All Episodes
Previous Next
Nov. 28, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
55:11
532 Logical Fallacies Part 2
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Alright, let us plow on with the continuation of logical fallacies, number, I don't know, 15 or 10 or something like that.
This is called the Description of Appeal to Novelty.
Oh, by the way, nizkor.org forward slash features forward slash fallacies.
I forgot to mention where this list is generated from.
This guy's got some good examples, definitely worth working through, and he's got some good dialogues which illustrate these sorts of issues.
The appeal to novelty is a fallacy that occurs when it's assumed that something is better or correct simply because it is new.
And so you've got advertisements for your new improved, right?
They always say this in TV land, all new, right?
It's all new, an all new episode of X. It's like, what, are they going to mix up the new and the old?
Who knows?
And here's an example this guy gives between a professor and a student.
The professor says, So you can see that a new and better morality is sweeping the nation.
No longer are people with alternative lifestyles ashamed.
No longer are people caught up with the outmoded moralities of the past.
Well, what about the ideas of the great thinkers of the past?
Don't they have some good points?
A good question. The answer is that they have had some valid points in their own barbaric times.
But those are old, moldy moralities from a time long gone.
Now is the time for new moralities, progress, and all that you know.
So you would say that the new moralities are better Because they are newer.
Prof. Exactly.
Just as the dinosaurs died off to make way for new animals, the old ideas have to give way to new ones.
And just as humans are better than dinosaurs, the new ideas are better than the old.
So newer is literally better.
And this is also known as ad misericordium, which sounds like a musical instrument played somewhere on the banks of the Mediterranean.
The appeal to pity.
An appeal to pity is a fallacy in which a person substitutes a claim intended to create pity for evidence in an argument.
The form of the argument is as follows.
1. P is presented with the intent to create pity.
Therefore, claim C is true.
This line of reasoning is fallacious because the pity does not serve as evidence for a claim.
This is extremely clear in the following case.
You must accept that 1 plus 1 equals 46.
After all, I am dying!
While you may pity me because I'm dying, it would hardly make the claim true.
This is, of course, a little bit different from the consequences of a belief, which is more of an objective negative that occurs from a belief.
This is sort of when you're pressured not to tell the truth because somebody else is going to feel very, very sad.
So, arguments, here's an example of appeal to pity.
Jill, he'd be a terrible coach for the team.
Bill, he had his heart set on the job, and it would break his heart if he didn't get it.
Jill, well, I guess he'll do an adequate job.
And in a job interview, I'm positive that my work will meet your requirements.
I really need the job since my grandmother is sick.
So, also, I should receive an A in this class.
After all, if I don't get an A, I won't get the fellowship that I want.
This is also known as ad populum.
Sorry, this one, also known as ad populum, description of appeal to popularity.
Most people approve of X or have a favorable emotions towards X. Therefore, X is true.
The basic idea that a claim is accepted as being true simply because most people are favorably inclined towards the claim.
More formally, the fact that most people have favorable emotions associated with the claim is substituted in place of actual evidence for the claim.
A person falls prey to this fallacy if he accepts a claim as being true simply because most other people approve of the claim.
And this is similar to appeal to belief, appeal to common practice, and so on.
And here's some example.
My fellow Americans, there has been some talk that the government is overstepping its bounds by allowing police to enter people's homes without the warrants traditionally required by the Constitution.
However, these are dangerous times, and dangerous times require appropriate actions.
I have in my office thousands of letters from people who let me know, in no uncertain terms, that they heartily endorse the war against crime in these United States.
Because of this overwhelming approval, it is evident that the police are doing the right thing.
I read the other day that most people really like the new gun control laws.
I was sort of suspicious of them, but I guess if most people like them, then they must be okay.
Anyway, there's some more there.
The appeal to ridicule, also known as the appeal to mockery, the horse laugh, and I would sort of say the ass's laugh.
The appeal to ridicule is a fallacy in which ridicule or mockery is substituted for evidence in a, quote, argument.
This line of, quote, reasoning has the following form.
X, which is some form of ridicule, is presented, typically directed at the claim.
Therefore, claim C is false.
It should be noted that showing that a claim is ridiculous through the use of legitimate methods such as the non-fallacious argument can make it reasonable to reject the claim.
One form of this line of reasoning is known as the reductio ad absurdum, reducing to absurdity.
In this sort of argument, the idea is to show that a contradiction, a statement that must be false, or an absurd result follows from a claim.
For example, quote, Bill claims that a member of a minority group cannot be a racist.
However, this is absurd. Think about this.
White males are a minority in the world.
Given Bill's claim, it would follow that no white males could be racist.
Hence, the Klan, blah, blah, blah, blah, are not racist.
So, that's the reduction to an absurd situation is something that can be valid, but the appeal to ridicule, here's some examples the guy gives.
Sure, my worthy opponent claims that we should lower tuition, but that's just laughable.
Support the ERA? Sure, when the women start paying for the drinks, ha ha ha ha.
Those wacky conservatives, they think a strong military is the key to peace.
And this is quite often used in arguments, so keep your eyes peeled.
The appeal to spite. The appeal to spite fallacy is a fallacy in which spite is substituted for evidence when an argument is made against a claim.
This line of reasoning, quote, reasoning has the following form.
Claim X is presented with the intent of generating spite.
Therefore, claim C is false or true.
So here's an example.
Bill, I think that Jane did a great job this year.
I'm going to nominate her for the award.
Dave, have you forgotten last year?
Remember that she didn't nominate you last year?
Bill, you're right.
I'm not going to nominate her.
Or Jill, I think Jane's idea is a really good one and will really save a lot of money for the department.
Bill, maybe.
Remember how she showed that your paper had a fatal flaw when you read it at the convention last year?
Jill, I'd just forgotten about that.
I think I'll go with your idea instead.
Or here's another example.
Bill claims that the Earth revolves around the Sun, but remember that dirty trick he pulled on you last year?
Now, doesn't my claim that the Sun revolves around the Earth make sense to you?
This can also be called the appeal to hypocrisy or, you know, past bad behavior, the appeal to the other sorts of ideas.
Appeal to tradition. The appeal to tradition is also known as the appeal to the old.
Old ways are best, fallacious appeal to the past, appeal to age, and so on.
And sort of the opposite of the one that we talked about earlier, which in the new is better.
You know, X is old or traditional, therefore X is correct or better.
So obviously age doesn't have a bearing on the truth.
Either newness, less age, or tradition, more age, has no relevance to the truth value of any propositions whatsoever.
Unless, of course, you're saying old wine is better.
I mean, whatever. Old wine is more valuable.
But that's not really a test of the proposition, but a test of the content of the proposition, namely the wine.
So, sure, he says, here's an example.
Sure, I believe in God. People have believed in God for thousands of years.
And so it seems clear that God must exist.
After all, why else would the belief last so long?
Of course this mode of government is the best.
We've had this mode of government for over 200 years, and no one's talked about changing it in all that time, so it has to be good.
Anyway, there's lots of other examples here.
The bandwagon, also known as peer pressure.
The bandwagon is a fallacy in which a threat of rejection by one's peers, or peer pressure, is substituted for evidence in a, quote, argument.
This line of, quote, reasoning has the following form.
One. Person P is pressured by his or her peers or threatened with rejection.
Two. Therefore, Person P's claim, X, is false.
Joe. Bill, I know that you think that 1 plus 1 is 2, but we don't accept that sort of thing in our group.
Bill. Oh, I was just joking.
Of course I don't believe that.
And, of course, the pressure from a particular group has no bearing on the truth of the proposition that 1 plus 1 is 2.
Bill, I like classical music and I think it's of higher quality than most modern music.
Jill, that stuff is for old people.
Dave, yeah, only real wussies listen to that crap.
Besides, anthrax rules.
It rules! Bill, well, I don't really like it that much.
Anthrax is much better. Bill thinks that welfare is needed in some cases.
His friends and the young Republicans taunt him every time he makes his views known.
He accepts their views in order to avoid rejection.
Begging the question.
This one can be a really exciting challenge.
I remember all of these from my days as a debater.
This is also known as circular reasoning, reasoning in a circle, or a petitio principi.
Begging the question is a fallacy in which the premises include the claim that the conclusion is true, or directly or indirectly assume that the conclusion is true.
This sort of reasoning typically has the following form.
Premises in which the truth of the conclusion is claimed, or the truth of the conclusion is assumed, either directly or indirectly, therefore claim C, the conclusion is true.
So here is, you can't sort of beg the question.
You can't assume the answer in pursuit of the answer.
So for instance, God must exist.
How do you know? Because the Bible says so.
Why should I believe the Bible?
Because the Bible was written by God.
Or, if such actions were not illegal, then they should not be prohibited by the law.
Or, the belief in God is universal.
After all, everyone believes in God.
Or, interviewer, your resume looks impressive, but I need another reference.
Bill, Jill can give me a good reference.
Interviewer, good. But how do I know that Jill is trustworthy?
Bill, well, I can vouch for her.
So here you get the sort of circularity of the reasoning.
So these and other exciting...
Debates or debating techniques or logical fallacies are very, very important, in my opinion, to learn and to understand so that you can more clearly go on with your debates in a productive and positive manner.
Off we go into the wild blue logic.
All right, it's Steph. Hope you're doing well.
We are going to continue down our merry path of logical fallacy-ization exploring, and we will, I think, finish up on this drive.
It really depends... How many tangents, what the traffic is like, and what the full moon of podcasting gods and devils are going to do to my brain during the beginning, nay the middle, and as you know, eventually we usually do get to.
So, the next one we'll just touch on very briefly because it's not too relevant to most of the stuff that goes on in Free Domain Radio because it involves facts.
And this is the magical world of statistics, and statistics are subject to more manipulations than a bag full of Chinese gymnasts.
There's lies, damned lies, and statistics, as you may have heard the quote.
Statistical sampling, of course, is relatively horrible, because if you sort of, you know, there's a couple of things, you're probably aware of these, but I'll just go off them briefly.
There's a couple of things that you may have heard of, like, if you're sort of, if you're dragging a...
If you're looking for a whole bunch of balls, and in a bag, or in a pit, or a crater, there's a whole bunch of plastic balls, and a whole bunch of metal balls, and you drag a...
You say, oh, I want to find out how many balls there are, and what kind they are, and you drag a magnet through.
Why, then, you're not going to notice, as you pull the magnet out, with all the balls stuck to it, that there's, in fact, any plastic balls in there, and so on.
And you may remember this...
I think it was James Carville who came up with this line about some woman who was suing Clinton.
Paula Jones, her name was. And he said, well, it's amazing what you get when you drag $100 through a trailer park, right?
So he was obviously, there was a whole load of logical non-arguments, or sorry, illogical quote arguments in that statement.
But one of the things he's trying to say is that this is a biased sample because of the money that's involved, right?
So, you can, you know, this old thing is like if you send a poll around and say, oh, I want to find out what the American public thinks about gun control, and you send your poll sort of questions to the NRA, well, then you're going to get a pretty biased sample back anyway.
You don't have to go back over this too long.
I'm sure you're fairly aware of all of this.
The burdens of proof, also known as the appeal to ignorance.
Basically, we talked about this to some degree in the podcast on agnosticism.
We also talked about it in other podcasts as well.
But the burden of proof is a fallacy in which the burden of proof is put on the wrong side of the argument.
So I say invisible spiders exist and they can't be detected in any way, and then I say, well, you can't disprove it, and so the proposition stands as a possibility at least, even if so.
We'll call it even and call it a draw, right?
But this, of course, is not the case, right?
Whoever has the burden of proof is obligated to provide evidence for that position.
If I put forward a proposition, it's my job to come up with logic or evidence for it, and so on.
So burdens of proof, psychic powers, right?
I think that psychic powers exist.
Well, how do you know?
It's like, well, no one's been able to prove that they can't.
Well, that's not enough, right?
I mean, you cannot prove that God does not exist, so he does, and so on.
Now, there's a sort of subset of the ad hominem called circumstantial ad hominem.
And this is a fallacy in which you attempt to attack a claim by asserting that the person making the claim is simply doing so out of self-interest.
right, simply doing so out of self-interest.
And this can have many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many.
And it doesn't, so, you know, if I say, if I'm a senator and I say that the dam should be built in my state, well, of course, I mean, it's like, well, why would you believe that?
Because it's just his state.
He obviously just wants the dam to be built in his state for his political blah blah blah and all the other reasons he's come up with the nonsense.
That is actually, however true that feels, that is a logical fallacy.
The sort of argument saying that somebody has a self-interested explanation is not really the case, right?
It may lead you to be a little bit more skeptical, but it's not, you know.
If I say 1 plus 2 is 2, but I'm a Republican and therefore it's false, that obviously doesn't make any sense, right?
So you can't really make that to be a sort of logical way of approaching it.
So, if you hear some uniformed general say that we need more military spending, it's wrong, but it's not because he's a general, right?
So, you don't want to sort of pin it on the uniform, so to speak, like an anti-medal of an arco-capitalist, whoa, we want to be free, kind of thing.
Or, you know, some rich guys.
You see this as a comic effect or sort of pseudo-bitter comic socialist effect in movies and so on where a bunch of fat cats are sitting around saying, yeah, we need tax breaks for the rich.
And it's like, well, of course you say that because they're rich and therefore tax cuts are bad and all this kind of stuff, right?
So this stuff is pretty common, but you don't want to fall for it, right?
You always want to go back to the logic, the argument, at least in my suggestion, the argument for morality, the reversibility, the universality, the fact that if somebody doesn't make a universal claim, then it's just an opinion and it means nothing and so on, or at least it doesn't mean anything in terms of anything that would be binding on you.
So, just be careful of this one, because there's a certain kind of skepticism and almost bitterness in this kind of thing, where we see people who are motivated by their own self-interest to put forward certain propositions, and we dismiss those propositions because we so clearly see the self-interest.
But that is a logical fallacy that does not disprove an argument.
Because, of course, really, when you get right down to it, and the problem is with universal, like, you know that these arguments are fallacious because they're universal, right?
So you could argue that anyone who puts forward any proposition is doing so because of some reason of self-interest, right?
That they must prefer to do it in a pseudo-deterministic kind of way.
Ooh, he's out there tweaking the determinist.
Don't do that. Don't go for the tangent.
But everybody has a motive for saying what it is that they're saying, right?
So you could say, well, you know, Steph is just obsessed with free, with anarcho-capitalism or, you know, dominating weaker board members or whatever you want to say.
And that's why Steph puts out his podcasts and so on.
And, of course, that bypasses the whole excitement of trying to find a logic, which may not be as hard to find as I'd like in my proposition.
So you want to be careful of that one.
That's not a good, it's not a good criteria.
So, the fallacy of composition.
This is a bit more tricky.
This is a little bit more tricky.
You commit this fallacy when a conclusion is drawn about a whole based on the features of constituents when, in fact, no justification is provided for that inference.
And there's two kinds.
They're pretty similar. Let's just go straight to the example.
You can go and read this on the website that I mentioned in this podcast, actually.
I guess I'm going to stitch these two together.
But here's an example.
A main battle tank uses more fuel than a car.
Therefore, the main battle tanks as a whole use up more of the available fuel in the world than do all the cars, right?
Obviously, you're leaving out a pretty key thing, which is how often are they driven and how many of them are there, right?
So fuel consumption alone does not determine overall fuel consumption of the planet, right?
So you say a tiger eats more food than a human being.
Therefore, tigers as a group eat more food than do all the humans on the earth.
Atoms are colorless.
Cats are made of atoms, so cats are colorless, right?
So you really have to watch this.
This is certainly one of my many pets that I have to sort of take care of and really make sure that I don't...
Kind of fall into this pit, right?
This is a real temptation for me.
So there's tons of examples of this kind of stuff.
But it's where you take a particular characteristic of a subset, magnify it to a superset, and retain the same characteristics magnified, whereas the magnification may not be relevant.
See? It's so much better when I give you examples rather than try and explain it myself.
Isn't it? All right.
Confusing cause and effect.
This is another one.
The general form is A and B regularly occur together, therefore A is the cause of B. There's a lot of details to get into about this one, and I don't want to get into too many of them, but I'll just give you a couple of examples, and you can go and look up and enjoy the logic trees.
So you say, well, You know, you have some debate with some guy, and you say, well, this new music, this new rap, thrash, ska, country, metalhead nonsense is causing the youth to become corrupt, right?
So this rap stuff is always tell the kids to kill the cops, do drugs, abuse women, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and the kids shouldn't be doing that sort of stuff.
We ought to ban that music, right?
So then you say, okay, well, so if we ban the music, that's going to get rid of all the sexism and so on and so on and so on, right?
And you're sort of kind of questioning, you're sort of putting the cause and effect, right?
So you're saying, well, the youth is, the kids are not alright.
The youth is a bad seed, right?
Youth are bad people.
I don't like the looks of those teenagers, as the old guy says in The Simpsons.
And you say, well, here's, you know, this rap music is causing it, right?
Because as, let's just say, as the general morals of the youth decay, rap music increases.
So you say, ah, it's the rap music that's doing it.
But, of course, there is no cause and effect that's clear from that statement, right?
It could well be that there's another factor, the state, the church, sorry, there's a family, excuse me, there's another factor that is causing the moral decay of which The rap music is but a symptom, right?
So this confusion of cause and effect, a little bit more occurs in political, statistical, rewind, statistical debates, but still, it can occur in other kinds of ethical debates as well.
I don't, because I really try and work from first principles, I don't think I fall prey to this one a whole lot.
You know, I've probably committed at least one of these, if not half a dozen, throughout the course of the podcast series, and that's why I'm always so appreciative when people point out an error, right, so that I can sort of correct it and move on with something that's a little bit more together, more centralized, more correct.
Okay, the fallacy of division.
The fallacy of division is committed when a person infers that what is true of a whole must also be true of its constituents, and the justification for that inheritance is not provided, right?
So the whole or X has properties A, B, C, therefore the parts also have properties A, B, C, and so on.
Not valid. Not good.
Double plus ungood.
I mean, it's fine, but you have to provide the inferent justification.
Here's an example. This ball is blue, therefore the atoms that make it up are also blue.
A living cell is organic material, so the chemicals that make up that living cell are also organic materials.
Bill lives in a large building.
Therefore, his apartment must be large!
Huge! So I think you sort of see the idea, right?
Americans use a whole lot more electricity than Africans, right?
So Bill, an American who lives in a shack in the woods, uses more electricity than Bob, who lives in a modern house in South Africa.
So again, it's the group as a whole broken down to each of its constituent parts.
You smooth out the irregularities and so on, and you sort of say that each component part has the same characteristics that are aggregated to the whole.
This is not good.
The false dilemma. So the false dilemma is also known as black and white thinking.
Instead of fallacy, you use the sort of following pattern of, quote, reasoning.
Either claim X is true or claim Y is true, when X and Y could both be false, therefore claim Y is false, right?
Claim Y is false, and therefore claim X is true, right?
So that's not good, right?
So then...
It's sort of like saying this, 1 plus 1 is 4, or 1 plus 1 is 12.
Well, it's certainly not the case that 1 plus 1 is 4, therefore, 1 plus 1 must equal 12.
But of course, both of them could be false.
So, Bill is dead, or he is alive.
And this can work, right? If it is sort of a binary thing, it works fine.
Bill is either dead or he's alive.
Well, Bill is not dead, therefore, Bill is alive.
And this is something that, here's an example, right?
So one person says about his wife, my wife and I both support prayer in public schools.
And his wife says, hey, I never said that.
And Bill said, well, you're not an atheist, are you?
As if, the moment that you don't support prayer in public schools, you're instantly an atheist.
Well, of course, if you don't support, it is perfectly possible to not support prayer in public schools and not be an atheist, right?
You could be a deist. So there's lots of possibilities there, but this kind of thing is pretty common in a lot of political debates because there's a lot of ad hominem stuff and all that.
It's the old have you stop beating your wife kind of situation.
So, this is another one where you sort of get stuck with these impossible alternatives or if it's not this, then it's that.
It's the sort of not ambiguity.
And you'll get a lot of this stuff.
Libertarians go a little bit sort of crazy at this kind of stuff.
They're like a sort of hummingbird attacking a window, attacking a mirror a little bit.
Because this stuff doesn't work so well when you start slithering into the grey areas of exactly when does a child become a moral agent as an adult.
It's not like one nanosecond, they're not 100%.
And then they are 100%.
Like, when did you learn to ride a bike?
Well, it wasn't one moment when you couldn't and one moment when you could.
And when did you fall in love and blah, blah, blah, right?
So this kind of stuff, this sort of either or black or white thinking doesn't work so well in those kinds of areas.
Now there's another one here called the gambler's fallacy.
The gambler's fallacy.
So X has happened.
X departs from what is expected to occur or to be on average over the long term.
Therefore, X will come to an end soon.
Right? So, you know, this is like, well, normally there's no depression.
Normally, there's no depression, or you could sort of say like in economics, right?
Or normally, people's incomes, like for the last 200 years, people's incomes have gone up.
Now, for the past 10 or 15 years, real wages have not gone up at all.
Therefore, Real wages are going to start going up again soon because this is a deviation from the norm.
This is also the case if you're a gambler and you haven't run one for a while, you're going to feel that your luck is about to change.
This is a complete fallacy.
Every time you roll a dice, the whole thing is reset.
The odds of getting a six when you're rolling a dice don't increase.
When you haven't rolled a six in a while.
So this one is something that...
It's one of the things that keeps the political system alive, right?
It's this idea that every condition is temporary, and everything's going to change over time, and things are going to even out, and so on.
So that's nothing to base your logic on, right?
Because, of course, it doesn't take into account other factors that may have denormalized the situation or changed the situation.
All right, here's another one.
The genetic fallacy.
Now, a genetic fallacy is a line of reasoning, I'll quote reasoning, in which the perceived effect of the origin of a claim or thing is taken to be evidence that discredits the claim or the thing itself.
And that is, again, this is something that can slip in pretty, pretty easily, right?
So it's something like this.
Bill claims that 1 plus 1 is 2.
However, my parents brought me up to believe that 1 plus 1 is 5, so Bill must be wrong.
And that is sort of the origin of things and the longevity of things a little bit where this is considered to be something that's illogical, right?
The current Chancellor of Germany, you might argue, was in the Hitler Youth at age 3 years old.
With that sort of background, his so-called reform plan must be a fascist program.
I was brought up to believe in God, and my parents told me God exists, so he must.
Sure, the media claims that Senator X was taking kickbacks, but we all know about the media's credibility, don't we?
This is all logical fallacies, right?
Ah, the joyful guilt by association, also known as the bad company fallacy, or the company that you keep fallacy.
So here you reject a claim simply because it is pointed out that people you dislike accept the claim.
So it could be that you are a Democrat who likes tax reductions, but it's pointed out that the Republicans like tax reductions and therefore you abandon it because people you dislike Have the same opinion,
right? So in the anarchy world, there is anarcho-capitalists and anarcho-syndicalists or left-wing socialist anarchists.
There are anarchists who believe in property rights, which is the NCAP or anarcho-capitalist perspective.
And then there are socialist anarchists who would oppose a state and would oppose any form of property rights.
And so I would be sort of not too logical in saying, well, I oppose the state, but these left-leaning anarcho-syndicalists also oppose the state, but they oppose property rights as well, so I'm not going to oppose the state because these people who I disagree with or dislike or whatever, I wouldn't say I dislike them or just disagree with them, that they have a position which I also share, so I'm going to get rid of it, right?
And next we have the hasty generalization.
And this is when a sort of startling or frightening or whatever, it could be a positive kind of event or occurrence, leads you to generalize over the group as a whole.
This is also known as bigotry or racism or whatever.
And it is also something that occurs when you haven't processed your childhood history and something that occurs in your adult life can trigger for you these memories of your history.
And that can end up propelling you sort of back into the past, but you don't know it, so you come to generalizations about the present.
So if I'm, you know, driving along and a guy in a BMW cuts me off, right, and suddenly into my mind pops that old joke, what's the difference between a BMW and a porcupine?
Well, with a porcupine, the pricks are on the outside.
And I then say, oh man, these guys who buy these German cars, they're such jerky drivers, they're this, they're that, the other, right?
But, you know, that's not a logical inference, right?
It's not a statistical sample of people who just happen to cut me off.
You know, maybe it's two BMW drivers in the same day, but it's the hasty generalization.
This occurs quite a lot in people's minds.
So this is another thing to occur.
And of course... This occurs in the realm of racism as well.
I'm frightened of oriental midgets because once an oriental midget kicked me in the shin when I said, hey, don't get short with me, and I was talking to somebody else who was being snappy.
So that's another sort of way of looking at things.
Also, you know, if you see the angry feminist and then you say, well, all feminists hate men and so on, it's just a way of short-circuiting a curious and rational exploration of the world and so on.
All right. Ignoring a common cause, also known as questionable cause.
A and B are regularly connected, but no third or common cause is looked for, therefore A is the cause.
Therefore, A is the cause of B. If you have a cottage up north and you notice that a whole bunch of pine tree needles fall into the river or your lake, and then the next day a whole bunch of dead fish float to the surface, Then you are going to call up the local government agency and say, well, these damn trees are killing my fish.
These pine needles are falling into the lake and they're killing my fish.
And they're going to say, well, no, actually it's, I don't know, it's acid rain that's making the needles fall off the trees and also is killing the fish.
So it's some sort of third cause, right?
Not looking for the third cause.
All right, to the middle ground fallacy, also known as the golden mean fallacy or the fallacy of moderation, right?
And this, oh, we all know as libertarians, right?
So this is position A and position B are two extreme positions.
C, ah, lovely C from sea to shining sea is a position that rests in the middle between the two extreme and nasty positions of A and B. Therefore, see, it's the correct position.
This is the nice position.
This is a misuse of the Aristotelian mean as well.
So we all know this one, right?
You've got communism is extreme and fascism is extreme, communism on the left and fascism on the right, and libertarianism is just some God knows where, some n-dimensional freakiness.
And so the middle ground is, you know, a little bit of, you know, Keynesian mixed bag, good socialism, Robert, sorry, the Rawlsian theory of justice, something in the middle is the best way to be, and so on and so on and so on, right?
And this is kind of funny, right?
So if I go into a computer store and some guy says that he wants to sell me to this computer for...
A thousand dollars, and I say, I'm going to give you a dollar, does that mean that the fair price is $500.50, let's put the difference, or $499.50?
Does that sort of really follow?
Well, no, of course not, right?
Two extreme positions.
I want a thousand dollars for, you know, like, I don't know, an $800 computer for his profit and so on.
I want $1,000, and you want to pay much less than that.
Is the mean automatically that way?
Or I say, I want to go and stab a guy, and you say, I don't think you should go and stab a guy.
And the third guy says, well, okay, why don't you go and just...
Kick him up, beat him up a little, go dust him up a little, and we'll call it middle ground, right?
So this is not the way to do it, although this is sort of the agnostic position in my view, right?
Some people say God is there, some people say God is not there, and so the agnostic feels like they're sort of in the middle ground, right?
So he's only slightly all-powerful and slightly all-knowing, and so it's somewhere in the middle, right?
So that's not good.
Misleading vividness.
Misleading vividness is a fallacy in which a very small sample of particularly dramatic effects are taken to outweigh a significant amount of statistical evidence.
And you'll get this kind of stuff in libertarian circles as well, where people will say, ah, Ruby Ridge, you know, they shot this woman and Waco and so on, right?
They'll say, well, this is state violence.
This is the examples of state violence that we sort of want to bring to the forefront and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And people say, well, that's pretty rare.
We know about these things because they're pretty rare.
It's not often that the Feds will swoop in on domestic citizens, just start blowing them away.
So, you know, of course it's really bad that this happened, people will say, and definitely it's an excess that needs to be restrained, but...
You know, I don't really think that we can look at it as the sort of, if that's all that state violence is, is something that happened like 10 years ago and then something that happened like 20 years ago and so on, then that's not a very credible look at the sort of root causes or examples of state violence.
And you do get all of this.
You get emails every now and then sort of float into my box from Lord knows where.
But it's, you know, Bush plan 9-11.
Ah! You know, all this kind of stuff.
And to me, at least, you don't need any of that kind of stuff at all, right?
So that's sort of never been...
It's been particularly useful to me.
This is also the case with people who are frightened of plane travel.
This is definitely the safest form of travel there is, other than astral travel, even though then you could get stuck in the dimension because God wants you to stay there, some other dimension.
But people, you know, it's dramatic, it's scary, you're flying off the ground and so on, but it's far safer than driving, of course, especially when you're podcasting.
The personal attack one as well.
The theory is false because the person who is putting it forward is repugnant.
This is not the same as the ad hominem, which is a direct attack against you, the person putting forward the proposition.
But, it's the sort of thing that, something like, you know, okay, well, Jane said that drug use is morally wrong, but Jane is just a goody-two-shoes Christian, so we don't have to listen to her.
So, drugs are not morally wrong.
I mean, I'm not saying they are. This is just sort of an example that I think is good, or, you know...
Well, libertarianism can't be right because a lot of drug addicts are libertarians.
I don't know. Maybe they are, right? And so, therefore, libertarianism is false.
And, of course, that is pure nonsense as well.
So you sort of have to watch that as well.
Now, the next one is poisoning the well.
It's a very exciting one. What happens is poisoning the well occurs, and you can see examples of this on not just this board, but I'm sure many, many boards.
But poisoning the well...
Let me just do my merge.
Is where somebody sort of says, okay, Steph.
Put your stupid theory forward now.
Or something like that.
It's like where you put forward a ringing non-endorsement, right?
So that is...
You put forward your stupid, hyper-rational, freedom-obsessed dictatorial...
And I'll be happy to listen once you put your stupid idea forward.
Let's all hear your stupid idea, right?
So that's sort of poisoning the well.
That's a pretty obvious example.
But you do get this quite a bit, right?
You know, it can be a sort of eye-rolling, right?
So if you're at dinner and somebody sort of immediately starts rolling their eyes, oh, here he goes again, right?
That's called poisoning the well, right?
So it's trying to affect the sort of emotional tenor of the interaction such that the credibility is lost of the person who's sort of speaking next.
I was actually quite good at this when I was a debater, so I try to watch that as a habit, as a tendency.
So basically it's don't listen to him, he's a scoundrel.
Or, you know, he...
His wife doesn't work, so he doesn't understand anything about feminism.
Or, you know, whatever, right? Alright.
Post hoc, also known as post hoc ergo propter hoc.
False cause, questionable cause, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So this is a basic one.
A occurs before B. Therefore, A is the cause of B. People listen to the weather before going outside.
Before going out for their daily drive, people listen to the weather.
Therefore, listening to the weather ejects you from the house.
It's like a catapult.
You turn on the radio and the trap door opens and shunts you down on the street.
So you see this stuff in sports.
It's like, well, I was wearing my lucky socks when I hit the home run, so now I'm going to wear my lucky socks So that I can keep hitting home runs, right?
So, yes, it's true that when you put on your lucky socks, you hit a home run.
But, of course, it's quite a logical fallacy to say that putting on your lucky socks was the cause of it.
It's not always wrong, but it's not a clincher.
If you've got a computer, you run fine, and then you come to the free-domain radio boards for the first time, and your computer freezes, then you may think, well, it's that that caused it to freeze.
The free-domain radio board caused it to freeze.
And it may be, right?
If it's reproducible and it happens on a bunch of different machines, then sure.
But that sort of raises the chance.
But the first time it occurs, you can't sort of look at, well, that's what I was doing when this occurred.
Therefore, that caused it. If you turn the page of a book and a plane crashes in India, it's not the cause.
It's just proximate, right?
It's not cause. All right.
The next one.
Questionable cause. Oh, sorry.
Just before we leave the last one, this is something...
That once freedom comes around too, it's going to be something that ANCAPs or libertarians are going to have to deal with, right?
So let's just say that you ended the welfare state tomorrow, then people sort of rioted and the people who were dependent on welfare got really angry and threw their television sets out through their windows in an orgy of SCTV-inspired destruction or then people sort of rioted and the people who were dependent Then people would say, well, freedom is causing people to behave in a destructive manner.
Freedom is bad.
In the same way that if somebody is addicted to a drug for a long time and then you lock them up, right, How did they... What movie was it?
Oh, yeah, that's right. It was...
Oh, the Scottish movie with the drugs.
I can't remember it now. Trainspotting.
His parents just lock him up.
He's got the baby on the ceiling and so on, right?
So in Trainspotting, somebody's on drugs, and then they dry out, right?
They stop taking the drug, and then they say, well, look, lack of heroin makes you sick, right?
And No, it's what happens when you stop abusing yourself.
Everybody who's ever been in therapy knows that you feel worse before you feel better, right?
So you're kind of in a state where things are bad, and a good therapist will make them worse, right?
That's sort of what goes on.
And so then you say, well, causally, I wasn't feeling nearly as bad until I went to the therapist, so the therapist is making me feel bad, and it's making me feel worse, and so on.
So questionable cause...
So, you know, these chain emails or chain letters that get sent around.
If you break the chain, if you don't forward this on to 10 people and stupid viral nonsense, if you break the chain, this will be very bad and bad things will happen, right?
So you throw it in the garbage and the next day or the very next night or within 10 minutes, you slip and break your leg.
Then it's like, oh my god, I've got to send out 200 emails to this.
I'm never going to avoid that again and so on.
So this is a questionable cause.
Red herring or smoke screen or wild goose chase.
Do I need to switch my lane?
I think I don't. No, I don't.
Excellent. You know, I've only driven this about 100 times, 200 times.
So I'm still getting the hang of it.
Now, the Red Herring, also known as the Stephanesque Tangent, is when you...
an irrelevant topic...
Oh, I do need to switch my...
Do I? I think I do.
No, I don't. All right, this is when an irrelevant topic is presented in order to divert attention from the original issue.
And this I have sometimes done in conversations and on the board, right?
So I have to sort of watch this.
Sometimes it's because I'm sort of shifting the focus of the argument.
If I'm not having any luck with a particular approach, then I'll try it from another direction.
But sometimes I don't follow through as well as I should, so it's sort of left as a red herring, right?
So here's an example of a red herring.
I'm going to talk a little bit about it after that.
We admit that this measure is unpopular, say the government or whatever, but we also urge you to note that there are so many bond issues On this ballot, the whole thing is getting ridiculous.
So if you are a Democrat and you say, well, I'm against the war in Iraq, but we do have to show in order to get into power that we are tough on terrorists.
So we're going to support the troops and we're going to do this and we're going to do that and so on.
So that's sort of an example of that kind of stuff.
You sort of bring in something completely relevant.
The question is, is the war in Iraq good or bad?
Moral or immoral or whatever?
And then people say, well, but in order to get power, we have to have this position.
It's like, but that's not the question.
This kind of stuff is...
I actually probably shouldn't be sharing any more with this, because now we're getting into staff territory.
The relativist fantasy, also known as the fallacy, sorry, also known as the subjectivist fallacy.
And it runs a little bit like this.
Claim X is presented.
Person A asserts that X may be true for others, but not true for him or her.
Therefore, A is justified in rejecting X. So this is something to do with the argument for morality, of course.
So somebody says, you know, if you don't get enough exercise, it's not very healthy for you.
And somebody says, well, that may be true for you, but it's not true for me.
Or if you say to somebody, your argument results in a logical contradiction and therefore is not acceptable, it's falsified.
And they say, well, the contradictions may be bad in your Eurocentric, oppressive, logical, white guy worldview, but I don't think they're bad.
Therefore, my position is just fine.
It's that Walt Whitman thing.
You say I contradict myself very well, then I contradict myself.
He doesn't sort of reject the argument, or he doesn't feel any need to conform to a more logical position.
He's just, meh, so I do, so what?
It's your hang-up, man.
It's your prejudice. It's your power trip to think that I have to be logical.
Just loosen up. Loosen up a little, man.
The camel's nose, also known as the slippery slope.
The slippery slope is a fallacy wherein somebody says that an escalating series of events must immediately follow, or must inevitably follow, without any sort of argument as to why such an inevitability should be, well, inevitable.
So, oh my god, we have to fight this tuition increase because next thing you know they'll be charging $50,000 per semester.
Like, well, maybe.
Or the U.S. shouldn't get involved military in other countries because once the government sends in a few troops, it will then send in thousands to die.
And then there will be attacks on America.
Oh wait, no, that one's true. No, I'm kidding.
Still, not logical, right?
Not logical. I mean, again, not that it's illogical, it's just that the statement alone is not enough to prove the proposition.
Or, you know, you can never be nice to people because as soon as you're nice to people, they walk all over you.
As soon as you give someone an inch, they'll take a mile and that kind of stuff, right?
So, the slippery slope argument, that's, you know, capital punishment is bad because next thing you know, they'll be executing children for shoplifting and so on, right?
It's not a logical argument unless you can find some directly causal chain.
I mean, I certainly do say that government is a slippery slope, slippery with our blood, but I think I've put forward some fairly decent arguments as to why that's the case.
But me just saying it wouldn't be enough.
It's a species of fear-mongering as well.
Special pleading.
This is a fallacy where somebody applies standards, principles, rules and so on to others while taking himself or those he has a special interest in to be exempt without providing adequate justification for the exemption.
This sort of reasoning has the following.
Well, you know the reasoning, right? So the government will say that guns are bad.
We shouldn't have guns, and you don't need guns for self-defense.
And then every time the president leaves the house with his six million death squad entourage of secret service agents, they're all armed to the teeth with weapons that would be absolutely, completely, and totally illegal in the private sector, right?
So the president says, well, you can't have self-defense, but it's different for me.
I'm The government is allowed to steal money on behalf of others and themselves, but you're not, all this kind of stuff.
And then this is sort of like, I think that all murderers should be put to death, right?
And then I go and kill some guy, and then I say, well, I should be an exception, right?
I still believe in it, but I should be the exception.
Well, that doesn't work, right? Unless you can really find some complete logical justification So here, somebody says, turn off that stupid stereo.
I want to take a nap. And someone says, why should I? What, are you exhausted or something?
No, I just feel like taking a nap.
Well, I feel like playing my stereo.
Well, I'm taking my nap.
You have to turn off your stereo, and that's final.
This is a pretty subtle one, right?
I mean, somebody says, turn off the stereo.
I want to take a nap. Because I feel like taking a nap.
And then somebody says, well, I feel like playing my stereo.
So the principle, of course, is that I should get to do what I feel like doing.
I feel like taking a nap, therefore you should turn off the stereo.
But if I feel like playing my stereo, then I should, by your logic, I should get to do what I want to do.
So this is family stuff all over.
Special pleading. Do as I say, not as I do.
All this kind of stuff. So this is a pretty common thing that occurs as well.
So this is quite right.
So, somebody says to his wife, honey, you tracked in mud again.
And she says, so? It's not my fault.
He's like, sure, I suppose it walked in on its own.
You made the mess, you clean it up.
Why? Well, we agreed that whoever made the mess has to clean it up.
That's fair. And she says, well, I'm going to watch TV. If you don't like the mud, then you clean it up.
My wife? And he says, what?
I said I want to watch the show.
I don't want to clean up the mud.
If it bothers you that much, then you should clean it up.
Of course, my brother and I had this thing.
Whoever took the toys out should put them back in, but he just generally would wander back in, and I'd sort of be left with the toys, so I'd let the toys get stolen or broken and go in as well, or do I just...
Tidy up the toys and so on, right?
So that's a pretty common one, too.
A little bit more so in relationships, but it's a pretty subtle one to get sometimes, especially when it comes to discussion of ethics in the state.
All right. The spotlight.
This is a fallacy which is committed when a person uncritically assumes that most members or cases of a certain cluster type are like those that receive the most attention or coverage in the media.
So, some libertarian goes on a shooting rampage and then somebody says, well, libertarians have a tendency to go on shooting rampages or whatever, right?
I mean, that's a pretty common thing that occurs as well.
It's sort of related as well to statistical anomalies and to extrapolations from statistical anomalies and to bigotry sort of as a whole, but it is not uncommon in a lot of different kinds of conversations.
So here's an example.
Guy says, man, I'd never want to go to New York.
It's all concrete and pollution.
And another guy says, well, not all of it.
Guy says, sure it is.
Every time I watch the news, they're always showing concrete skyscrapers and lots of pollution.
I was like, well, sure, but that's news shows, and a lot of New Yorkers' farmlands and forests.
It's not all New York City.
That just receives most of the attention, right?
So you think that New York is like the state, and all they do is show, because nobody's going to show you a picture of farmland.
It's not news, right? They show you stuff that's going on in the city.
So this fallacy of the spotlight as well is sort of looking at this as well.
And this drives, you know, the black community kind of mad, right?
Because every time you see a criminal, oh, he's black, you know, something like that.
And there's, of course, tons of law-abiding, perfectly nice black people.
But it seems like this is sort of the focus pull is sort of a little bit in this area, right?
And we're almost done.
I think we're almost done. The straw man argument, we know this one fairly well, right?
The straw man argument is something like, well, I think that there should be no state, right?
Oh, so you're arguing that there should be no rules.
Well, life has to have rules, and therefore your argument that there should be no state is not correct, right?
Or I think that there should be no state.
Oh, so you don't want to punish criminals in any way, shape, or form?
Well, that will result in a worse kind of anarchic, horrible society, blah, blah, blah.
Therefore, there has to be a state.
Well, of course... Arguing that there is no state does not argue that criminals should not be punished, does not argue that there should be no rules, and so on.
Or, you know, it's like, I think that there's a universally preferred behavior is a good definition for morality.
It's like, oh, so you want to impose your will on everyone else.
And therefore, the argument for universally preferred behavior is false.
It's like, well, but that's not my position.
So in the recent one on prostitution, people are saying, oh, so you're saying everyone who visits a prostitute is immoral, but they're not using force.
Therefore, your argument that it's an indication of lower self-esteem is false.
It's like, but that's not my argument.
It's not that it's immoral.
Of course not. I mean... It's not coercive.
Of course, if a man rapes a prostitute, then it's immoral, but that's not the issue, right?
So it's voluntary and so on.
So you see this kind of stuff.
People will just sort of set up a distorted version of your argument and then attack that version and then feel, you know, it's sort of like thinking you're a tough guy because you punch Mike Tyson's shadow while he's sleeping, right?
So the last one which we'll talk about is the two wrongs make a right.
Two wrongs make a right, and that, of course, is very common in economics as well.
It's like, well, we should get rid of trade subsidies.
It's like, yes, but other governments have trade subsidies, and so we have to.
We should get rid of farming subsidies.
Yes, but other governments are dumping their farm stuff on our, subsidized farm stuff on our, and therefore all this kind of stuff.
So the two wrongs making a right is also like, well, there's nothing to do with it.
What other people are doing has no relevance whatsoever to what we're doing.
So here's an example.
After leaving a store, Jill notices that she is underpaid by $10.
She decides not to return the money to the store because if she had overpaid, they would not have returned the money.
And that, of course, is another kind of fallacy.
Oh, I've made it home.
Okay, thanks so much for listening. I appreciate it.
I hope that this has been helpful for you.
Another nice two donations today, which I look forward to getting more.
▲
Export Selection