Vincent Bugliosi Quotes

There is no greater mistake in the world than the looking upon every sort of nonsense as want of sense.

Even intelligent people succumb to their own propaganda.

The longer you hold a belief, the less likely it is to be true.

Men can reason themselves into almost any sort of opinion if they are so inclined.

The line between science and magic becomes blurred so that public judgments on technical issues can be erratic or badly flawed. It frequently appears that some people will believe almost anything. Thus judgments can be manipulated or warped by unscrupulous groups. Distortions or outright falsehoods can come to be accepted as fact.

I may not be smart enough to debate you point-for-point on this, but I have the feeling about 60% of what you say is crap.

If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance with his instincts, he will accept it even on the slenderest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.

There is a subconscious tendency to substitute the conviction, forcefulness, or decibel level of opinionators as a proxy measure of their comprehension of the issues or veracity of their statements. Such correlations are imaginary and often inverse.

Facts are incidental if not accidental, and the problem that we have as a society is that there is a significant number of people who have grown up in a different information environment ... surrounded by much more information, but whose provenance is not clear.... The rumors will be believed; the fiction will be thought of as fact; and the political agendas, among other agendas, will be influenced by interest groups who are coming from some quite strange trajectory to issues based on collective understanding that is founded on falsity.

When people read 'Breitbart' every single day and convince themselves that Barack Obama is a foreign terrorist, that is not a problem of government. That is a problem of community failure, and we have to recognize that.

When you write a book, and you argue a problem is complicated and multidimensional, it's very easy to read a slice of that book and say, 'Well, this is the part that either confirms or really challenges my biases, so that's what I'm going to say the entire book is about.'

Those who use 'Correlation is not the same as causation' as a magic incantation to dismiss all fact-using professions are fools holding a lit match in one hand and an open gas can in the other, screaming, 'One has nothing to do with the other!'

Interviewers actively fool themselves, finding ways to learn from interviews even if there's actually nothing there to learn from.

We have to challenge lies. We have to challenge falsehoods and conspiracy theories. If you don't, they fester - unchecked and unchallenged.

Just because something doesn't confirm your existing beliefs does not mean it's a hoax.

Skimming has led, I believe, to a tendency to go to the sources that seem the simplest, most reduced, most familiar, and least cognitively challenging. I think that leads people to accept truly false news without examining it, without being analytical.

As soon as you hear a proposition, the creative brain in humans assumes for the moment that it's true, and starts trying to find evidence. It's what computer scientists in the old days used to call 'Fifo:' first in, first out. The first piece of information that gets in has a privileged position, even if it's misinformation.

There is a danger, increasingly, that we're in a post-fact society where it seems my ignorance is as good as your facts.

It's not as if Trump is addicted to the best-researched, most in-depth, meticulously sourced material in the world. If he were, we'd all be better off, right?

We live in an epoch where rational reasoning associated with evidence isn't universally accepted and is, in fact, in jeopardy. That worries me a lot.

You can convince yourself of just about anything when you want to believe a conspiracy theory.

When did ignorance become a point of view?

I'm disturbed when people let superstition, magical thinking, extreme conspiracy theories and so on blur their minds.

The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story the mind has managed to construct.