Why people believe nonsense, part one

The useful part

I pretty much knew most of the contents before I read these books, but they helped me organize my thinking and connect some dots. There are innumerable entry points to this problem, but I have to start somewhere, so here goes. Indeed, for much of history since classical antiquity, it has produced fallacious results.

How it works

• However, scholarly expertise today means something entirely different.
• Until the scientific revolution, scholarship and expertise meant studying ancient texts.
• Scholars learned cosmology and human history by studying the Bible, and they learned human biology and medicine by studying the writings of the Second Century Greco-Roman physician Galen.
• Now we know that biblical cosmology and history are false, and Galen’s theories were equally bunk.
• Relying on Galen, physicians tried to heal people by bleeding them, giving them powerful emetics and laxatives and otherwise hastening their deaths.

What to take from it

I also recommend Nonsense on Stilts, by Massimo Pigliucci. Modern scientists would like nothing more than to upend orthodoxy, but they can only get credit for doing so if they present powerful evidence. As we have seen in the course of this discussion, as scientific knowledge has grown vaster and more complex, deep expertise has necessarily come to apply to smaller and smaller fractions of the whole.

Details worth keeping

I believe I previously recommended Science Under Siege, by Michael E.