Three books about knowing things that just ain't so

July 31, 2025

It's tempting to think that people who believe nonsense do so because they can't think straight or can't understand facts. Here are three books which look at what nonsense people believe and why they believe it. The authors are a historian, a professor of psychology and a quantum physicist. Hard to believe they could agree on anything, isn't it?

Why People Believe Weird Things by Michael Shermer

This book was first published in 1997 and is a classic in the canon of skeptical literature. As well as identifying various forms of bad thinking it offers some suggestions for how to recognise and avoid them. Because of its origins it deals mainly with the targets of organised skepticism over the years - pseudosciences like astrology, young Earth creationism, medical quackery, Holocaust denial (Shermer has written a book, Denying History, specifically addressing Holocaust denial), alien abductions and even the bizarre cult built on the writings of Ayn Rand.

It might seem a bit out of date, but new absurdities come along all the time. Climate change denial hadn't been invented when the book was written, but nobody could have predicted that there would be people in the 21st century seriously claiming that they can prove the Earth is flat. And in 1997 there was no ubiquitous Internet to spread a tsunami of misinformation. (In 1997, the largest search engine in the world, Lycos, indexed 70 million web pages. Today, Google and Bing index many billions of pages.)

One frequent criticism of the book when it first came out was that surely belief in all this nonsense indicated that believers weren't very smart. In the second edition in 2002, the author added a chapter titled "Why Smart People Believe Weird Things" to address this complaint. None of us is immune to believing things that are false, but we have to be constantly aware. As some wise person once said: "A skeptic is someone who likes his facts to be correct".

The book has an introduction by the late Professor Stephen Jay Gould which deserves to be published as a stand-alone defence of critical thinking.

This book is highly recommended. It can be a bit hard to find a copy but that's what interlibrary loans are for.

Note about the author: Michael Shermer is one of those people whose faults have clouded people's opinions of his work. If he hadn't been a high profile speaker and author nobody would have cared about his behaviour away from the word processor. His skeptical work stands on its own, even if the author might not be someone you would want to spend time with. (Disclaimer - I met and associated with Shermer before anyone knew he was a bad person. I probably wouldn't do it again.)

Misbelief by Dan Ariely

The use of red letters in the book's title, Misbelief, gives a clue to what is inside the covers, as does the subtitle "What makes rational people believe irrational things" (which is basically the title of Michael Shermer's book above).

The author of this book is Professor of Psychology and Behavioural Economics at Duke University, so the obvious emphasis is on how mental processes lead us to what we think we know. One obvious example of this is "confirmation bias", which means that people give more attention and credence to ideas that agree with existing beliefs - renewable energy is a waste of money if climate change is a "hoax", for example.

An area covered by the book is the social pressure to agree with other people in our social group, or even other people in the room. (This is known as "social conformity", and as Solomon Asch showed as far back as 1956, people can be influenced to make absurd claims to avoid conflict.)

A large part of psychology is working out the answer to the question posed in the book's subtitle, and the book goes a long way to explain in layperson's terms what is known about the problem. It's an easy read for the non-expert and there is a comprehensive collection of references to the scientific literature for anyone who wants to dig deeper.

And yes, I did check to make sure that Asch was mentioned somewhere, although I was a bit disappointed to see that Stanley Milgram's famous experiment about compliance to authority doesn't seem to rate a mention. But that's only a small complaint.

Highly recommended, and there is a copy in the Oberon Library.

Anecdote:

I spent six years at university studying psychology and almost ever day I see someone post something to social media that is so absurd (and so easily shown to be absurd) that it makes me think "How could anyone believe that?"

Decades of research might tell us how and why people believe things that are transparently untrue but they still keep doing it.

Cosmic Bullsh*t by Chris Ferrie

And now for something completely different ... .

Now that we've heard from a historian and professional skeptic and a professor of psychology, it's time to see what a quantum physicist has to say. Chris Ferrie is an Associate Professor at the University of Technology Sydney, specialising in quantum physics, commutation and engineering.

This book is different to the other two because it doesn't really try to explain why people believe anything - it just points out the absurdity of belief in matters which have no logical basis in fact. Ferrie doesn't try to be polite to believers or accept that there might be rational reasons for their irrational beliefs - if what you think is wrong it's wrong and you need to be told so.

Another difference is that this book is addressed straight at the target, whereas the others try to explain the phenomenon to outsiders. No believer in astrology, the deadliness of the COVID vaccine, alien bodies at Area 51 (I used to work in a secret government research facility and I have an Area 51 coffee mug, so take anything I say with caution) or the reptilian nature of Hillary Clinton and the Royal Family is going to even consider reading either of the other two books, but they might just look at this one and maybe take some notice when absurdities are pointed out.

Highly recommended, but stay away if you are offended by "strong" language - the author is somewhat forthright in his opinions. Oberon Library has a copy.

Chris Ferrie has another book called Quantum Bullsh*t in which he rails against the ubiquitous use of the word "quantum" by people with no understanding of what it actually means. As a professional journalist I sometimes think that it is mandatory to use the term "quantum leap" to describe a major change in something despite knowing that it is in fact the smallest distance anything in the universe can move and make a detectable difference.

See also: Facts and other lies

And here's something I wrote for the July, 2009, edition of Australasian Science magazine.

I try not to know what just ain't so

Everyone must be familiar with the quote "It ain't so much the things we know that get us into trouble. It's the things we know that just ain't so". I once used it in something I was writing and being a pedant I went looking for the original author of the saying. Something in my mind said that it was Ralph Waldo Emerson, but something else said that it didn't really sound like Emerson. I knew it was an American, but it didn't sound like Walt Whitman, Edgar Allen Poe or T. S. Elliot either, so I checked. I found many attributions, and what all these attributions had in common was that the writer was absolutely sure that it had been said by Mark Twain. Or Josh Billings. Or Artemus Ward. Or Will Rogers. Or … .

Here was possibly the most famous saying in the world warning about being both sure and incorrect and the evidence was clear that at least some people talking about it were both sure and incorrect.

We all know stuff that is wrong, and the object of skepticism (and therefore its descendant, science) is to minimise the things we know which just ain't so. I suppose I could return to the extreme skepticism of René Descartes and accept that the only thing I can be sure of is my own existence, but I prefer to think that I can take some things on trust.

People can have beliefs and knowledge bases for three reasons, and I have called these "fact", "faith" and "fiction".

The first class is knowledge - people believe or know something for rational reasons based on the reality of the universe and on good evidence. I allow that second-hand evidence is almost always sufficient, provided that the method of gathering the evidence and the means of interpreting it by experts and authorities can be trusted. This is a recursive process - we can accept with some confidence information coming from sources that have been shown to be reliable in the past. Nobody can do all the research necessary to be personally assured of the truth about everything, so we rely on scientific journals and the news media to get things right for us. They do this most of the time, and failures and corrections are usually well publicised.

The second class contains religious, moral, aesthetic, or ethical beliefs. These may not (and perhaps should not) be logically or empirically justified, but their basis in faith must be recognised. Beliefs in this class may or may not have an observable effect. Liberalism* is an example of an ethical belief which affects others, but, as Blaise Pascal pointed out, belief in God may have absolutely no effect in this life but an enormous effect in the next.

(* Note - "Liberalism" has nothing to do with the Liberal Party of Australia or the sneering way US fascists use it as a synonym for socialism or anything else they don't like.)

The third class is belief in nonsense, which has no effect on anything, and cannot be justified in any way. I was predestined to be a methodical, rational empiricist because I was born on the equinox at the cusp of Virgo and Libra. Beliefs in this category can often be harmless and fun, but they can cease to be fun if taken seriously.

All of these belief classes are valid and most people have all three, although none are mandatory. People lacking beliefs in the third, nonsense, class can be extremely boring and humourless. People lacking religion, morals, and ethics are extremely unpleasant. Anyone without rational beliefs is probably mad. There is only a problem when the boundaries become distorted or overlap.

All this preamble is a way of saying that there is a qualitative difference between science (which is basically the first class), non-science, and nonsense. It is not sufficient, however, to simply show that such demarcation is possible. I believe that it is essential to actually make and use the distinction.

When people lose the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction they may also lose the power of rational thought, with consequent tragic results. There will always be charlatans who know the difference but pretend there is none, and there will always be cranks and crackpots who deny a difference because they cannot see one. It is the task of rational people to defend against both groups, and the only defence is a clear understanding that there is a real difference between science and non-science. They are different, and the difference is absolute. Some beliefs can be proved, some can not, and nothing can be both.