Is the urban legend about Richard Gere and his fondness for gerbils really true?
It helps to use critical thinking when deciding if something that sounds farfetched is really true. There is a saying that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. The key word is “probably.” It is rational to base your world view on things that are likely to be true rather than on “outliers” (statistical anomalies), even though things that sound too good to be true sometimes defy logic and turn out to be true. Take the smoking issue for example. The preponderance of evidence is that smoking is bad for you. You may encounter a skeptic, however, who says his Uncle Horace smoked a pack a day, was never sick, and lived to 100. So who are you going to go with, the American Cancer Society or Uncle Horace? It is safe to say that the gerbil myth is nonsense and dismiss it. Nevertheless, I have encountered a surprising number of seemingly intelligent people who insist the gerbil myth is true. Common sense is not as widespread as we might hope. For more information on urban myth
