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Nov. 28, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:32
531 Logical Fallacies Part 1

The top forty of being naughty!

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Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
Steph, 27th, 28th, 28th of November 2006.
And we passed 100,000 downloads two days ago for this month.
So, that's good. We're growing.
Excellent. Now, I thought we had a great post two days ago on the board.
Because, of course, as I mentioned yesterday, in some of the excitement that is surrounding the...
Some of the excitement that is surrounding some of the outside, some aspects of the outside world coming into our little community.
Somebody has written a post-it I thought was great.
Since we're all being accused of being a cult, this I think is a wonderful piece of dry comedy.
So here it goes. As cult members, I think we need to know exactly where we stand to be sure of what our duties are as parishioners in the Church of Steph.
So... I thought it might be fun to define ranks for those of us enlisted in the Grand Molyneux Army.
Would it be based on the number of posts?
Or on the level of passion which is deployed in our defense of the great leader?
Or would it be based on a, quote, proof of intellectual loyalty?
This will all certainly have to be worked out.
But in the meantime, here are the categories I would come up with.
Top level. Minion.
The minion is angling for his chance come the day that the great leader gets capped, and so he has developed the capability of disagreeing with the great leader, but in such ways that it sounds like there is actually agreement.
He delegates his marching orders to his own favorite drones and, on occasion, acts as a stand-in for the great leader.
Level 2. Drone.
takes all his marching orders from either the great leader or from a minion and never ever disagrees with the great leader unless he has secretly allied with a minion he has developed a solid confidence in the doctrine of the great leader and preaches it without fail to everyone he knows level three sycophant Level 4.
Groupie. Groupies are budding sycophants, often over-enthusiastically declaring their love for the leader and mischaracterizing the great leader's doctrines in broad simplistic terms in an attempt to get noticed by the great leader or his favorite minions.
Sycophants act as mentors to groupies, schooling them in the basics of the doctrine and punishing them for their missteps.
Level 5.
Initiate. These are the lowest of the low.
Groupies and sycophants have done the job of luring initiates into the cult just enough to make them think they are here of their own free will.
Once initiatives are convinced that they want to be here all the time, they advance to groupie, where fellow groupies encourage their development towards sycophant This is all very complicated stuff, of course.
Only a well-schooled drone or minion should really have a full understanding of the various layers of psychological and philosophical conditioning that are necessary for the advancement and growth of the Molyneux nation.
For if this information spread to the broader society, it would surely be a deadly toxin capable of melting your eyeballs and rending your very flesh.
I think that's just great.
So thanks so much for the poster, who has occasionally described himself as humorless, Which I think is quite a funny statement.
So I'd like to spend a little bit of time back in the magical land of philosophy and talk about logical fallacies.
And I think this is nothing that I've made up and this is all pillaged from websites and logic books and stuff that I studied oh so many eons ago in philosophy classes, particularly in Aristotle.
But I always find it's worth going over again.
So if you've heard this stuff before, give me a shot, man.
Just give me a chance.
We will have a go over some of these logical fallacies.
They're well worth looking at.
At various points in your life.
I always get new things out of it.
For me, I read The Fountainhead every 10 years, and I read The Atlas Shrug maybe every 12 years.
I find that I get new stuff out of these books every time I read them.
And even, you know, when I look at my old novels, which we're kind of doing at the moment for a variety of reasons, I find there's sort of more stuff in there, just as when I listen to a dream analysis that I've done, I always go, oh, that's the answer!
That's what that's about! And, of course, the moment has passed, so I can't do anything about it.
This, you know, debate about how many of them there are, but there are about 40.
And don't be frightened.
I'll try and make it fun first.
But they're well worth having a look at and understanding.
So without sort of further ado, let's have a look at a couple of these.
So the first one is the famous ad hominem.
This is Latin. Ad hominem in Latin means against the man or against the person.
The ad hom is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author or of the person representing the claim or argument.
And this fallacy typically involves two steps.
First, an attack is made against the character of the person making the claim, her circumstances or her action is made, or the character, circumstances, or actions that the person is reporting the claim.
Second, this attack is taken to be evidence against the claim or argument the person in question is making.
So basically, person A makes claim X, person B makes an attack upon person A. Therefore, person A's This proposition is false.
And this, of course, is very common in the world and in society and politics and in debating.
This is very, very clear.
And some atheists will use this, right?
So I'm going to try and give examples from areas that are not obvious to us because logic is something that's very, very important, right?
Like if you go and see the movie Borat!
And you laugh at the pitiful superstitions that he wants the gypsy's tears to break a curse, and you laugh at the pitiful superstitions that he thinks that Jews can transform themselves into cockroaches, and ha-ha, gosh, how backward, and then he goes to the Pentecost revival, And, I mean, the sort of backswing of laughing at other people's cultures and then not seeing just how ridiculously freaky.
Like there's nothing going on in Borat's country that's as bizarre as a Pentecostal revival meeting.
And so it's just funny.
You laugh at other people's superstitions and then your own comes as a bit of a shock to you sometimes.
At least that's the case for me.
So I'm going to sort of use the opposite arguments so that you can see, you know, without the same emotional content where these debates are coming from, right?
So this would be something like thinking that this Haggard fellow who paid the male prostitute for massages and amphetamines or some sort of uppers, I think they were, And That because of the corruption of certain priests and the obvious moral iniquity of certain priests, and it's not the moral iniquity, I mean, go to a male prostitute and have all the drugs you want.
That's not immoral to me. I'm not saying it's high character, but it's not immoral.
The hypocrisy, of course, is attacking gay marriage at the same time as you're going to a gay prostitute.
Of course, psychologically, it's almost inevitable, right?
But it is not exactly noble.
So then you say, well, look at all these corrupt priests.
Of course there's no God.
I mean, look how corrupt the church is.
Look how many of the altar boys they're after.
Look at all the homosexuality.
Look at all the corruption and so on.
And that is also not...
It's an ad hominem attack.
It's also an ad hominem attack to say there can't be a God because there's so much evil in the world.
Now you can say that there can't be a virtuous God or God can't be virtuous if there's all this evil in the world and he commands us to intervene to get rid of evil and he doesn't and so on.
Then there's at least two moral standards and therefore we can't tell whether God is good.
We just know God is doing the opposite of what he tells us is good.
But there's lots of ways in which ad hominem attacks get people sort of kind of messed up, right?
So, that's a very, very important thing to do.
So, if someone, if some priest comes up to you and says, I believe that abortion is morally wrong, and you say, well, that's just because you're a priest, right?
So, that doesn't sort of make, that's not a rebuttal, right?
So, that's sort of ad hominem.
You can go on and on with this kind of stuff, but you'll see it quite a lot, right?
Now, the second one is ad hominem to coque.
Ad hominem to coque, which I thought was actually an Aztec god to begin with, but it's not the case.
What this is, is it's the flip-flop argument.
Right? So if your doctor, let's say you're talking to your lung doctor and your lung doctor says, dude, smoking is really bad for you.
You really shouldn't do it.
It's going to make you very sick, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And then you say, well, I don't want to get cancer, so I guess I'll not smoke.
And then the lung doctor says, well, he sort of breaks out his pack of Chesterfields, taps them on his knee and says, hey, I'm going to light up.
Do you want one? Then you say, well, I guess smoking isn't that bad because my lung doctor smokes.
So this is not...
Because a person's claim is false because something else that that person has said is inconsistent with that, then that's an example of saying that...
Like if in the past I had said, and somebody, a guy I knew about 10 years ago, When I was not an anarchist said that my arguments for anarchism are incorrect because 10 years ago I wasn't an anarchist.
Right? And so That's completely illogical.
I mean, it has no bearing on the truth value of a proposition.
Because otherwise, nothing would ever be true.
But we're all born not knowing that 2 plus 2 is 4.
And the first time we do long division, at least if you're anything like me, your head gets all spaghetti gooed and you feel queasy.
And you get it wrong.
So... And if you sort of go back even further, then the proposition, if I say that Santa Claus doesn't exist, maybe at one time I believe that, I can't remember if I did, but maybe one day I believe that Santa Claus did exist, then of course it would be perfectly logical to say, well, this proposition is now false because you said something differently previously.
Now, it is certainly important to acknowledge that The difference, the change in opinion, right?
I've certainly never hidden that I used to be a non...
I was a voluntary minarchist, whatever the hell that means.
I mean, as far as there should be taxation, but it should be voluntary.
There were some certain issues with the practicalities of my solution, but it would have no...
Going back and saying, well, you know, you used to be for the Iraq War, therefore your proposition that the Iraq War is immoral now is wrong, right?
And that's got nothing to do with it.
That's ad hominem to quoque.
Description of appeal to belief.
This line of reasoning is fallacious because it's stuff like, oh, I don't know, 85% of all Americans believe in God, therefore God must exist.
And this is a very common kind of thing.
Description of appeal to beliefs.
So widespread beliefs must be true.
Everybody knows. This is the argument.
Everybody knows it's common practice.
Everyone across the whole world believes X. You don't believe X. Therefore, I am going to put my arguments on X. I'm going to believe X because that's just the majority.
This is like majority rule.
There is a kind of sort of massive and lazy appeal to inertia here.
You know, like, well, everyone believes that, you know, democracy is the best system and everyone, like, every society in history has had taxation and blah, blah, blah.
And therefore, everyone believes in it, and it's common.
We'll get to appeal to common practice in a sec.
But people say, well, everyone, the whole world over, blah, blah, blah, therefore it must be true, right?
And that, of course, is completely fallacious.
As you can see, just looking back sort of in history, that people in the Middle Ages, they believed that the Earth was the center of the solar system.
Everybody believed that, and it turned out to be completely false, right?
And, of course, the same thing is going to occur, hopefully relatively soon, but sooner or later, is going to occur where people suddenly go, Hey, I can't believe people used to believe in a government and all this sort of nonsense, right?
I mean, they'll look back on our society the way that our society looks back on slavery and witch burning and so on.
Now, the description of the appeal to common practice is a little bit different.
X is a common action.
Therefore, X is right or moral or justified or good or noble or decent or whatever.
So, this is the idea that most people do it, therefore it is common sense, therefore it is the right thing, and who are you to blah blah blah, right?
So, for example, common practice is used for ethics, right?
So, every society has taxation, taxation is a common practice, therefore taxation is okay.
Or you're failing to draw the logical conclusions.
It's often used as kind of an excuse, right?
So if you're a university student, it's like, oh, there's this test.
I feel like cheating on it.
Well, everybody cheats on the test.
It's common practice. Therefore, it's okay in some way.
Everybody doesn't. To me, this also involves sort of failing to draw the logical conclusions, right?
So, everybody, people can logically, they think that they can logically say, democracy is the best system, and all politicians lie, right?
That is not exactly a very consistent position.
But all politicians lie, lying for politicians is a common practice, therefore, it's sort of different from whatever, whatever, right?
Like, if you had an employee who constantly lied to you, you'd fire him.
And if you had a supplier whose sales reps constantly lie to you, you would fire that supplier and not just say, can I get a different sales rep, but I don't want to do business with the supplier anymore.
But in the realm of politics, things are kind of different.
Now, another one that's interesting is the appeal to the consequences of a belief.
So the appeal to the consequences of a belief.
And this, of course, is very common in the realm of religion and of the state.
And so you say, well, the government is immoral and blah, blah, blah.
And then people say, well, but the consequences of getting rid of the government would be really, really bad.
And, of course, libertarians use this as well, I think, erroneously, right?
So they try to say that the consequences of getting rid of the government would be really, really good.
And whether those things are logical or not, there's no basis on the logical propositions that are being put forward, which is namely that the government is immoral.
So you can't prove that the government is immoral by saying people will be better off without the government.
I mean, it may be a consequence, but that's not a proof of the proposition.
So in the same way that people say, well, if we got rid of the government, there would...
Like you say that getting rid of the government would be immoral and logical and, you know, a good thing.
And they then say, well, getting rid of the government would cause civil war and starvation and sparrows mating with trees and all of the horrors in the world would rain down upon us.
That's nothing to do with your proposition.
It's a completely ridiculous argument.
The reason being, of course, one of the ways that you know that you're dealing with an ad hominem argument or with a fallacious logical response to an argument of yours is that it could be applied to anything.
If you have a sort of one-size-fits-all response, and I'm not saying you, but I mean if you're debating with someone, and like the ad hominem you can use on anyone.
I recently used it on Milton Friedman.
I think I had some good reasons for that, but the ad hominem attack you can use on anyone.
You don't really have to go into the difficult nature of actually sort of reasoning through, understanding the argument and debating and this and that.
You don't have to go through all of that, you know, admittedly not the easiest thing in the world to do.
You can just take your ad hominem attack and apply it to everyone.
There is, of course, the argument from offense, which we'll get to later, which is what you're saying is highly offensive to me, right, which I get quite a bit, right?
I mean, I'm sure you do too if you debate these issues with people also.
You can say that to anyone, right?
Somebody says 2 plus 2 is 4.
I'm highly offended by that.
That's incredibly offensive.
How insensitive are you?
That's bullshit! I mean, all of that kind of stuff.
You can say that to anything, right?
Everyone's been inconsistent at one time or another.
You can find any society where there's a common practice and you can, of course, take 51% or even the 20% that you know as the common practice, right?
So if you're a slave owner in the South in the early, I don't know, early 18th century, Then you can say, hell, everybody I know has me some slaves, has them some slaves.
What a terrible southern accent.
I really only have one foreign accent, so I just sort of mishmash around it.
I apologize to those in the south.
Let me throw in a complimentary yowl.
So he's going to look around and say, well, everyone around me owns slaves, it's common practice, blah, blah, blah.
Well, of course, your slaves don't own slaves, and you're simply looking at, you know, rich white plantation farmers in your country club, right?
So you can find whatever common practice you want.
You can go and join some sort of hot nipple wax drip and S&M group and say, well, everyone I know is into S&M, so it's common practice.
You just redefine yourself into whatever you want, but it has nothing to do with the logical or moral content of a proposition.
Now, there's also the logical fallacy of the favorable appeal to emotion.
The favorable appeal to emotion, or the appeal to a favorable emotion.
And what this is, it says, well, really good feelings are associated with X. Therefore, X must be true.
And you get this, of course, with people are happier when they believe in God.
And therefore, there must be a God.
Or therefore, you know, God must exist.
You get this, of course, in the realm of patriotism as well.
So people love their country, therefore their country must be virtuous.
It's the appeal to an associated emotion.
And this, of course, is the flip side of the negative thing, right?
Because if you say that positive emotions are associated with the validity of a proposition, or support the validity, or validate itself, right?
Good emotions or positive emotions validate a proposition, Then you are stuck.
This is the flip side of the argument from offense, which is that negative emotions invalidate a proposition, right?
So somebody's posted on the board, somebody who's in high dudgeon about my characterization of people who visit whores or prostitutes as lower self-esteem than people who don't.
He's saying, you know me better than I know myself.
And that, of course, is considered to put me in an arrogant position and this and that.
But it's got nothing to do with the proposition, right?
Nothing to do with the argument.
And you could say that about anyone, anyone who says anything about you.
It's like, oh, so you think that you know me better than you know myself, right?
The doctor says, "I think that you have an appendicitis." It's like, oh, you know my body better than I know my...
You could say that to anything. You don't actually have to work at sort of understanding a debate or anything.
You just get offended, and then people think that that's got something to do with the truth value of a proposition.
So if you go and hear...
Not you, but maybe you, maybe if you're still on the democratic side of things.
You go and hear some politician speak, right?
And you think, gosh, and this is sort of part of the whole Milton Friedman thing, right?
So you say, this guy, you hear this guy speak and he thunders about the evils of government and how you've got to throw out the bums in office and we're going to clean this town up and we're going to turn things around and so on, right?
And so you get riled up and it's like, yeah, yeah, those guys are bums, you know, and they are.
They lie to me and they have been stealing and they're bad people and so on.
So then he's like, let's get this guy in and let's get rid of the old guy, right?
Let's meet the new boss, not the same as the old boss.
And so then he feels that it's the right thing to do to vote for this guy because he feels good about voting it and he dislikes the current politicians and so on and so on and so on.
So you get that kind of stuff, of course.
And advertising is very, you know, like if you say to people, if you buy this magnetized wrist bracelet, you will get, you'll levitate, walk on water, speak to Jesus, speak to Vishnu as well, have Vishnu and Jesus argue with each other in your head and go and mow the lawn with your bare hands.
And people say, well, that's a damn good thing.
I want that. Because they want those...
Well, the proposition that it produces these things, that this metallic magnetized bracelet produces these things.
Well, it must be true, because I feel really good about what it's saying, what they're saying it will do.
Diets, of course, are very...
Anyway, so...
Appeal to fear!
Ah, the appear to fear!
The appeal to fear, also known as the war on terror.
So the appeal to fear is sort of the vague warning.
And so a certain why is presented, right?
So why is presented is the claim is generally produced fear.
The terrorists are out to get us.
Therefore, we need the Patriot Act, right?
This is the appeal to fear.
The terrorists are going to blow up your house, and they're going to rub sandpaper on the knees of your children, and they're going to violate your cat in cruel and unusual ways.
Therefore, we need the Patriot Act.
So people get frightened, and they go, oh, I'm telling you, no, no, no.
Patriot Act. In the religious world, of course, you must believe, they say, well, God must exist and you must believe that God exists because if you don't, you are going to burn in hell forever.
And in the academic world, this is also known as some things like, well, you can't be a libertarian, for God's sakes!
If you speak out about libertarianism and you're against the government, then if the dean hears about it, you're never going to get tenure.
So, you know, just accept that it's a bad thing to speak out against libertarianism.
This is the appeal from fear. This is, of course, how government works with this and the flattery thing, which we'll get to in a second.
The appeal to fear is a very common technique.
It's just designed to sort of make you feel uneasy.
And it's often combined with that homonym as well, right?
So somebody comes up to me and says, Steph, when you make a pronouncement, right?
So they'll sort of use the language.
So when I say X is true, and then they say, well, what you really mean is you believe X is true, as if that's not implicit, right?
I mean, I can't directly prove the movement of atoms in the world.
I'm going to put forward suppositions.
And then they say, they'll use sort of the ad hominem scare tactic words and so on.
It's like you're making pronouncements from on high and so on.
As if that's got anything to do with the truth value of the proposition.
Or, you know, they'll say that, you know, you're believing your own fantasy, and therefore, you know, that's got nothing to do with the truth value of the proposition.
I could be passing down judgments from Ahai, I could think that I am the many-armed concubine of some Asiatic god, but it still has no relevance on the truth value of my proposition.
People will do an enormous amount to avoid actually looking at the truth value of a proposition.
I mean, they'll kick up lots of storm and stress, storm and drang, and they will, you know, snip at you and bitch at you and whine at you and complain at you and get offended at you and get mad at you and get frustrated with you and get all these kinds of things and change the topic and switch, rather than simply look at the truth value of a proposition.
The reason for that is not because human beings are innately illogical.
It's just because they've been abused, right?
I mean, a clear thing that occurs when people have been abused and haven't dealt with it is they can't deal with logic very well.
Because they were brought up in an abusive situation, in an anti-logic situation, so then using logic and appreciating logic is very painful because it highlights for them the abuse that they experienced.
The appeal to flattery, right?
Person A is flattered by person B. Person B makes claim X. Therefore, meh, X is true.
This is the sycophant-y stuff, right?
So, ha, ha, ha, you just made a wonderful joke, my glorious boss, who is the wisest man I've ever experienced in business.
Now listen about that raise.
And this is also the case with sales can happen this way as well.
You look really good in those jeans, therefore you should buy them.
It can happen where you just go around praising people in the hopes that they will then accept your argument that will occur next, right?
So the appeal to flattery of this, of course, is very common in politics, where, you know, we're number one, the American people are the kindest and most generous, or the, you know, the Aztec people are the kindest and most generous, or the Native Americans were wonderful and kind when they were, you know, all murdering each other, one million of them in North America.
And, you know, this is appealed to flattery, right?
This is very common. Every time a politician goes and speaks to someone, right?
Veterans, right? The noble heroes who defended our freedom rather than the slaves who were forced to murder people or the sociopaths who voluntarily signed up to murder people.
It's just flattery. I mean, this is the constant rotating disco ball of political flattery we're all aware of.
And so this appeal to flattery is like, what I'm saying is more true because I'm flattering you.
And it's a sort of manipulation of the appeal to a positive emotion, right?
So whenever I talk to you and praise you, I make you feel good, and that's going to pump out some beta blockers and make you feel those endorphins are going to rush out, and then you're going to feel good, and that's going to lend you to be more...
Accepting or positive of what it is that I'm saying.
Now, there are tons of others. I'll try and get some more done this afternoon.
But it really is, I think, very, very important to spend some time looking through the sort of 40 or 50 logical fallacies, and they're not sort of discrete.
They're sort of commingled together.
Just because, well, you know, I guess for two reasons.
You know, for two reasons. One, I mean, if you want to get involved in philosophy, if you want to get involved, I mean, all of life is to some degree philosophy, all of life is to some degree sales, all of life is to some degree whatever, right?
I mean, these things overlap.
In many, many ways.
All of life is to some degree negotiation or argument or whatever.
And the successful negotiation of interpersonal conflict is a very great and positive skill to have from an economic standpoint.
So the reason that it's important to study philosophy and to learn these logical fallacies is so that you can make more money.
I absolutely guarantee you that if you're better at handling conflict and you're better at understanding where people are coming from, then that's why studying psychology and philosophy is an important thing.
You can make money without it, of course, and if you learn this stuff, you won't necessarily make money, but if you do put the two together, then you can go, you can go far, my son, my daughter, my brother, my sister.
But it's important to learn these kinds of things because you want to be good at what you do, right?
I mean, if you say, I want to drive a car, Then you don't want to blindfold yourself, right?
And if you say, I want to be a surgeon, you don't want to sort of pull out the chainsaw, you know, spin around 40 times and then go to town, right?
You kind of want to be good, especially in the realm of ethics and morals and politics and government and so on.
You want to be good at what you...
At what you do, particularly in this realm.
Because if you're bad in the realm of ethics, really bad things occur in your life.
And not just in your life, but in the world.
So, for me, it's more important that a philosopher be rigorous even than a surgeon.
A surgeon will only kill a few people or a few dozen people or a few hundred people.
But bad philosophy gets millions of people killed and enslaves six billion people the world over.
I'd say that you kind of want to be good at this, right?
If you're going to pick up the sort of philosophy, you better have some jujitsu fencing moves under your belt.
Because otherwise, you're just going to cut yourself.
And badly. And badly.
Yeah, you might sort of triumph over a few people and so on.
But if you bring up the sort of wisdom and the sort of philosophy and the sort of truth and the shield of reason...
Let me mix my words. The armor of integrity.
If you're going to pick up this sword, then you've kind of got to know what you're doing.
And that's why it's important to practice, right?
What do they say? How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
Well, practice. It's a joke from Walter Block, I think.
So you really want to know what you're doing with this kind of stuff.
It's like economics. It's like any sort of intellectual discipline.
If you're going to implicitly claim to a kind of knowledge, then you kind of got to know what you're doing.
If you're going to implicitly say, I know something about truth or freedom or reason or integrity or all of the endless things that I claim to have some knowledge of, then you kind of should.
Because otherwise it's sort of hypocritical, right?
I mean... It's really, really the wrong thing to do.
Which is why I'm really thankful that podcasting wasn't around when I was still a voluntary minarchist or a libertarian or an objectivist.
So if you're going to claim to have knowledge and you don't actually have that knowledge or you don't actually have a basic grounding in logical fallacies and all these other kinds of juicy things, then it's not really a very good thing to do.
It's not really a very good thing to do.
To sort of say, I'm a doctor.
You've got a crowd milling around and somebody's sort of flip-flopping around like a fish on the bottom of a boat.
And they say, is there a doctor?
And you come and you say, I'm a doctor.
I'm a doctor. I'm three doctors.
I'm board certified and me the doctor.
Then... People are going to say, well, this person knows something about medicine, so let's let them take care of it.
Right? So you kind of, it's like when you say about a drowning guy with like 10 people standing on a pier, don't worry, I'll save him.
And then you jump in and then you sort of swim past him.
Well, other people would have jumped in to save him if you hadn't said you were.
So you kind of got a moral culpability there and so on.
Right? So if you're going to start talking philosophy, which of course I highly, highly encourage naturally.
It's a wonderful, wonderful pursuit.
Best of the best. And leads to enormous happiness, peace of mind, security, serenity, joy, and anger, and all the good things we've talked about here.
If you want to be a philosopher, then you for sure need to start with the study of logic.
You absolutely, completely and totally need to start with the study of logic.
And the study of the scientific method wouldn't hurt.
A lot of people sort of want to jump in towards the end.
They want to get to the good stuff.
It's like, I'm done cutting up this frog.
I want to go take me out an appendix with some black and decker power tools.
Everybody wants to jump ahead.
I do too. This is all very, very common stuff.
But, you know, don't jump ahead.
Don't jump ahead. Don't start at the end, I say, while bringing up some of the basics in regards to Podcast 531.
But, of course, I did the intro to philosophy, which is all that kind of stuff, right?
But don't start at the end.
Don't start in the middle. Don't get to all of the juicy stuff like freedom and virtue and responsibility and integrity and all that without sort of the basics in logic.
Sort of an important thing to really get a handle on.
That's sort of one reason is that if you're going to do this, you want to do good.
You want to get into philosophy because you want to do good.
Good for you. That's fantastic.
But recognize that if you start swinging this stuff around and you don't know what you're doing, you're going to hurt yourself and others.
I really mean that in a way that is very fundamental.
It is blindfolded shooting around in a mall.
It is throwing a chainsaw off a balcony into a crowded street.
It is every nefarious act of irresponsibility that you could think of is what happens when you start philosophizing without knowing the basics about logical fallacies and so on.
Now, that's sort of one reason.
Now, the second reason may not mean as much to you.
And it may just be my particular perspective, but this is sort of what I see, is that you don't look that good.
From the outside, right?
You don't look that good.
You may think that you look good and you may think that you're looking real smart when you start tossing words around and you start getting mad at people and debating and throwing yourself in.
But to an experienced eye, it's totally obvious.
It's sort of what I was talking about. With psychology, it's the same sort of thing, right?
But it's pretty obvious what's going on that you don't know what you're talking about.
So because you don't know and haven't worked out these logical fallacies and your own impulses towards them, which we've all learned because this is exactly how we're taught in school and even to a large degree in university, and of course by our parents, If you haven't worked out this kind of stuff in your own mind and also in your own heart,
right, in the sort of emotional side of things that you want to look at your own tendencies and also clean up the messes that you've made in the past through the misuse of logic and through the misdirection of people's clarity of thinking through these techniques and so on, these manipulative techniques, if you sort of rush in, And immediately deploy, like in your first post or your tenth post or whatever, you immediately deploy like six logical fallacies.
It's pretty obvious, like from the outside, when you've worked with these things for like 20 years or more, I've sort of worked back and forth with these things in myself and in others.
If you sort of experience in that, then it's sort of exactly like...
It's exactly like you go to Beijing and you don't know Chinese, but you pretend to know Chinese, you know, by pretending that you can speak that language by sort of making up some vaguely offensive, I'm cold and constipated kind of Chinese caricature of speech.
Right now, to somebody else who doesn't know Chinese...
It may sound vaguely believable, right?
And you can see there's some comedians, Mel Brooks is one of them, there's some others who've got quite a specialty of imitating foreign languages.
And they can sort of pick any foreign language and speak, and it's going to sound like they're speaking that language.
Of course, they have no clue, but it sounds German, right?
They've got the horrible glottal stops, and they've got whatever, like the phonemes and the parts of speech.
They're all in there, right?
And it sounds believable to somebody else who doesn't speak Chinese, right?
And so you go to Beijing and you're earnestly speaking Chinese to a bunch of people and they don't know that you're not speaking Chinese because they themselves don't speak Chinese.
But to somebody who does speak Chinese, you look kind of bizarre, right?
And kind of not really...
How am I going to put this?
Not really... Not really very balanced, right?
I mean, not really. Somebody who goes to China and walks around pretending to speak Chinese because they can make similar sounds and they can, you know, in the way that people talk about economics and they talk about psychology and they talk about philosophy, all these very difficult disciplines.
Only I find them difficult, at least.
They use some of the words, right?
And we've all seen sort of salespeople who do this or managers who do this.
Stephen Colbert talks about the internets, right?
I mean, that's pretty funny. Obviously, no clue what he's talking about.
At least that's the joke. But he uses the term and thinks that this is a very common kind of thing, right?
And if you have some expertise or training or history or education in this kind of area, then...
When people come in pretending to speak Chinese, and you actually do speak Chinese, and then these people get upset, and you also speak the language that they really do speak, right?
So if you speak English, go pretend to speak Chinese.
The Chinese person also speaks English.
Well, how are you supposed to respond to it?
The only thing that my initial response is, learn Chinese.
If somebody comes at me, if I speak Chinese, and pretends to speak Chinese, and I respond to them like, what are you doing?
This is a very bizarre thing that you're doing.
And then they turn to me in English and say, why aren't you answering my argument in Chinese?
Why aren't you answering my Chinese argument?
Well, it's because the only thing that I can sort of say in response is, well, learn Chinese.
I mean, that would be a lot better than pretending you know Chinese.
And so when you come into an intellectual debate, and I would say that the quality of the debates at Free Domain Radio is extraordinarily high, and that's more other people than me, I think, but if you come into a debate, If you want to go and have a dinner party at people's house and they speak Chinese, don't go and pretend to speak Chinese.
It's kind of a humiliating thing to do to yourself.
Right? Because, and it's, you know, it's emotionally volatile because what's going to happen is people are going to try and be nice about it, but fundamentally, you just look kind of weird, right?
I mean, if you don't know the basics, right?
I'm not saying you've got to agree with my philosophy or anything like that, or I don't really think it's my philosophy.
I like to think of it as philosophy, which I'm struggling at or trying to get right.
But you don't...
It doesn't mean you have to agree with anything that I say, but it does mean that you have to understand logical argument, right?
Because this is the point of this show, right?
It really fundamentally is about freedom through reason, right?
The logic of personal and political liberty.
It's about logical argument.
It's about the scientific method in the pursuit of wisdom.
And so if you want to come in and debate...
Great. You know, all we're saying, or at least all I'm saying, is spend a day or two.
I mean, we're not saying you've got to go get a PhD in philosophy, but at least spend a day or two looking up some sort of logical fallacy stuff, right?
That's all, right? Because this is philosophy, right?
So philosophy is about logic, and logic is a skill that needs to be learned, particularly because it's taught so badly.
But that's sort of all I'm saying, is learn a little bit about, so that you can be listened to with respect, right?
Because that's what I want.
I want you to be listened to with respect.
I want to listen to people with respect.
Because what happens is, you know, and this is not, I'm saying all the time, but it certainly does happen, That somebody starts yelling at me in Chinese, and I know that they're just faking, that I don't really know Chinese, right?
And then they stop, and I don't have much to say, because I don't even know where to begin other than say, go learn Chinese, right?
And then if I say...
And so I pause, and they say, ha!
I got you there, didn't I? You don't have much to say now, do you, Mr.
I-know-Chinese-so-well, right?
And it's like, well, okay, but you don't know Chinese?
Or, you know, if I come back and say, well, let me start off with your basic syntax.
They say, oh, don't you be condescending to me and deal with the argument that I'm making, not the form in which I'm making it.
It's like, but if your argument has no form or is riddled with logical inconsistencies, there is no content to deal with, right?
It's just an ad hominem attack or something, something, but there's no content to deal with.
So I can't, and the people say, oh, I guess you can't deal with my content because my reasoning is so immense and powerful and great.
Somebody just walked past my car while I'm podcasting.
I just don't want to get into the conversation about why were you speaking into a high-quality microphone in your car?
Or if I say, you know, you can't speak Chinese or philosophy, and then they'll say, well, you know, you're not dealing with my argument and all this kind of stuff.
And I want to deal with your argument.
I want to have people correct me in terms of logic and correct me in terms of syllogisms.
I really, really want that.
That's a wonderful thing. That's a great growth in learning for me.
But if you sort of show up at the scientific conference with a bunch of random scribbles and say, now can I have the Nobel Prize?
In physics, people...
And then you say, well, why isn't anyone critiquing my thesis?
It's because it's a bunch of random scribbles, right?
And this is not saying you're dumb.
It just means that you've never been taught or haven't learned or haven't ever been exposed to some sort of the basic logical arguments or logical fallacies that are just, you know, the basics to know.
And so everyone thinks that they're an expert until they start really looking into it.
And that certainly has been my experience.
It took me 20 years to come up with anything useful.
And I don't think that I'm the dullest star in the constellation.
So, that's all I'm saying.
You know, just have some respect for the challenges of the debates and the challenges of the knowledge.
Have some respect for the knowledge that people have gained over many years of study, and at least if you're going to come in, learn the basics of Chinese syntax so that your argument can be dealt with in a positive manner, because the fact that people aren't answering you might not be because you have won the debate.
That's all I'm saying.
Thank you so much to the gentleman who posted a kind donation yesterday.
It came at a good time because I was getting a bit weary of some of the stuff.
So I really do appreciate that.
And it broke a bit of a dry spell.
So as you start cooking through this stuff...
If you haven't donated and you're on podcast 531 or whatever this is, I think that might be a little parasitical.
I'll be perfectly frank with you.
I think that you might not be doing a good thing there, right?
Because there's a lot of effort and time and money that goes into these podcasts.
If you've come this far and you've listened to, you know, hundreds and hundreds of hours of podcasts and you haven't coughed up even a shackle, I got to tell you, I don't think that's a very good thing to do.
So thank you so much for listening.
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