Lies are the social equivalent of toxic waste: Everyone is potentially harmed by their spread. - Sam Harris

The sea squirt — a very simple marine creature — swims about during its juvenile phase looking for a place to settle, and once it settles and starts filter feeding, it digests its own brain, because it no longer has any need for perceptual or motor competence. This is often used as an unkind analogy for getting tenure in academia.

The answer to the question, 'What should I believe, and why should I believe it?' is generally a scientific one. Believe a proposition because it is well supported by theory and evidence; believe it because it has been experimentally verified; believe it because a generation of smart people have tried their best to falsify it and failed; believe it because it is true (or seems so). This is a norm of cognition as well as the core of any scientific mission statement. As far as our understanding of the world is concerned — there are no facts without values.

When the members of the “Heaven’s Gate” cult failed to spot the spacecraft they knew must be trailing the comet Hale-Bopp, they returned the $4,000 telescope they had bought for this purpose, believing it to be defective.