Why People Believe Weird Things — A Crisis in Perception (Sagan & Shermer Deep Dive)

In this Deep Dive, we explore why otherwise intelligent people come to believe false, unsupported, or irrational ideas—and why those beliefs are so difficult to dislodge.Drawing from Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World and Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things, this episode examines the psychological, cultural, and systemic forces that make humans vulnerable to pseudoscience, superstition, and conspiracy thinking.Rather than focusing on individual ignorance, we look at how cognitive biases, social incentives, media structures, and institutional failures shape belief itself—and why critical thinking is not intuitive, but learned.This episode is part of Crisis in Perception, a long-form educational series using books as entry points to better understand how we misperceive the world, how systems actually work, and how skepticism and evidence-based reasoning help us navigate an increasingly confusing information landscape.If you’d like to support the continuation of this independent educational project, you can find Crisis in Perception on Patreon.