“It ain’t what you don’t know that hurts you. It’s what you know that ain’t so.”

Will Rogers said, "It ain’t what you don’t know that hurts you. It’s what you know that ain’t so." Or maybe it was Mark Twain who said it? Or Sachel Paige? Josh Billings? Yogi Berra?! Whatever. The point stands as a staple of folk wisdom: firmly held and unquestioned beliefs get people into trouble because we're often wrong.

Very Short List: Science calls our attention to an addition to this discussion, Robert Burton's book On Being Certain:

Robert Burton is a neurologist (and novelist) who marshals scientific and psychological arguments and concludes that our strongest convictions can arise just as readily from prelogical processes as from rational thought. Alarmingly, Burton also suggests that our sense of certainty attaches as readily and firmly to false ideas as to true ones — and feels precisely the same whether we’re dead right or totally wrong. (our emphasis)

According to Burton, confidence in our untested beliefs may have given us an evolutionary edge by allowing us to act decisively in moments of crisis . . . but sometimes we assume too much and get ourselves in trouble.