It

dive learning has more nuanced validity tests, including the assessment that others make of our own (and each other’s) authenticity, truthfulness, and qualifications. Dive learning is heavily influenced by and, in turn, shapes or transforms the cultural context in which we act. We can easily draw erroneous conclusions from reflection alone on the content of our experience, leading to a closed cycle of non-learning. Therefore, practices such as reflecting on the foundations of our beliefs (premise reflection) and publicly testing our conclusions with others are effective validity tests within this domain of dive learning.

One of the most popular superstitions consists in the belief that every man is endowed with definite qualities—that some men are kind, some wicked; some wise, some foolish; some energetic, some apathetic, etc. This is not true. We may say of a man that he is oftener kind than wicked; oftener wise than foolish; oftener energetic than apathetic, and vice versa. But it would not be true to say of one man that he is always kind or wise, and of another that he is always wicked or foolish. And yet we thus divide people. This is erroneous. Men are like rivers—the water in all of them, and at every point, is the same, but every one of them is now narrow, now swift, now wide, now calm, now clear, now cold, now muddy, now warm. So it is with men. Every man bears within him the germs of all human qualities, sometimes manifesting one quality, sometimes another; and often does not resemble himself at all, manifesting no change.

Though I couldn’t have articulated it at the time, for years my deepest fear was that I was a weakling, powerless to temptation, and that I—the victim—would break under pressure every time. I was a victim, all right—a victim to my own erroneous belief system. Satan quickly detected my fears and preyed on them, doing everything he could to confirm what I believed. Once again we see a huge reason why we must believe we are who God says we are and that we can do all things through Christ. Satan will always discourage and demoralize us if we don’t.

It is true that coercion of an individual cannot compel genuine belief by that individual. However, one must remember that the justification offered for religious persecutions was not so much that they helped to save the individual heretic—the person with erroneous beliefs—but rather that they helped those who might otherwise be contaminated with false religious beliefs.

The true quandary lies not in the existence of challenges themselves, but rather in the futile pursuit of an existence devoid of them, and the erroneous belief that encountering obstacles is in itself an insurmountable dilemma.

Unfortunately, instead of a world where those who bear the physical burdens of reproduction—whether they reproduce or not—have equal footing, we have the opposite. The Ancient Greeks, the originators of Western medicine, labeled the female body as inferior, and the act of menstruation has been viewed as proof that women have troublesome physiology and are by nature dirty and toxic. Many religions and cultures have long carried that same torch based on the erroneous belief of impurity and the idea that menstrual blood is filthy and contains actual toxins that poison the body (and especially men, if they were to touch it). Women have been banned from places of worship, from preparing food, from having sex, and even from their own homes based on the supposed polluting powers of menstrual blood.

The true misfortune lies in the erroneous belief that superficial things are important. When we fool ourselves into thinking that our money and property are the things that make us happy, we set ourselves up for a lifetime of disappointment because there’s always something better, always someone wealthier.

Overall, it is this work on ourselves that conditions the evolution of consciousness. It is about ceasing to be subjected to beliefs we consider our own, which generate inner conflicts and are the source of our suffering, as they distance us from our essence, our true nature. These beliefs lead us to adopt an erroneous vision of ourselves, based on the false idea that our thoughts define us. We are not what we thing or say, but what we do.

What is the use of being able to dissolve the body into lights, to lose subject-object separation in deep states of samadhi, if we cannot even bear to see our true face in the mirror? Why do we think we can, or should, penetrate the most refined aspects of the five kleshas and the four erroneous beliefs, when, in the most gross kinds of ways, we are having trouble acknowledging, experiencing, and bearing the reality of our simple daily life?

I still think that, sometimes, even though I know full well I am exemplifying the just-world fallacy, which is the erroneous belief that the world is fair. We are socialized to think that. It makes the world feel more predictable if we believe good behavior is rewarded and bad behavior punished. The problem is that we then subconsciously believe people who suffer must deserve it. It’s what allows us to look away, to turn the television off. People sometimes say that everything happens for a reason. No. No, it does not. There was no reason for these terrible things to happen together. No reason at all. They just did.

the erroneous belief that one is receiving an effective drug or treatment can exacerbate rather than relieve the patient’s symptoms. The explanation for this paradoxical result can be found in attribution theory, particularly as it is applied to emotional experience and self-labeling (Ross, Rodin, & Zimbardo, 1969; Valins & Nisbett, 1972). To the extent that negative symptoms persist in the face of a treatment that “ought” to bring relief, one may be inclined to attribute such persistence to the seriousness and intractability of whatever it is that is producing one’s symptoms. Such an “internal attribution” might be harmful if it produces worry and rumination that exacerbate one’s symptoms.

Allow me to say that again: if you were a Jewish Christian in Rome, and you agreed in any way with the Jewish prejudices and erroneous beliefs about the plight of the Gentiles (as articulated in places like the Wisdom of Solomon, and now reiterated here in Romans 1:18–32), then Paul is calling you out as being the source of the problem.

The true misfortune lies in the erroneous belief that superficial things are important.

Take politics, for instance. We can look back at past events, and the deadly significance of those events seems so plain that we don’t see how people could possibly have overlooked them. Yet millions of voters, at the time, saw those facts and warped their significance so that they supported erroneous political beliefs.

Playwright Bertolt Brecht was angered by what he called the Germans’ ‘good-natured cluelessness, the shamelessness, that they were simply continuing on as if it were only their houses that had been destroyed’. The only solution was to re-educate the people in order to rid them of their delusions and erroneous beliefs, which was a problematic and potentially impossible task.

Some members of the Church have an erroneous idea that when the millennium comes all of the people are going to be swept off the earth except righteous members of the Church. That is not so. There will be millions of people, Catholics, Protestants, agnostics, Mohammedans, people of all classes, and of all beliefs, still permitted to remain upon the face of the earth, but they will be those who have lived clean lives, those who have been free from wickedness and corruption. All who belong, by virtue of their good lives, to the terrestrial order, as well as those who have kept the celestial law, will remain upon the face of the earth during the millennium. (Doctrines of Salvation [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1977], 1:86–87)

Since the human mind is incapable of discerning truth from falsehood, it is forced to constantly create erroneous stories to explain, justify and categorize everything.

according to a report in Nature on the study, researchers at the NCI concluded that other compounds that might work in humans were never tested on the erroneous belief that if they couldn’t help PDX mice, they couldn’t help humans either.

TIMOTHY AND THE PAROUSIA. 1 TIM. 6:14: - [I give thee charge] ‘that thou keep this commandment without spot, unrebukable, until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ: which in his times he shall show,’ etc. This implies that Timothy might expect to live until that event took place. The apostle does not say, ‘Keep this commandment as long as you live;’ nor, ‘Keep it until death;’ but ‘until the appearing of Jesus Christ.’ These expressions are by no means equivalent. The ‘appearing’ [έπιφάνωια] is identical with the Parousia, an event which St. Paul and Timothy alike believed to be at hand. Alford’s note on this verse is eminently unsatisfactory. After quoting Bengel’s remark ‘that the faithful in the apostolic age were accustomed to look forward to the day of Christ as approaching; whereas we are accustomed to look forward to the day of death in like manner,’ he goes on to observe: - ‘We may fairly say that whatever impression is betrayed by the words that the coming of the Lord would be in Timotheus’s life-time, is chastened and corrected by the καιρόις ίδίοις [his own times] of the next verse.’ dldl In other words, the erroneous opinion of one sentence is corrected by the cautious vagueness of the next! Is it possible to accept such a statement? Is there anything in καιρόις ίδίοις to justify such a comment? or is such an estimate of the apostle’s language compatible with a belief in his inspiration? It was no ‘impression’ that the apostle ‘betrayed,’ but a conviction and an assurance founded on the express promises of Christ and the revelations of His Spirit. No less exceptionable is the concluding reflection: - ‘From such passages as this we see that the apostolic age maintained that which ought to be the attitude of all ages, - constant expectation of the Lord’s return.’ But if this expectation was nothing more than a false impression, is not their attitude rather a caution than an example? We now see (assuming that the Parousia never took place) that they cherished a vain hope, and lived in the belief of a delusion. And if they were mistaken in this, the most confident and cherished of their convictions, how can we have any reliance on their other opinions? To regard the apostles and primitive Christians as all involved in an egregious delusion on a subject which had a foremost place in their faith and hope, is to strike a fatal blow at the inspiration and authority of the New Testament. When St. Paul declared, again and again, ‘The Lord is at hand,’ he did not give utterance to his private opinion, but spoke with authority as an organ of the Holy Ghost. Dean Alford’s observations may be best answered in the words of his own rejoinder to Professor Jowett: - ‘Was the apostle or was he not writing in the power of a spirit higher than his own? Have we, in any sense, God speaking in the Bible, or have we not? If we have, then of all passages it is in these which treat so confidently of futurity that we must recognise His voice: if we have it not in these passages, then where are we to listen for it at all?

Science cannot replace a religious view of the world, since there is no such thing as "the scientific worldview". A method of inquiry rather than a settled body of theories, science yields different views of the world as knowledge advances...Above all, science cannot dispel religion by showing it to be an illusion. The rationalist philosophy according to which religion is an intellectual error is fundamentally at odds with scientific inquiry into religion as a natural human activity. Religion may involve the creation of illusions. But there is nothing in science that says illusion may not be useful, even indispensable, in life. The human mind is programmed for survival, not for truth. Rather than producing minds that see the world ever more clearly, evolution could have the effect of breeding any clear view of things out of the mind. The upshot of scientific inquiry could be that a need for illusion goes with being human. The recurring appearance of religions of science suggests this may in fact be the case. Atheists who think of religions as erroneous theories mistake faith—trust in an unknown power—for belief. But if there is a problem with belief, it is not confined to religion. Much of what passes as scientific knowledge is as open to doubt as the miraculous events that feature in traditional faiths. Wander among the shelves of the social sciences stacks in university libraries, and you find yourself in a mausoleum of dead theories. These theories have not passed into the intellectual netherworld by being falsified. Most are not even false; they are too nebulous to allow empirical testing. Systems of ideas, such as Positivism and Marxism, that forecast the decline of religion have been confounded time and time again. Yet these cod-scientific speculations linger on in a dim afterlife in the minds of many who have never heard the ideas from which they spring.

Indeed, recent research suggests that presenting people with proof that their beliefs are incorrect doesn’t change their minds. Instead, it actually reinforces their erroneous beliefs, as they work hard to defend them against fact and logic.

With respect to the formation of erroneous beliefs, the implications of people’s difficulties in detecting covariation should be clear. By placing too much emphasis on positive instances, people will occasionally “detect” relationships that are not there. For many of the real-world phenomena that are of greatest interest, one is sure to encounter many positive instances even when there is no relationship at all between the two variables. Although there is surely no validity to the common belief that we are more likely to need something once we have thrown it away, examples of acute longing for a discarded possession may be easy to come by. By letting necessary evidence “slip by” as sufficient evidence, people establish an insufficient threshold of what constitutes adequate support for a belief, and they run the risk of believing things that are not true.

A person’s conclusions can only be as solid as the information on which they are based. Thus, a person who is exposed to almost nothing but inaccurate information on a given subject almost inevitably develops an erroneous belief, a belief that can seem to be “an irresistible product” of the individual’s (secondhand) experience.

In the West, Hinduism is a religion that everyone has heard of but one that few non-practitioners truly understand. Today it is widely regarded as one of the world’s great religions and considered the indigenous religion of India, with practices and beliefs stretching back thousands of years. However, many of these so-called facts are actually erroneous. Hinduism as it is conceived of today is a conglomerate of a number of indigenous Indian religions; in fact, prior to the migration of Islam and the corporate invasion of the British, Hinduism may not have existed at all. Rather, a number of local religious traditions had very old belief systems dating back hundreds or thousands of years, depending on the tradition, and many worshiped gods that are no longer worshiped today. In essence, it was only through the non-indigenous populations in India, namely the Turks and later the British, who defined what Hinduism was.

Dogmas — religious, political, scientific — arise out of the erroneous belief that thought can encapsulate reality or the truth. Dogmas are collective conceptual prisons. And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of “I know.” Nothing has inflicted more suffering on humanity than its dogmas. It is true that every dogma crumbles sooner or later, because reality will eventually disclose its falseness; however, unless the basic delusion of it is seen for what it is, it will be replaced by others.

Of the political superstitions lately alluded to, none is so universally diffused as the notion that majorities are omnipotent. Under the impression that the preservation of order will ever require power to be wielded by some party, the moral sense of our time feels that such power cannot rightly be conferred on any but the largest moiety of society. It interprets literally the saying that “the voice of the people is the voice of God,” and, transferring to the one the sacredness attached to the other, it concludes that from the will of the people—that is, of the majority—there can be no appeal. Yet is this belief entirely erroneous.

Where is hell, anyway? Ancient man believed that hell was underground, in the center of the earth, where it was hot. This belief was based on the erroneous notion that the earth was the center of the universe. When science proved that the sun was the center of the solar system, then what? Well, the Bible and Sacred Tradition never again tried to define the exact location of hell. Because God created hell as a place to incarcerate the devil and all the bad angels who rebelled with him, and because angels are pure spirits and have no bodies that take up space, hell isn’t a physical place. It’s as real as heaven or purgatory, but you can’t travel to it anymore than a spaceship can reach heaven. The essence of hell isn’t a million degrees of heat from fire but from the heat that comes from hatred and bitterness. Hell is a lonely and selfish place; no matter how many souls it contains, not one of them cares about anyone else. It’s utter isolation as well as eternal torment, which is why everyone should want to avoid it at all cost. Heaven, on the other hand, is a place of happiness and joy because everyone there knows and loves each other. And, most of all, heaven is desirable because of what’s called beatific vision — seeing God face to face for eternity. Being in the presence of the Supreme Being who is all truth and all goodness ought to be the desire of every person.

The religious and scholarly alike arrive at conclusions as to Jesus’ nature based on the world-view they hold, the belief structure that shapes their interpretation. Inaccurate views of the function of reality can only lead to erroneous conclusions.

Arab world. In 1570 there were more than six hundred of them in Constantinople alone, and they spread north and west with the Ottoman Empire. These new public spaces were hotbeds of news and gossip, as well as places to gather for performances and games. Coffeehouses were comparatively liberal institutions where the conversation often turned to politics, and at various times governmental and clerical powers-that-be attempted to close them down, but never for long or with much success. (A vat of coffee was put on trial in Mecca in 1511 for its dangerously intoxicating effects; however, its conviction, and subsequent banishment, was quickly overturned by the sultan of Cairo.) As coffee’s defenders rightly pointed out, the beverage is nowhere mentioned in the Koran. Coffee thus offered the Islamic world a suitable alternative to alcohol, which is specifically proscribed in the Koran, and it came to be known as kahve, which, loosely translated, means “wine of Araby.” This notion that coffee somehow exists in opposition to alcohol would persist in both the East and the West, and comes down to us today in the common, but erroneous, belief that black coffee is an antidote for drunkenness.

It troubles Chentsova Dutton that so much therapeutic intervention with kids proceeds from the conceit that children should attribute great import to their feelings. Emotions are not only unstable, they’re also highly manipulable, she said, hinting that she could make me feel all kinds of things if she really wanted to. Asking someone a series of leading questions, or making certain statements to them, can reliably provoke certain emotional responses. (“It’s just so easy,” she said.) In an individualistic society like ours, we incline toward the erroneous belief that feelings accurately signal who we are in the moment. But in fact, “feelings are responsive to so many cues, and because of that, so often are off.” The anger you feel does not necessarily indicate that you are in the right or that someone treated you unfairly. You may feel envious of a friend, even though you would not actually want what he has. You may feel loved by someone who mistreats you or resent someone who’s only treated you kindly. Feelings fool us all the time.