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Summary Of ' Evidence By Kathryn Schulz

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Kathryn Schulz argues in “Evidence”, a chapter of her book called Being Wrong, that we need to “learn to actively combat our inductive biases: to deliberately seek out evidence that challenges our beliefs, and to take seriously such evidence when we come across it” (Schulz, 377”). By attending to counterevidence we can avoid making errors in our conclusions.
Whether we are aware of it or not, we depend on our past experiences to form our beliefs and ideas. Prior knowledge from personal experiences also explain why we come to the conclusions that we do in everyday life. Whether we like it or not, we are all guilty of believing things based on evidence we have formerly come across. There is a short little quiz in “Evidence” that proves to both you and Schulz that this is true. One of the seemingly simple questions included a photo of a shaded black rectangle with a white strip running behind it. The question was: “What is behind the shaded rectangle?” (Schulz, 365). Our automatic human assumption would be that the strip of white continued behind the rectangle. What we don’t think about is the fact that we truly don’t know what is actually behind that shaded rectangle, we use our former knowledge that something peaking through the top and the bottom must continue through the middle. The reality is, we have no logical indication what is really behind that black rectangle, but what is probable is what our mechanized answer is. Inductive reasoning is described as making

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