The Invisible Gorilla:
The book The Invisible Gorilla and other Ways or Intuition deceives us by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, published by Crown, New York, 2010 was reviewed in Seeing and Thinking in the Mist Aude Oliva SCIENCE vol. 329 August 27, 2101.
I shall not have time to read the book, but it looks crackerjack. The review points out some things that the book explains. One is that we can be distracted so we do not see things to an amazing degree. Another is that we tend to fill in blanks in our memories that we are unaware of.
They point out that a very confident person can impose his opinion on others even in the absence of better evidence and logic. That has happened to me so many times that I thought everybody knew it.
The issue that struck me was that if you take a number of people with an opinion that they are not very convinced of and have them talk about it, there emerges a group opinion that is far stronger than any individual opinion before the discussion.
Take that one step further and have everybody believe something on the basis of no evidence at all and you begin to describe the world I see. You know. Things like the old witch trials.
What is lacking is a suggestion of what to do if you know something that is contradictory to almost universal opinion. How do you get a hearing? Alas no suggestion seems forthcoming. There is only the caution that you yourself may be deceived. I thought everybody knew that, too.
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