Pragmatic Thinking and Learning

Now I Don’t Know What to Think

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.

➤ Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

As we’ve seen earlier in the book, intuition is a powerful tool. It is the hallmark of experts. But your intuition can be dead wrong. As we’ve seen in this chapter, your thinking and rationality are fairly suspect as well. Our perspective is skewed all the way from our personal values to understanding our place in the cosmos, as Douglas Adams points out in this section’s opening epigraph. What we think of as “normal” isn’t necessarily ...