Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

Life, like evolution and natural selection, ultimately doesn’t care about what’s true. It cares about what works.

Believing that reason and logic are all that matter is like imagining that a great city is only about its present, that the past does not matter and plays no role in shaping it

It turns out there are excellent reasons for your eyes and brain to do all this filtering. Indeed, to see reality clearly would leave us worse off, not better. Our eyes and brain are not in the truth business; they are in the functionality business, and it turns out that discarding nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and sixty bits of data out of every billion is extremely functional

Life, like evolution and natural selection, ultimately doesn’t care about what’s true. It cares about what works.

self-deception can sometimes be functional—it enables us to accomplish useful social, psychological or biological goals. Holding false beliefs is not always the mark of idiocy, pathology or villainy.