{
"type": "entry",
"author": {
"name": "Cathie",
"url": "https://cathieleblanc.com/",
"photo": null
},
"url": "https://cathieleblanc.com/2026/03/12/things-we-believe/",
"published": "2026-03-12T12:18:26-04:00",
"content": {
"html": "<p>I received a great gift at the end of 2025 from my friend, Lynne. To celebrate my retirement, she gave me a <a href=\"https://www.storyworth.com/\"><em>Storyworth</em></a> memoir. Each week for a year, Storyworth asks me questions curated by Lynne (which I can change if I want) and I write my answers to the questions. At the end of the year, Storyworth will send me a bound copy of all of my answers, a sort of guided memoir. Lynne set things up so that she and another friend receive copies of my answers. A couple of friends have expressed interest in these weekly musings, so I have added them to the list of people who receive my answers. But mostly, I haven\u2019t felt as though most people would be interested in my answers so I haven\u2019t shared them more broadly. A recent question, however, keeps nagging at me and makes me wonder what other people think.</p>\n<p>The question is: What did you believe when you were young that you later learned was false?</p>\n<p>Here\u2019s the gist of my answer:</p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>When I was very young, I believed the trees caused the wind. I saw the trees moving and felt the wind on my face and came to the conclusion that the trees moved and stirred up the air, just like my mother waving a piece of paper in front of her face stirred up the air, creating a small, cool breeze. Cause and effect. Wave a piece of paper, air moves to cool your face. Wave a tree, air moves to cool your face. Logical, right?</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>I have been thinking about how we come to believe what we believe for a long time but hadn\u2019t realized that the root of my fascination with the subject might be this early misunderstanding of the direction of causality. How should I have known that the wind causes the trees to move and not the other way around? When two things happen together, how do we know that one actually causes the other? For example, I know that ice cream consumption increases in the summer. I also know that shark attacks increase in the summer. Does this mean that eating ice cream cause shark attacks? Or do shark attacks cause people to crave ice cream? In other words, how do we know that two things are have a causal relationship?</p>\n<p>I don\u2019t remember how my mistaken belief about the trees causing the wind was corrected. I suspect I learned about it in school, probably in a science lesson. I don\u2019t remember any experiments to prove that the wind caused the trees to move so I probably believed my teacher when she told me about the relationship between wind and trees. In other words, I believed what she told me because she was a person of authority, someone I trusted had more knowledge than I did, someone who would not deliberately lie to me about how the world works. This is called Authority-based Belief. And although I now know more about things like air pressure differentials and jet streams and aerodynamics, very little of that knowledge comes from my own direct experiments. Instead, it comes from scientists telling me that these things are so. That is, I am still believing in authorities who I believe have little incentive to lie to me about their vast knowledge of how the world works.</p>\n<p>My belief in scientific authorities doesn\u2019t mean that I think scientists are infallible or that they never get things wrong. But I do believe science uses a particular type of knowable evidence to come to conclusions. I also believe that science is self-correcting. When current models of how the world works fail to explain newly discovered evidence, scientists develop new models that incorporate that new evidence. In other words, it is not a problem that scientific understanding keeps changing. It is how things are supposed to work.</p>\n<p>I have been thinking a lot about what I believe and why lately because of the many places where my beliefs about what is going on in the world differ from the beliefs of my neighbors and members of my family. For example, I went to the Campton (town that I live in) town meeting last night to participate in direct democracy by debating and voting on 21 town governance and budget articles. As my neighbors articulated their support or opposition to these articles, I was struck by how significantly my beliefs differ from some of my neighbors. For example, one of the articles asked us to budget $650,000 for road upgrades and maintenance. The elected members of the select board explained in much detail how they came to the number $650,000 for this item. New Hampshire roads need a lot of maintenance due to thawing and freezing of the ground, which causes frost heaves which in turn crack pavement causes huge potholes. In addition, my town has a lot of dirt roads which require maintenance and upgrades so that they don\u2019t become impassable in the Spring, which we call Mud Season because of the copious amounts of mud created by melting snow and spring showers. The select board explained which roads needed which kinds of maintenance and told us the estimates they had gotten from contractors to do that work. When they finished the explanation, one of my neighbors proposed an amendment to change the amount to be allocated to $400,000. He explained that he believed the road work needed to be done but that the cost was too high. He didn\u2019t explain how he had come up with $400,000 as the appropriate cost. The amendment was voted down and the original article was passed. But I wondered how my neighbor had come to believe that $400,000 was the appropriate cost. I understood how I came to believe that $650,000 was the appropriate cost. I had elected a group of people to do the work of running our town so that we taxpayers have necessary services provided at reasonable costs. I believed they were doing the best job they could for the town. They told me the process through which they had come to their decision about what to propose to the voters and I believed what they told me. Clearly, my amendment-proposing neighbor had some other information or influence that caused him to believe that the select board was telling him something that wasn\u2019t true or had flawed logic in some way or they had motivations other than providing necessary services at reasonable cost or something. Since he didn\u2019t explain it, I can\u2019t know why he believes what he does. But I think his underlying mistrust of the numbers provided by the select board is rooted in a belief <em>system</em> rather than just a single belief about a town meeting warrant article.</p>\n<p>This example from town meeting might seem small compared to some of the disagreements we see playing out in the country today. Why do some people believe that President Trump is guilty of sexual abuse of minors and others don\u2019t? Why do some people believe transgender people are evil and others don\u2019t? Why do some people believe the 2020 election was stolen and others don\u2019t? Why do some people believe we landed on the moon and others don\u2019t? Why do some people believe Hitler exterminated 6 million Jews and others don\u2019t? I could go on and on.</p>\n<p>How we come to our beliefs is a complicated, fascinating process. I am so interested in this question that I created and taught several classes related to it. I provocatively called one class \u201cWhy do people believe weird things?\u201d The class was essentially about critical thinking, about how to decide whether something is \u201ctrue\u201d or not. We talked about what constitutes \u201cevidence\u201d when deciding whether to believe something, about what is a \u201cweird\u201d thing to believe and what isn\u2019t. I taught that class long after the retirement of Walter Cronkite but, as a society, we were still basking in the glow of his iconic sign-off, \u201cAnd that\u2019s the way it is.\u201d We still believed there were authorities that we could trust to tell us the \u201ctruth.\u201d I taught my students that when they had questions about something, they should find an authority they could trust to find answers. Soon, however, we morphed into a society with many \u201cauthorities\u201d vying for our beliefs. As we now know, the World Wide Web brought misinformation and disinformation into the mainstream. Students increasingly found it difficult to determine which authorities they should trust. So I developed a new class tackling the wicked problem of disinformation. The class still focused on critical thinking (although I am increasingly disillusioned with that phrase) but now we focused on the process of evaluating whether a particular claim about whatever question you have is true. We used the <a href=\"https://hapgood.us/2019/06/19/sift-the-four-moves/\">SIFT</a> method, developed by Mike Caulfield, to evaluate claims. SIFT stands for Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, and Trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context. Stop means that when you start to read something, especially something you heartily agree or disagree with, ask yourself some questions. What do you know about the source of the claim? Why might they be posting this claim? Do you know whether the claim is true or not? How? Investigate the source means investigate who might be paying for the source, what motivations might the source have, who are the people behind the source, and so on. In other words, don\u2019t take any source to be authoritative. Instead investigate the biases and motivations of every source. Find better coverage means research whether anyone else is making a similar claim. What are other sources saying about this claim? Finally, Trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context is, in my opinion, the most important step in this process. It mean follow any links the source might have provided so that you can get to the original sources of any information. If there are no links to other sources, ask yourself why? If there are links, follow them to determine whether they say what your source says they say.</p>\n<p>In daily life, the SIFT method is cumbersome. Using it on every claim that we come across takes far more time than nearly any of us wants to spend on investigation. But I find it to be a tool for mindfulness, even if I don\u2019t follow all of the steps. I can often determine that something is likely disinformation or at least hyperbole just by checking to see whether there are any links to other sources of information. Or by typing the claim into my search engine of choice to see what others are saying about the claim. At the very least, the SIFT method makes me Stop so I don\u2019t post disinformation myself. But it also makes me Stop and wonder why I believe the things I do.</p>\n<p>I was telling Liz about this blog post and she told me about an assignment she used to give in her Composition class. Rather than have the students write an opinion piece about some topic, she would ask the students to think about an opinion they hold and write about where that opinion comes from. She would ask them to think about their families, their religion, their movie and TV watching, etc. to try to determine where their opinion comes from. Likely it\u2019s not one place but instead is formed from a belief system that developed over years through their experiences. I love this assignment and want to think about some of my own strongly-held opinions to see where they come from.</p>\n<p>I know my childhood belief that the trees moving caused the wind came from making an analogy between flapping a piece of paper in front of my face and the trees moving. I don\u2019t know exactly where my counter-belief that the wind causes the trees to move came from. I do, however, believe pretty strongly that the wind causes the trees to move.</p>\n<p>I drew the featured image on this post to try to capture my childhood belief. Causality is hard to draw!</p>",
"text": "I received a great gift at the end of 2025 from my friend, Lynne. To celebrate my retirement, she gave me a Storyworth memoir. Each week for a year, Storyworth asks me questions curated by Lynne (which I can change if I want) and I write my answers to the questions. At the end of the year, Storyworth will send me a bound copy of all of my answers, a sort of guided memoir. Lynne set things up so that she and another friend receive copies of my answers. A couple of friends have expressed interest in these weekly musings, so I have added them to the list of people who receive my answers. But mostly, I haven\u2019t felt as though most people would be interested in my answers so I haven\u2019t shared them more broadly. A recent question, however, keeps nagging at me and makes me wonder what other people think.\nThe question is: What did you believe when you were young that you later learned was false?\nHere\u2019s the gist of my answer:\n\nWhen I was very young, I believed the trees caused the wind. I saw the trees moving and felt the wind on my face and came to the conclusion that the trees moved and stirred up the air, just like my mother waving a piece of paper in front of her face stirred up the air, creating a small, cool breeze. Cause and effect. Wave a piece of paper, air moves to cool your face. Wave a tree, air moves to cool your face. Logical, right?\n\nI have been thinking about how we come to believe what we believe for a long time but hadn\u2019t realized that the root of my fascination with the subject might be this early misunderstanding of the direction of causality. How should I have known that the wind causes the trees to move and not the other way around? When two things happen together, how do we know that one actually causes the other? For example, I know that ice cream consumption increases in the summer. I also know that shark attacks increase in the summer. Does this mean that eating ice cream cause shark attacks? Or do shark attacks cause people to crave ice cream? In other words, how do we know that two things are have a causal relationship?\nI don\u2019t remember how my mistaken belief about the trees causing the wind was corrected. I suspect I learned about it in school, probably in a science lesson. I don\u2019t remember any experiments to prove that the wind caused the trees to move so I probably believed my teacher when she told me about the relationship between wind and trees. In other words, I believed what she told me because she was a person of authority, someone I trusted had more knowledge than I did, someone who would not deliberately lie to me about how the world works. This is called Authority-based Belief. And although I now know more about things like air pressure differentials and jet streams and aerodynamics, very little of that knowledge comes from my own direct experiments. Instead, it comes from scientists telling me that these things are so. That is, I am still believing in authorities who I believe have little incentive to lie to me about their vast knowledge of how the world works.\nMy belief in scientific authorities doesn\u2019t mean that I think scientists are infallible or that they never get things wrong. But I do believe science uses a particular type of knowable evidence to come to conclusions. I also believe that science is self-correcting. When current models of how the world works fail to explain newly discovered evidence, scientists develop new models that incorporate that new evidence. In other words, it is not a problem that scientific understanding keeps changing. It is how things are supposed to work.\nI have been thinking a lot about what I believe and why lately because of the many places where my beliefs about what is going on in the world differ from the beliefs of my neighbors and members of my family. For example, I went to the Campton (town that I live in) town meeting last night to participate in direct democracy by debating and voting on 21 town governance and budget articles. As my neighbors articulated their support or opposition to these articles, I was struck by how significantly my beliefs differ from some of my neighbors. For example, one of the articles asked us to budget $650,000 for road upgrades and maintenance. The elected members of the select board explained in much detail how they came to the number $650,000 for this item. New Hampshire roads need a lot of maintenance due to thawing and freezing of the ground, which causes frost heaves which in turn crack pavement causes huge potholes. In addition, my town has a lot of dirt roads which require maintenance and upgrades so that they don\u2019t become impassable in the Spring, which we call Mud Season because of the copious amounts of mud created by melting snow and spring showers. The select board explained which roads needed which kinds of maintenance and told us the estimates they had gotten from contractors to do that work. When they finished the explanation, one of my neighbors proposed an amendment to change the amount to be allocated to $400,000. He explained that he believed the road work needed to be done but that the cost was too high. He didn\u2019t explain how he had come up with $400,000 as the appropriate cost. The amendment was voted down and the original article was passed. But I wondered how my neighbor had come to believe that $400,000 was the appropriate cost. I understood how I came to believe that $650,000 was the appropriate cost. I had elected a group of people to do the work of running our town so that we taxpayers have necessary services provided at reasonable costs. I believed they were doing the best job they could for the town. They told me the process through which they had come to their decision about what to propose to the voters and I believed what they told me. Clearly, my amendment-proposing neighbor had some other information or influence that caused him to believe that the select board was telling him something that wasn\u2019t true or had flawed logic in some way or they had motivations other than providing necessary services at reasonable cost or something. Since he didn\u2019t explain it, I can\u2019t know why he believes what he does. But I think his underlying mistrust of the numbers provided by the select board is rooted in a belief system rather than just a single belief about a town meeting warrant article.\nThis example from town meeting might seem small compared to some of the disagreements we see playing out in the country today. Why do some people believe that President Trump is guilty of sexual abuse of minors and others don\u2019t? Why do some people believe transgender people are evil and others don\u2019t? Why do some people believe the 2020 election was stolen and others don\u2019t? Why do some people believe we landed on the moon and others don\u2019t? Why do some people believe Hitler exterminated 6 million Jews and others don\u2019t? I could go on and on.\nHow we come to our beliefs is a complicated, fascinating process. I am so interested in this question that I created and taught several classes related to it. I provocatively called one class \u201cWhy do people believe weird things?\u201d The class was essentially about critical thinking, about how to decide whether something is \u201ctrue\u201d or not. We talked about what constitutes \u201cevidence\u201d when deciding whether to believe something, about what is a \u201cweird\u201d thing to believe and what isn\u2019t. I taught that class long after the retirement of Walter Cronkite but, as a society, we were still basking in the glow of his iconic sign-off, \u201cAnd that\u2019s the way it is.\u201d We still believed there were authorities that we could trust to tell us the \u201ctruth.\u201d I taught my students that when they had questions about something, they should find an authority they could trust to find answers. Soon, however, we morphed into a society with many \u201cauthorities\u201d vying for our beliefs. As we now know, the World Wide Web brought misinformation and disinformation into the mainstream. Students increasingly found it difficult to determine which authorities they should trust. So I developed a new class tackling the wicked problem of disinformation. The class still focused on critical thinking (although I am increasingly disillusioned with that phrase) but now we focused on the process of evaluating whether a particular claim about whatever question you have is true. We used the SIFT method, developed by Mike Caulfield, to evaluate claims. SIFT stands for Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, and Trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context. Stop means that when you start to read something, especially something you heartily agree or disagree with, ask yourself some questions. What do you know about the source of the claim? Why might they be posting this claim? Do you know whether the claim is true or not? How? Investigate the source means investigate who might be paying for the source, what motivations might the source have, who are the people behind the source, and so on. In other words, don\u2019t take any source to be authoritative. Instead investigate the biases and motivations of every source. Find better coverage means research whether anyone else is making a similar claim. What are other sources saying about this claim? Finally, Trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context is, in my opinion, the most important step in this process. It mean follow any links the source might have provided so that you can get to the original sources of any information. If there are no links to other sources, ask yourself why? If there are links, follow them to determine whether they say what your source says they say.\nIn daily life, the SIFT method is cumbersome. Using it on every claim that we come across takes far more time than nearly any of us wants to spend on investigation. But I find it to be a tool for mindfulness, even if I don\u2019t follow all of the steps. I can often determine that something is likely disinformation or at least hyperbole just by checking to see whether there are any links to other sources of information. Or by typing the claim into my search engine of choice to see what others are saying about the claim. At the very least, the SIFT method makes me Stop so I don\u2019t post disinformation myself. But it also makes me Stop and wonder why I believe the things I do.\nI was telling Liz about this blog post and she told me about an assignment she used to give in her Composition class. Rather than have the students write an opinion piece about some topic, she would ask the students to think about an opinion they hold and write about where that opinion comes from. She would ask them to think about their families, their religion, their movie and TV watching, etc. to try to determine where their opinion comes from. Likely it\u2019s not one place but instead is formed from a belief system that developed over years through their experiences. I love this assignment and want to think about some of my own strongly-held opinions to see where they come from.\nI know my childhood belief that the trees moving caused the wind came from making an analogy between flapping a piece of paper in front of my face and the trees moving. I don\u2019t know exactly where my counter-belief that the wind causes the trees to move came from. I do, however, believe pretty strongly that the wind causes the trees to move.\nI drew the featured image on this post to try to capture my childhood belief. Causality is hard to draw!"
},
"name": "Things We Believe",
"post-type": "article",
"_id": "47618021",
"_source": "2782"
}
