Born again Skeptic

Another quick redirect; I love this writeup of how we are stupid at risk assessment . I wish a few of the people close to me would learn up on this a bit.
The precautionary principle can so easily be abused to the point that it becomes a zero risk bias .

This is a TED video from 2006, but I just now watched it. Michael Shermer talks about cognitive bias, pareidolia, and other interesting ways we fool ourselves.
Michael Shermer at TED.com: Why people believe strange things
It’s a delightful 12 minute refutation of stupidity.

Stolen from the blinkenlights box :
Science is not–I repeat, not–a method for finding out the "truth" about anything. Without going into a great deal of detail, I would characterize science as a methodology that allows us to test our beliefs about how nature behaves with how nature actually behaves and to derive laws and theories [...]