“Don’t Believe Everything You Believe” with Bertha Vazquez

We welcome Bertha Vazquez from the Center For Inquiry (CFI), who will be giving a talk, “Don’t Believe Everything You Believe”. 

Betty Leonard Community Room, Aptos Library

Synopsis:
We all think we’re good at thinking but we’re not. We all fall victim to logical fallacies and other mental shortcuts that may have kept our earliest hominid ancestors alive but do a disservice with the mountains of information now at our fingertips. Just like our human backs and knees aren’t perfect, our minds have flaws, too. The first step is humility; don’t believe everything you believe. There is an overwhelming amount of information that we each see on a daily basis. Learn the differences between the different types of misinformation and some of the steps to protect ourselves from all of it.

Bertha taught science to middle schoolers for 34 years in the Miami-Dade County public schools. She is the education director at The Center for Inquiry, an international nonprofit that promotes reason and science. She runs a teacher-led network of over 100 teachers who have presented over 400 professional development sessions for their fellow teachers in all 50 US states. Her multi-faceted approach to teaching climate science has been featured on NPR, in the New York Times, in Earth magazine, and in a book and film series by Lynne Cherry, Empowering Young Voices for the Planet. Bertha is the editor and contributing author of the book, On Teaching Evolution, published in 2021. A regular speaker at skeptical and humanist conferences, Bertha is a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.