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You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don’t have enough doubts about them. I’m going to come back to the distinction between some doubts and enough doubts, because I think it’s crucial. Just think about how many times you have criticized someone else, in hindsight, for their failure to spot a liar. You should have known. There were all kinds of red flags. You had doubts. Levine would say that’s the wrong way to think about the problem. The right question is: were there enough red flags to push you over the threshold of belief?
Talking to Strangers
Malcolm Gladwell
I noticed that very intelligent and informed persons were at no advantage over cabdrivers in their predictions, but there was a crucial difference. Cabdrivers did not believe that they understood as much as learned people—really, they were not the experts and they knew it. Nobody knew anything, but elite thinkers thought that they knew more than the rest because they were elite thinkers, and if you’re a member of the elite, you automatically know more than the nonelite.
The Black Swan
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
MINIMAL GROUP PARADIGM
If you group people by a trivial category, e.g. favorite ice cream flavor, the groups will become tribal, display in-group favoritism, and discriminate against other groups. So even if you end racism & sexism, people will find other reasons to discriminate.
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