"Novelist and social critic Siri Hustvedt takes aim at our dogmas in her essay “Delusions of Certainty” from her collection of nonfiction pieces A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind. In this sprawling essay, she explores the way doubt and skepticism go out the window when we’re being told what we want to hear about life, intelligence, technology and society."

"Our modes of inquiry, Hustvedt concludes, are supposed to take us into unknown territory where we’re likely to discover things that make us doubt the way we understand the world. However, it’s all too easy for us to use the trappings of empirical inquiry to validate what we already think; if we’re only conducting research to reinforce our biases, what we discover says more about our mindsets than about the universe."

Read more at [patheos.com]