Robert Carroll > Quotes

“Political beliefs, religious beliefs, and conspiratorial beliefs seem impenetrable to facts that contradict them.”
― Robert Carroll, The Critical Thinker's Dictionary: Biases, Fallacies, and Illusions and What You Can Do About Them

“It is not that hard to understand why most of us believe strongly in things that are palpably not true. We have a natural propensity to see causal connections where there are none and our beliefs are constantly reinforced by people we like and trust. For many people, one vivid and emotionally salient experience validated by a single neighbor or shopkeeper trumps a thousand randomized, double-blind, controlled scientific experiments.”
― Robert Carroll, Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!

“There are a few rules we can follow. We should be skeptical of single studies. That should be the case even if we have every reason to trust the lab. Until the work is replicated under a variety of conditions, we should suspend judgment. We should be skeptical of studies that have no controls. We should not treat observational studies as proving causal connections, no matter how strong the correlations that are discovered. We should trust consensus science, even though the majority is not always right. Scientists will”
― Robert Carroll, Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!

“There are a few rules we can follow. We should be skeptical of single studies. That should be the case even if we have every reason to trust the lab. Until the work is replicated under a variety of conditions, we should suspend judgment. We should be skeptical of studies that have no controls. We should not treat observational studies as proving causal connections, no matter how strong the correlations that are discovered. We should trust consensus science, even though the majority is not always right.”
― Robert Carroll, Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!

“Attacking a person, rather than the person’s position or argument, is usually easier as well as psychologically more satisfying to those who divide the world into two classes of people—those who agree with them and are therefore good and right, and those who disagree with them and are therefore evil and wrong.”
― Robert Carroll, Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!

“Societies progress by the free assertion of differing proposals, followed by criticism, followed by the genuine possibility of change in the light of criticism....The whole approach of an authoritarian society is anti-rational. A rational and scientific approach requires societies to be open and pluralistic.”—Karl Popper  ”
― Robert Carroll, Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!

“Accept the fact that sometimes coincidences happen. Clouds sometimes look like horses and clocks sometimes stop for no reason. Resist the urge to find meaning and significance everywhere you look.”
― Robert Carroll, The Critical Thinker's Dictionary: Biases, Fallacies, and Illusions and What You Can Do About Them

“In May 2010, Wakefield and Walker-Smith were found guilty and had their medical licenses revoked. Murch was found not guilty. Wakefield is unrepentant. He has since published a book entitled Callous Disregard: Autism and Vaccines: The Truth Behind a Tragedy (2010) with an introduction by actress Jenny McCarthy. (McCarthy denies that she is anti-vaccine. She claims she is pro safe vaccine, yet she seems to think there is no such thing as a safe vaccine.)”
― Robert Carroll, Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!

“About the only uncontested effect of cognitive training is that training in a specific area improves performance in that area but does not transfer to other cognitive tasks. Even learning to memorize long lists of numbers doesn’t help one learn to memorize long lists of letters. “Practice improves specific skills, not general abilities.” So, put down that Sudoku, unless your goal is to get better at doing Sudoku or you just like doing it. If you’re trying to exercise your brain, you’d do better to take a brisk walk.”
― Robert Carroll, Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!

“The church teaches us that we can make God happy by being miserable ourselves.”—Robert Ingersoll”
― Robert Carroll, Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!

“At the very least, one would hope that by becoming aware of the many ways our brain can trick us, we would arrive at the conclusion Bertrand Russell thought was a necessary consequence of the limits of knowledge: we should be less cocksure of our beliefs, hold them tentatively, and always be on guard against thinking our feeling of absolute certainty implies we’re right.”
― Robert Carroll, Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!

“This has the added negative effect of giving them the illusion of confidence. It is a hard lesson to accept, but the success of many people is due to luck, not knowledge. If a thousand people try a thousand different methods and one of them hits the jackpot, it is an illusion to think the winner necessarily had more knowledge or skill than the losers. If two psychics pick opposite winners in an athletic contest, one of them may appear to have more knowledge that the other, but the appearance is an illusion.”
― Robert Carroll, Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!

“Actually, 50 million people can be wrong. Think of all the millions of people who believed the light from the stars came in through holes in a cosmic sky dome. How many people once believed in bloodletting as a way to get rid of disease? It would be good if 50 million people believed in the effectiveness of some medical treatment because the scientific evidence provides strong support for its effectiveness. It is not so good if one person believes a treatment is effective only because 50 million other people believe it is. The”
― Robert Carroll, Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!

“One of the ironies of cults is that the craziest groups are often composed of the most caring people.”
― Robert Carroll, The Critical Thinker's Dictionary: Biases, Fallacies, and Illusions and What You Can Do About Them

“Psychologists call this natural tendency to be selective in both our memory and our perception confirmation bias. People with strong convictions often take confirmation bias to a level known as motivated reasoning. The more evidence one presents against their belief, the more motivated they become to refute the evidence and defend their conviction.”
― Robert Carroll, Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!

“More than half of all Americans believe we can heal each other by psychic or spiritual means. About one-third believe in telepathy and about one-fourth believe in clairvoyance. More than one-third believe houses can be haunted. More than forty percent accept demonic possession as real. Twenty to twenty-five percent believe that the dead communicate with us. Only about forty percent of Americans accept evolution and about fifty percent believe a god created humans in their present form. Only one-third of Americans accept the Big Bang theory. Virtually all scientists accept both evolution and the Big Bang as facts. The average citizen is not impressed.”
― Robert Carroll, Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!

“Politicians play on our fears to manipulate us.”
― Robert Carroll, Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!

“Societies progress by the free assertion of differing proposals, followed by criticism, followed by the genuine possibility of change in the light of criticism....The whole approach of an authoritarian society is anti-rational. A rational and scientific approach requires societies to be open and pluralistic.”—Karl Popper”
― Robert Carroll, Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!

“When presented with this evidence, believers in the “hot hand” are likely to reject it because they “know better” from experience.”
― Robert Carroll, The Critical Thinker's Dictionary: Biases, Fallacies, and Illusions and What You Can Do About Them

“The National Research Council (NRC) spent more than three years reviewing more than 500 scientific studies that had been conducted over a 20-year period and found “no conclusive and consistent evidence” that electromagnetic fields harm humans.”
― Robert Carroll, Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!

“Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler coined the term “backfire effect” to describe how some individuals when confronted with evidence that conflicts with their beliefs come to hold their original position even more strongly.”
― Robert Carroll, Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!

“A measles epidemic in Ireland (over 1,500 reported cases in 2000) has been blamed on Wakefield. Three children died. Fears of an epidemic in Scotland (where Wakefield once practiced medicine) and England were also fueled by Wakefield’s claims. Cases of measles in England rose to a 20-year high following the collapse in MMR immunization rates.”
― Robert Carroll, Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!

“Some scientists have actually done this and guess what? They haven’t found a significant correlation between phases of the Moon and hospital admissions in the emergency room. Nor have researchers found a significant correlation between any phase of the Moon and any of the following: the homicide rate, traffic accidents, crisis calls to police or fire stations, domestic violence, births of babies, suicides, major disasters, casino payout rates, assassinations, kidnappings, aggression by professional hockey players, or violence in prisons. That the facts go against a common belief is not so exceptional. But that people are reluctant to accept facts presented to them indicates just how unnatural critical thinking is.”
― Robert Carroll, Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!

“I noted above that when I refer to an idea as unworthy of consideration (or words to that effect that might sound a bit harsher in context) I do not intend to cast aspersions on the intelligence or character of the one holding the unworthy belief. I must qualify that disclaimer. When I see or hear of anyone murdering strangers because they believe such acts please their god, I consider not only the idea but the one holding such an idea to be unworthy of any sympathetic consideration. How anyone could come up with the idea that an almighty being would be pleased by causing as much misery as possible escapes my imagination. Such a person also escapes my capacity for mercy.”
― Robert Carroll, Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!

“There is overwhelming scientific evidence on memory that shows memories are constructed by all of us and that the construction is a mixture of fact and fiction. Something similar is true for perception. Our perceptions are constructions that are a mixture of sense data processed by the brain and other data that the brain supplies to fill in the blanks.”
― Robert Carroll, The Critical Thinker's Dictionary: Biases, Fallacies, and Illusions and What You Can Do About Them

“In fact, there is good scientific evidence to support the notion that being really intelligent and knowledgeable can be a disadvantage to some thinkers because of the increased ability to come up with rationalizations in defense of a position one originally adopted for inadequate reasons. There are many reasons why smart people sometimes believe dumb things. The smarter one is, the easier it is to see patterns, fit data to a hypothesis, and draw inferences. The smarter one is, the easier it is to explain away strong evidence contrary to one’s beliefs. Also, smart people are often arrogant and incorrectly think that they cannot be deceived by others, the data, or themselves.”
― Robert Carroll, Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!

“Stare decisis, or the custom of many legal systems that requires respect for judicial precedents, should not be confused with the irrelevant appeal to tradition. Judicial decisions provide rules and guidance for future courts. The custom of using earlier judicial decisions to guide later ones provides stability to the legal system. When deemed appropriate, judges will overturn or modify precedents, but it is generally agreed that this should be done only if there are compelling reasons to do so. It is possible, however, for someone to reject sound reasons for overturning a precedent by claiming that the precedent shouldn’t be overturned only because it is a precedent. In that case, the one arguing for keeping the precedent would be committing the irrelevant appeal to tradition.”
― Robert Carroll, Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!

“Critical thinking is unnatural. Following our feelings and emotions is more likely to motivate our behavior than well-reasoned arguments. We are as likely to be persuaded by irrelevant appeals as by relevant ones, and are more likely to produce slanted, selective, biased, one-sided, incomplete arguments than well-reasoned, fair-minded, reflective, accurate, complete arguments. We often prefer attacks on a person’s motives to attacks on a person’s reasons. We make assumptions that aren’t warranted, create straw man arguments out of fragments of opposing viewpoints, offer up false dilemmas, and draw conclusions hastily. It’s amazing we’ve made so much progress!”
― Robert Carroll, Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!

“Without awareness of common pitfalls such as confirmation bias, positive-outcome bias, and subjective validation, a person trained in logic and fallacy detection is easily deceived into thinking that he or she has acquired invincible armor against assaults of unreason. Expressions like post hoc ergo propter hoc and false cause, should be informed by knowledge of evolution and how the brain works to jump to conclusions about causal connections.”
― Robert Carroll, Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!

“I intend to open this country up to democracy and anyone who is against that I will jail, I will crush.”—João Baptista Figueiredo, President of Brazil (1979)”
― Robert Carroll, Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!