Logical Fallacies 35: The Slippery Slope

Video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EUBvFZgAx4&feature=watch_response

            Now this one’s kind of tricky.  In use, it might not actually be a fallacy.  It depends.  Here’s the pattern.

            “Well, if event A happens, what’s to stop event B from happening?  And if event B happens, what’s to stop event C?  And then what’s to stop event D and E and F?  And suddenly we’re in totally different territory.”

            That’s the pattern.  Here’s the logical structure.

            First premise: Event A sets off a chain reaction that leads inexorably or almost inexorably to event Z.

            Second premise: Event Z is something unfavorable.

            Conclusion: In the interests of preventing Z we should prevent A.

            The key question here is, does event A have any actual bearing, as far as we can tell, on the odds of event B, C, and D, etc?  Is the first premise well founded?  Maybe it is.  For example, when I was in grade school, one day, the teacher assigned us a book report, and she insisted that the book we used as a subject had to be at least 100 pages; maybe more, but not a single page less.  Not even one.  After all, she explained, making such an allowance was virtually guaranteed to set this sequence in motion.

            first student: “Well, 97 pages is close to 100.”

            second student: “Well, 93 pages is close to 97.”

            third student: “Well, 89 pages is close to 93.”

            And the next thing you know, we have students writing reports on books only 15 pages long.  Do I doubt the likelihood of this sequence?  Not at all.  I dare to say that this teacher gave the assignment this stipulation out of her own acquaintance with the psychology of the typical grade-school student.

            Now let’s look at the age-old dilemma of the parent of a teenager.

            “Heh heh.  Sure, Son.  Your girlfriend can come over to study in your room, but you keep that door open while she’s here.  Do you understand me, young man?  Keep it open or I’ll remove it.”

            Does this make sense?  Is it prudent for the parent to impose this boundary?  Of course.  Why?  Because one thing tends to lead to another.  This first step is, indeed, onto a slippery slope.  In this particular setting, this observation (one thing leads to another) has predictive power.  Here we have another non-fallacious slippery slope.

            “Teenagers.  You give them an inch and they walk all over you.”

            Here’s another non-fallacious example:

            “If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After [a]while, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.”

            This is a quote from Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey trial, defense council for a biology teacher named John Scopes who was taken to court for having the audacity to teach evolution.  Now how about another historical example?

            The expansion of the Japanese Empire, during World War II was driven by an odd kind of circular reasoning.  They needed to expand their territory so that they could obtain more material resources.  But they needed to obtain more material resources so that they could expand their territory.  Therefore, though I don’t know if it actually happened, many voices of reason and prudence would have been well founded in concluding that, in the event the Japanese Empire was allowed to expand a little, they would subsequently expand a little more, and a little more, and next thing you know, even if they started clear on the other side of the world, they are now threatening your territory and/or the territory of friends and allies of yours.

            Here’s a non-fallacious example I would like all my Muslim subscribers to make note of, given the growing popularity among Muslims of Holocaust denial.  The Holocaust is a widely and heavily documented historical event.  To deny it is to deny and abuse history.

            Among the world’s most famous holocaust deniers, and by that I mean people famous specifically for their holocaust denial—those who’ve made a career out of it with virtually no attention to anything else—a significant portion are not Muslim.  What’s to stop these people from turning right around tomorrow and denying that Mohammed ever existed?

            One also finds a psychological slippery slope in Germany, leading up to the Holocaust.  The powers that be in that country, in 1930, would not have been able to get away with the Holocaust then, but instead had to be content with much more minor injustices, and then slightly less minor, and then slightly less and slightly less, incrementally more and more severe, until we have a holocaust.

            Now how about a few fallacious examples?

            “If you teach people they are biologically related to animals, won’t they start acting like animals?”

            This slippery slope is kind of short, but still fallacious.  First, although most animals are not people, all people are animals.  To be human is to be a pattern-seeking primate; one particular species of animal.  Therefore, to act like a human is to act like an animal; albeit a particular species.  But second, you mean other species of animals, don’t you?  Any species in particular?  I mean one thing evolution shows us is that human beings are biologically related to kangaroos.  Are you telling me that, if you came to accept evolution, you would start to act like one of them?  I would like to see that.

            You can’t allege behavior like animals with any meaning unless you are prepared to specify what species of animal.  Camels are animals too.  Does this mean that accepting evolution will lead to people acting like camels?  What about goldfish, jellyfish, moths, anemones, or choral?  These are all animals and these all have very distinctly different behavioral characteristics.  If the act of accepting evolution leads to animal behavior, what species?

            Just to digress for a moment, I mentioned anemones there.  I don’t understand why anyone has a difficult time pronouncing this word (anemone).  I mean you pronounce it the same way you would pronounce these four letters (N M N E) in this sequence.  Simple.  Now back to the subject.

            “Well, if you legalize same-sex marriage today, you’ll be legalizing bestiality tomorrow, then pedophilia, then vandalism, then murder, and so on and so on, until you get to ethnic cleansing, and soon the whole world will be consumed in flames!”

            How in the world do you figure that?  How in the world does restricting same-sex marriage mitigate the occurrence of any of the rest of these?  A number of states in my country alone have legalized same-sex marriage.  Has this brought any change at all in the amount of political pressure brought to bear by bestiality-rights groups?  What laws are there, currently, against bestiality?  How are they enforced?  How could they be enforced except by a complete, utter, total disregard for privacy in any form?

            “If you permit scientists to destroy human embryos for the purpose of research, it's a slippery slope from there to killing human fetuses in order to harvest tissue, and from there to euthanizing disabled or terminally ill people to harvest their organs, and from there to human cloning and human-animal hybrids, and if making chimeras is okay, well then Dr. Frankenstein must also be okay, and Dr. Mengele, too, and before you know it, it's one long hapless inevitable slide from high-minded medicine to the Nazis.”

            Of course.  Nazism has so much to do with stem-cell research, euthanasia, cloning and making chimeras, doesn’t it?  After all, those mad scientists in Saturday Morning cartoons which are always making chimeras are all Nazis, aren’t they?  The very same argument could be made about the slippery slope from legalizing mustaches into Bolshevism.

            So the key question here is how great are the odds that each event in the proffered sequence actually facilitates the occurrence of subsequent events?  How much veracity is there to the first premise in this argument?

            Incidentally, this drawing of a slippery slope into fascism, Nazism, Communism, Maoism and such is a very common practice.  You could almost call it hackneyed and predictable.

Logical Fallacies 34: The False Dilemma

Video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kchUxqSrxQA&feature=watch_response

            Reality is internally consistent.  That is, it agrees with itself.  If two statements are in disagreement, it means they cannot both be correct.  Therefore, any piece of evidence in support of one is evidence against the other.

            They can however, both be incorrect.  Any piece of evidence against one is not necessarily evidence for the other.  The act of proving one claim true proves any incompatible claims false by default, but the act of proving one claim false does not prove any incompatible claims true by default.

            Premise: “Statements A and B are incompatible.”

            Premise: “Statement B is proven correct.”

            Conclusion: “Therefore, statement A is proven incorrect by default.”

            This argument is logical.

            Premise: “Statements A and B are incompatible.”

            Premise: “Statement A is proven incorrect.”

            Conclusion: “Therefore, statement B is proven correct by default.”

            This is argument is not logical.  If you had additional premises enabling you to guarantee, somehow, that one of the two must be correct, then it would be, but otherwise, the act of proving one statement incorrect does not rule out the possibility that several incompatible statements are likewise incorrect.  By the same token, if a wrench is the wrong tool for a certain task, it does not necessarily establish that a set of nail clippers is the right tool for it.

            When two statements of fact are in disagreement, either only one is correct or neither is.

            “Look at all the terrible, subversive things being done in the name of religion X.  Do you see how that religion is?  So turn to religion Y instead.”

            “My best evidence that creationism is true would be the complete impossibility of the contrary.”

            “Evolution cannot be true.  Therefore creationism must be.  The evidence I have that creationism is correct is this evidence that evolution (allegedly) isn’t.”

            “Candidate such-and-so is campaigning for insert public office here.  But what do we really know about candidate such-and-so?  He says this, but he has done this, this, and that.  His subversive actions have had all these negative consequences.  So vote for me instead.  I’m candidate Whosits and I approve this message.”

            Never mind that candidate Whosits may have a record that’s even worse.

            Michael Jackson overdoses on prescription medication.  Deepak Chopra seizes on this as a chance to cast categorical aspersions on all “mainstream” medicine and to promote alternative pseudo-medicine in its place, as if the tragic misapplication of one somehow amounts to a resounding success of the other.  Never mind that it was modern, so-called mainstream medical science which figured out the cause of death.  So I guess, if mainstream medicine doesn’t work, we should hold these findings in abeyance until “alternative” medical science has a chance to conduct its own autopsy and provide us with more firmly based conclusions.

            This fallacy is called the False Dilemma.  Given the fact that we are now going into election season in the United States, I predict it is going to become increasingly common in the months ahead.  C0nc0rdance offers another really good example in his video called The Deadly Doctor Gambit, which I have linked in the description.

            I’ve been hearing this argument a lot, nowadays, among certain political talking heads.  They regale us at length with an emphasis on all these ways that government bureaucracy has gotten in the way and let people down.  This is done to cajole us into giving serious consideration to private organizations that serve the same functions, or to arguments for reassignment of those functions to private organizations.  Now I don’t know about others, but these arguments tend to fall pretty flat with me, because the last couple of years, I’ve been let down and screwed over plenty of times by both.  The act of making the case against one falls far short, on its own, of making the case for the other.

Logical Fallacies 33: The Spontaneous Reframing Fallacy

Video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFeXWxXt19E&feature=watch_response

Here I’ll be examining a particular manner of fallacy which lately, I’ve been encountering more and more.  It’s so common that I am compelled to believe that it must have an official name, but I don’t happen to know what that is.  If at some point, someone finds out, please let me know and I will add the name in an annotation right about here.  For the time being, I’ll just call this the Spontaneous Reframing Fallacy.

            This is a kind of Strawman used as a Red Herring, except that instead of strawmanning the position of the individual it is being used against, it strawmans the subject of disagreement.  It occurs when the Strawman is timed to distract from the actual point of contention under discussion, in the interest of pretending that the two of you have, all this time, actually been in disagreement about something else entirely.  So let us first revisit these terms: Red Herring, Strawman.

            A Red Herring is a kind of logical fallacy which, instead of answering a question or argument, strives to distract from it.

            “Well of course Bush and Cheney profited from the invasion of Iraq.  We all did.”

            “We all did?  All of us?  Every last one of us?  Even those who have died in the fighting?”

            “Oh, well, if you don’t grasp this, there isn’t much hope for you.  I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you but people die in war.”

            <Hold up!>

            “I’m quite well aware that people die in war, and when they die in war, I am hard-pressed to see how they can profit from it.  And if they did not, in fact, profit, then it wasn’t all of us which makes the statement that we all profited from it incorrect.  So are you willing to admit that you misspoke?”

            A Strawman, on the other hand, is a kind of fallacy which tries to create the appearance of refuting your position by subtly accusing you of holding a fundamentally different position; a fundamentally different position which perhaps resembles yours cosmetically, but which is nonetheless fundamentally different.

            “I lament the corruption in this country.”

            “Well why bother living in a country you hate so much?”

            <Hold up!>

            “I don’t hate the country.  I object to its corruption.  There’s a difference.  Pay attention.”

            So for an example of a spontaneous reframing, let me use an example from a discussion I had recently.  I had expressed the sentiment that no religious claim holds up under scrutiny which is why every religion dedicates itself to the end of avoiding and discouraging scrutiny.  Someone disagreed with me, making the insistence that Christianity does hold up.  I asked if he would be interested in testing that assertion.  He said he would be, so I asked him to present me with a Christian claim which he believed held up.

            He immediately commenced to shower me with tired, hackneyed rhetoric we’ve all heard hundreds of times.

            I expressed surprise at his...generosity.  After all, I had asked for a single claim to scrutinize and he provided me with a selection.  So I took my pick.  Among his claims was the one that the United States was founded entirely by Christians.

            Now a big pet peeve of mine is the common practice of claiming that one knows something, with no comprehension whatsoever about the significance of this word (know).  Belief can rest on personal experience (indeed, on virtually anything), but knowledge must be demonstrable.  You can believe whatever silly little thing floats your boat, but if you can’t show something—if you can’t demonstrate it—then you don’t know it and you have no business claiming that you do.  You can accurately claim that you believe it, but not that you know it; not unless you can demonstrate it.

            If you make a claim and I ask how you know it, and you say that you just do, what you are demonstrating is that you have no comprehension whatsoever what it means to know something.

            So when you make a claim and I ask, “How do you know that?” I’m inviting you to make with the demonstration.  This question (“How do you know that?”) is the form such scrutiny takes.

            So in all honesty, I brought more than scrutiny.  You see, the evidence doesn’t just fail to support this claim; it refutes it.  So I indicated this claim and asked this fellow what he thought Benjamin Franklin meant when he said, “The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.”

            His response was to tell me that, although Franklin was a smart fellow, the simple fact that he said something doesn’t make it true, and that Christianity still holds merit.

            <Hold up!>

            I wasn’t saying that.  I was not trying to make an appeal to authority against the “merits” of Christianity, whatever they may be.  I was making an evidence-based argument against his claim that this country was founded entirely by Christians.  I was simply showing that, given the fact that surely Benjamin Franklin of all people counts as a founding father, and given the fact that Benjamin Franklin was demonstrably not Christian, this claim that the United States was founded entirely by Christians does much more than break down under scrutiny.  It utterly disintegrates with just a dash of actual evidence, unless that evidence is very rigorously cherry-picked.

            I can only conclude that the only reason this fellow accepted this claim in the first place was due to a lack of scrutiny.

            Incidentally, if anyone’s interested in scrutinizing this claim I just made about BF, I will refer you to the 1758 edition of Poor Richard’s Almanack.  I guess, technically, you could say that he didn’t actually say it, but rather wrote it, but nonetheless, it is clearly his sentiment.

            Next example:

            “You really should accept Christ into your heart.  I mean, it would be a real pity if you went to hell to burn eternally after you died just because you were too proud for your eyes to be opened to the truth of this world.”

            “Uh, first, simply calling something ‘the truth’ does not make it true.  Second, any god who would arrange someone’s infinite, eternal torture for refusing to engage in special pleading and unreasonable credulity is a brutal tyrant I want no part of.  Besides, there is no hell.”

            “How can you possibly know that?”

            “Well, hell, by definition, is a place of eternal fire.  Fire, by definition, is a chemical reaction—a reaction between molecules—which means that for there to be fire, there must be molecules, all of which are part of the flesh, which I’m told we leave behind when we die.

            “Hell is also, by definition, a place of torture.  Torture depends on pain, which is a warning signal that something is wrong with the body—with the flesh; a signal carried along the nerves to the brain where it is processed and endowed with an emotional significance.  That means that, in order to experience pain, one must have both nerves to carry the signal, and a brain to process it, both of which are part of the body—of the flesh—which I’m told we leave behind when we die.”

            “Well that’s true about fire in this world.  The fire in hell is different.”

            “Well that means that it is fire which is not fire; something which does not fit the defining characteristics of fire, but which we nonetheless call fire just the same.  In that case, it makes just as much sense to call hell a place of disco, however fitting some might consider that.”

            “Well say what you will, but I prefer to live in a world surrounded by mystery and wonder.”

            “Bullshit.”

            “Why do you say that?”

            “Well because you worship one of the gods of the gaps, who are extraordinarily anti-social beings.  They always make it a point to live at an epistemic distance, just out of sight.  They live in the wind until we figure out that wind is just air molecules in motion.  They live in thunder, until we figure out that thunder is just high pressure air meeting low pressure air.  They live at the tops of impassable mountains, until one day when those mountains suddenly become passable.  Then they have to go live somewhere else.

            “They live in the clouds, until one day when we suddenly figure out how to fly.  They live in the space above a planet, until we figure out that the world is round, which means that living above it means living around it which places the planet pretty much in just a hole—a gap—in heaven.  Then they have to make due with living within each of us in ways that vigorously avoid scrutiny, or as abstract philosophical concepts no one can ever seem to establish agreement over the precise meaning of.

            “Basically, the god of the gaps is born or invoked whenever you take everything you don’t currently know, everything unknown, all the answers you don’t currently have, lump them all together, and rubber-stamp them [GOD], thereby insisting that they are known.  ‘Why does the wind blow?  I don’t know.  It must be God.’  ‘How did the Universe come to exist?  I don’t know.  It must be God.’  ‘I don’t know what it is.  Therefore, it must be God.  Therefore, I do know what it is.’  ‘It is unknown, therefore it is known.’  Now if you sincerely believe that God is the answer to all, then you believe that you know the answer to all, so where’s the mystery?  What do you have to wonder about?”

            “Look.  I have a right to be religious.”

            <Hold up!>

            “I have yet to suggest otherwise.  The subject of our discussion is the problems with the reasoning utilized in your arguments.  Do you have the right to be religious?  Absolutely.  Do I have the right to point out the problems in you reasoning?  Absolutely.”

            Next example:

            “They should teach intelligent design in biology classes in order to cover both sides of the controversy.”

            “There is no controversy.  ID is not a viable scientific concept.”

            “Yes it is.”

            “No.  It’s not an explanation.”

            “Yes it is.”

            “Let me explain something here.  The only way something gets to be called a scientific explanation is if it describes an empirical, verifiable, falsifiable, testable process.  ID doesn’t do that.”

            “Yes it does.”

            “Really?”

            “Really.”

            “What’s the process?”

            “That an intelligent designer of some sort made everything.”

            “And in the course of making everything, what process did the designer use?”

            “I don’t know.  The designer works in mysterious ways.”

            “Well that process, which you just admitted you don’t know, is the very focus of science.  If you can’t describe a process, then you don’t have a scientific explanation.  This is why intelligent design is not science.  There are only two kinds of creationist claims: those which don’t lend themselves to testing and therefore have no utility, and those which do lend themselves to testing and have failed it.  Until you get a process figured out, you don’t have a scientific explanation, and therefore you don’t have an alternative to evolution which does describe a process.  You can’t replace something that works with nothing that doesn’t.”

            “...Well science isn’t everything.”

            <Hold up!>

            “You might try paying attention.  The subject of our disagreement is not what constitutes everything, but what belongs in a science class.  Yes, I agree that science is not everything.  It’s not art.  It’s not literature.  It’s not philosophy (although it has roots in philosophy).  It is, however, everything that has any place whatsoever within a science class, and that’s the subject here.”

            So basically, the Spontaneous Reframing fallacy is clung to out of a desperate aversion to this admission: “You have a point.”

Logical Fallacies 32: The Perfect-Solution Fallacy

Video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qkm6mI0EfZU&feature=watch_response

Let’s say that you are a parent and you have a child in school, and that child’s first report card of the new semester has a GPA of 2.0; a C average.  You’re disappointed, of course.  It’s not quite what you had hoped, but at least it’s a passing grade.

            So you work with your child, a few of his or her professors, and his or her counselor to find any areas in his or her study approach in need of improvement.  You find a few areas, you and your child work to improve those areas, and the next report card has a GPA of 3.0; a B average.

            You were hoping for a 4.0; an A average.  Does your expectation detract at all from the value of the improvement?  Of course not.  It’s still an improvement.

            Most of the Founding Fathers had hoped, in the act of severing our ties with Britain, that we could put an end to slavery in the colonies in the process.  But passages in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence which condemned this practice proved too divisive and had to be dropped.  John Adams originally wouldn’t have it, but Benjamin Franklin argued with him that the most important issue here was independence from Britain.  If that much was not accomplished, he argued, the rest wouldn’t matter.  “Please, John,” he argued, “now that we’ve come this far, don’t give it all up just because our accomplishments don’t include that particular one.  Don’t sacrifice all these other improvements in the situation just because we can’t make that improvement as well.  Don’t reject a partial improvement just because it’s partial.  Don’t commit the Perfect Solution Fallacy.

            Similar problems impeded reform efforts in the drafting of the Constitution.  Again, there were those who were hoping, in the process, to put an end to slavery, but again, it proved divisive enough to halt everything else and was dropped.

            Finally came the Lincoln administration which saw the end of slavery, but it was not until the Johnson administration that segregation was finally abolished.

            Sometimes, walls which cannot be jumped over can be climbed over.  Such a process requires time and patience, but it often brings results which would otherwise be unattainable.  If the Founding Fathers had remained utterly intransigent on slavery with the ratification of the Declaration, the United States would probably have never successfully severed its ties with Britain.  If this had been the case eleven years later, the Constitution would never have been adopted.  If the abolition movement had refused to accept any reform that abolished slavery so long as it still allowed segregation, slavery may have persisted decades longer.

            When the Congress was deadlocked over Health Care Reform, Democrats realized that they would never get a bill through the Senate that contained a public option.  They could get through legislation containing a laundry list of other reforms, but not that particular one.  President Obama made an urgent plea to his party.  “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” he said.  Don’t commit the Perfect Solution Fallacy.

            By the same token, there can be no reform under any circumstances that doesn’t entail unforeseen complications.  Some of those complications are bound to be at least a little unfavorable.  Rejecting such reform on this basis is the same fallacy.  A reform is worthwhile when it constitutes an improvement, perfect or not.

            I don’t remember the names of the legislators spearheading or opposing this particular argument, but in the last couple years, there has been at least one instance in which the Congress has commenced to debate the Electoral College.  So before I continue on this particular example, let me just explain in case anyone watching doesn’t happen to know what the Electoral College is.

            The Congress is a Legislative body.  That is, its main focus is making laws.  It is a bicameral legislature, meaning that it has two houses.  In one, called the Senate, each state has two seats.  In the other, called the House of Representatives, each state has a number of seats coinciding in approximate proportion with its population.  The objective, in the Senate, is to represent each state equally, while in the House, it is to represent each person equally.  The full effectiveness with which each objective is accomplished is debatable, but nonetheless, these are the objectives.

            The Electoral College is based on the Congress.  In the EC, each state has a certain number of votes coinciding with the number of seats it has in the Congress; both houses.  So Hawaii, having two seats in each house, has four votes in the EC, while Alaska, (errata ahead) being the only state in the nation with more seats in the Senate than the House, has three.

            In a presidential election, actual ballots are counted on a state-by-state basis.  This actual ballot count is the popular vote.  The candidate who has the most people in a certain state vote for him or her is the winner of that state’s popular vote.  Whichever candidate wins the biggest share of a state’s popular vote gets the entirety of that state’s electoral vote.  When the candidate in question is a Republican, the state in question is called a red state, and when that candidate is a Democrat, that state is called a blue state.

            In this case, it’s winner-take-all.  Whichever candidate gets the biggest share of a state’s popular vote gets all of its electoral votes.  Either they all go to one candidate, or they all go to the other.

            Now the biggest problem with this, at least as far as I know, is that on a national level, the popular vote and the electoral vote sometimes add up in different ways.  This is what happened in 2000 when, on a national level, more than 500,000 more people voted for Gore than for Bush.  Bush was still declared the winner because he had more votes in the EC.  Gore won the popular vote, but Bush won the electoral vote, and therefore the election.

            As I recall, it was early in 2009 when one of our legislators (I don’t recall which one) proposed an amendment to change the election system so that the popular vote would be tallied on a national scale instead of state-by-state, and then the winner of the national popular vote would be awarded all the electoral votes in the nation.  This way, the winner of the national popular vote actually wins the election every time.

            Another legislator (again, I don’t remember which) argued against this amendment on the grounds that it would bring about a state in which less populated regions are more likely to be passed over by political campaigns.

            Now I’m afraid I don’t know how else this amendment fared in the Congress, but let me just take issue with this counter-argument.  Yes, I can see how the amendment in question would have this effect, but seeing as how that’s also a problem with our current system, I don’t attach much significance to that particular observation.

            “This amendment will improve our current system in one particular way.”

            “Perhaps, but it will not improve it in this other way.”

            That’s the argument in a nutshell; a textbook Perfect Solution Fallacy.

Logical Fallacies 31: Hasty Generalization

Video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaX_-42NptU&feature=watch_response

            Now this one is going to be both a module about a certain logical fallacy and a book recommendation.

            There is an unfortunate human tendency, when presented with a puzzling observation, to accept the first explanation, or seeming explanation, that happens along.  A good example of this occurs when one person asks, “Why does the sun rise?” and another responds, “It is being pulled across the sky by magical horses,” or “It is being rolled across the sky by a giant, magical beetle.”

            “Where did life come from?”

            “God made it.”

            A much more grievous example is examined by UCLA geography professor Jared Diamond in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel.  This book examines why, across the ages, some civilizations have developed further and more rapidly than others.

            Now let me just take a moment to say that I highly recommend this book.  It’s kind of a heavy read, but if you can find the time for it, it’s worth it.  You see, many a cursory examination of history shows us that it was European civilizations that conquered Africa and the Americas, and not the other way around.  So it has often been asked why in the world this should be the case.

            There are those who are very quick to respond to this by simply saying that Europeans are just more intelligent than Africans and Native Americans.  Now there may have been a time when no explanation received more evidentiary support than this one, but even then, this was far from adequate grounds to accept this so-called explanation, given the fact that it accounted for only this one observation.

            Let’s say that we have a list of 100 related, yet randomly selected, empirical observations.  Ah, but wait a minute.  Let me take a moment to clarify that I’m using the word “empirical” in the scientific sense of the word, not the philosophical sense.  So what’s the difference?

            In the philosophical sense, “empirical” is contrasted with “rational.”  Empiricism accounts for everything that can be directly observed while rationalism accounts for everything that can be logically concluded or inferred from that which can be observed.  In the philosophical sense, “empirical” is a synonym for “observable,” while “rational” is a synonym for “extrapolable.”

            In the scientific sense, on the other hand, “empirical” is contrasted with “anecdotal.”  Here we have a slightly different concept with the same name.

            Anecdotal evidence is evidence based on anecdote.  When one points out that two characteristics go together, or coincide, in one particular case, that’s an anecdote.  If that anecdote is documented in a demonstrable or independently-verifiable manner, then we have a piece of anecdotal evidence.

            Empirical evidence, on the other hand, conducts a proper sample to determine what percentage of the time two characteristics coincide or two variables change in unison.  Empirical evidence, in the scientific sense of the word, is necessary in order to establish whether any correlations exist.  If two variables tend to increase in unison or decrease in unison, then we have a positive correlation.  If, on the other hand, increases in one tend to coincide with decreases in the other or vice-versa, then we have a negative correlation.  This is the scientific sense of the word “empirical,” which is the sense I am using here.

            So summing it up, empirical evidence in the scientific sense is evidence intended to make correlations empirical in the philosophical sense.

            So let’s go back to that list of 100 related, yet randomly-selected, empirical observations.  Beginning with the first, if we are setting out to explain them, it’s a good idea to speculate until we have maybe five or six explanations, which at this point, are called hypotheses.  Then, the best thing for us to do is to keep each hypothesis in mind while we examine the second observation.  The hypotheses which explain the second as well are strengthened and supported by the act.  Those which don’t are weakened, unless they can be modified so that they still explain both observations.

            This we repeat with each subsequent observation, modifying each hypothesis as necessary, until one has been modified to the point that it enables us to predict observations which are on the list, but which we haven’t examined yet.  When these predictions can be made with testable, measurable, accuracy, to any extent whatsoever, leaving the door wide open for directed, testable speculation, then we have a school of thought, or in scientific and academic terms, a theory.

            When a given explanation enables you to make these predictions with such a high degree of accuracy that the prospect of that explanation being mistaken would be the greater miracle, the greater scientific revolution, then we have a fact.  Not until we reach this point.  It’s still a theory, but it’s also a fact.  In science, these are compatible concepts.

            The question of different civilizations developing at different speeds, and thus European civilizations conquering African and Native American civilizations is one observation for which many possible explanations can be arrived at through speculation.  If this is the only piece of evidence one is going to use to support this “conclusion,” or perhaps only this and a bare handful of others, then what we have is the Fallacy of Hasty Generalization, also known as the Fallacy of Insufficient Statistics.  That is, it reaches an inductive generalization based on the briefest, laziest, of assessments, and far from sufficient evidence.

            One could also call this “conclusion” the Fallacy of Unwarranted Assumption, which I have explained previously in this series, since it also makes the assumption that the intelligence of the three major ethnic groups in question is the only variable that had any bearing on this.  But of course, such is clearly not the case.

            Jared Diamond, in this book, takes the long road, taking the time to examine as exhaustive a list of related cultural observations as can be reasonably accommodated in just a few hundred pages.  Basically, he goes well out of his way, making a very noble and successful effort to avoid this particular fallacy.

            The rest of this particular video, or perhaps set of videos, I am going to spend expounding on the book.  If you don’t feel like sitting through that, then by all means, click away now.

            Let’s say that you have two neighboring civilizations, A and B, and each, at this point, relies on a nomadic way of life.  But then, after a few centuries, one begins to experiment with agriculture.  What does that entail?

            Agriculture depends on two key practices:

            First, in any undeveloped region, only about 10% of the vegetation is going to provide some manner of sustenance that human beings can digest.  In agriculture, one tears out the other 90% and replaces it with the plants that previously composed that 10, enabling one’s civilization to draw ten times as much sustenance from the same patch of land.

            Second, in agriculture, one domesticates plants, enabling one to apply artificial selection to their reproduction.  This makes it possible to direct the development of those crops in ways that further support the civilization growing them.

            So if a civilization relies on nomadic living, every able-bodied member of that civilization must participate in the search for food in order for that civilization to sustain itself.  If, on the other hand, it begins to make the transition to agriculture, as happened in the agricultural revolution, about 10,000 years ago, suddenly it is able to produce so much food that a large portion of its people don’t need to participate in that and can begin to develop their skills and expertise in other specializations, like soldiery.  Therefore, an agricultural civilization is much more able to sustain an army than a nomadic one.

            This, however, was not a key difference.  The agricultural revolution took off at about the same time in Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Asia.  But this set the stage for other key developmental differences.

            One concept this book explains is the concept of a continental axis; that is a straight line across the surface of the earth between a continents two most distant points.  In the Americas and Africa, this axis runs mainly north and south.  In Eurasia and Australia, it runs mainly east and west.  But this east-and-west continental axis is much longer in the one than the other.  Now what does that mean?

            Well this equated to a major agricultural advantage for civilizations in Europe and those at the same latitudes of Asia, in regions which, today, we call Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and northern China.  After all, the latitude at which a plant typically grows directly affects the amount of sunlight it gets and how that amount changes through the course of the year.  So any given plant adapts much more readily to changes in longitude than changes in latitude.  Plants growing at the eastern-most end of Europe in, say, Portugal, are much more able to make the transition to the Korean peninsula and vice versa than plants adapted to Canada are able to suddenly be cultivated in Ecuador.

            Therefore, given the much greater variety of plants which are naturally going to arise along the Eurasian axis, and given the far greater ease with which those plants are adapted to grow in regions further east and west than in regions further north and south, this resulted in a greater variety of crops which could be grown in Europe and Asia, making civilizations in both regions much more able to adapt to environmental changes the like of which would impact their food supply.  This made European and Asian civilizations, over the centuries, much more able than civilizations in other parts of the world to weather environmental changes that impeded the growth of certain crops.

            Now the relevance of this part will not be immediately apparent, but consider the cheetah.  Its mating practices usually entail three or four males chasing the same female across miles of open country.  This is necessary in order to get the blood circulating in the female’s reproductive organs.  She is in fact unable to conceive unless this chase takes place first.

            Now in order for us to domesticate an animal, we must be able to persuade that animal to breed in captivity.  Breeding cheetahs in captivity would require the construction and continuous maintenance of a cage several miles long; an undertaking for which I am hard pressed to think of any organizations that both have the funds and would find it worth the expense.  Thus, there are practical limitations preventing cheetahs from being domesticated.

            The larger animals of Africa are replete with such limitations.  It doesn’t usually entail a chase, but all of Africa’s largest animals have reproductive practices which depend utterly on factors which cannot be practically duplicated in captivity.  Animals like the elephant, wildebeest and water buffalo can be tamed but not usually domesticated.  That is, we can capture a single animal of this species and train it to survive in captivity, but we are prevented by practical limitations from reproducing them there, at least until the last couple centuries.

            If an animal can’t be domesticated, it can’t be drafted.  It can’t be used to pull wagons, chariots or plows on a regular basis on a national level.  So when the agricultural revolution took off in Africa, this was a big impediment to such activities as empire-building; an impediment not present in Europe.

            Europe, on the other hand, was replete with animals which could be both domesticated and drafted.  This is where cattle come from.  So because large animals were draftable in Europe but not Africa, this was another major advantage to developing civilizations there.

            Now consider the swine flu.  It’s called the swine flu because it originated among swine and made the transition to people.  But did you know that the seasonal flu is another swine flu that made that same jump centuries ago?

            Because European farms had all these draft animals that African farms didn’t, this resulted in European farmers spending a lot more time regularly in contact with other species, which opened the door for a lot more diseases to jump this divide.  As a result of this, European civilizations were much more prone to disease outbreaks, which over the successive centuries, built up European immune systems, while at the same time, making them carriers of many diseases that other civilizations hadn’t encountered.  So when they encountered those other civilization, they usually brought devastating disease, while suffering a great deal less from whatever diseases those other civilizations might be carrying.

            Now consider the wheel.  The wheel, interestingly enough, was invented in two locations, by two different cultures, independently of one another.  That is, they were not in contact at the time.  One was a people in Europe whose name I don’t know and the other was the Incas in modern-day Peru.

            But the wheel didn’t benefit the Incas the way it benefited the European civilization.  Of course, the Europeans, being surrounded with all these draft animals, were very quick to develop wagons for carrying supplies relatively quickly over relatively great distances, while the Incas didn’t have this option.  The Incas had the wheel but they were in the mountains of South America, and the nearest animal capable of pulling a wagon was the Buffalo, thousands of miles away on the plains of North America.

            And then, of course, there’s paper, an invention from ancient China.  Paper, in a pre-electronic age, enables a civilization to design machines, draw maps and develop and maintain a written language, which is necessary in order to maintain records, expound at length on highly abstract ideas, minimize miscommunications over great distances, foster innovation, and many other functions.  This development helped China to get quite a long head start on everyone which lasted for centuries.  Indeed, Chinese ships had reached all corners of Europe by the time Europeans had only begun to experiment with shipping.

            But then came a day when the ruling regime in China, a regime which greatly supported shipping, was replaced by another regime which didn’t support shipping at all.  This regime called back all of China’s ships, decommissioned them, and dismantled China’s ports, thus leaving the door wide open for Chinese shipping accomplishments to be surpassed by European shipping accomplishments.

            This event, though, was not in much danger of being repeated in Europe, because Europe was not unified under one particular government.  Christopher Columbus had many governments to choose from.  He asked one government to sponsor his voyage and they refused.  Then he asked another and they refused.  He kept asking different governments, and finally found one that agreed, and that’s how European civilization first made contact with the Americas.

            Now one thing I find especially interesting is how Jared Diamond uses this part to make an argument against too unified a government.  After all, having Europe divided in this fashion gave each European nation a vested interest in maintaining its exploration efforts, lest its failure to do so allowed it to be overtaken by the exploration efforts of other European countries.

            But much of this is adjacent to the main point of the book.  The question he addresses is, “How come it was European civilizations which conquered Africa and the Americas, and not the other way around?”  A very interesting consequence of that answer is, with just a few environmental differences, it very well could have been the other way around.

Logical Fallacies 30: Argument by Repetition

Video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9IlquMdvu8&feature=watch_response

            What if I were to tell you that, contrary to popular belief, the world is in fact a flat disk, and the Moon truly is made of cheese?  Would you believe me?  I may be mistaken, but I doubt it.  You would probably have less difficulty believing that this claim is made of cheese.  What if I were to repeat it a few times?  Would this make it any more convincing?  Again, I may be mistaken, but I doubt it.

            What if I were to bring in several friends to join me in this repetition?  Would the lot of us, together, be able to repeat it enough times to suddenly render it convincing?  Of course not.  Why not?

            Because if you can tell that a certain claim is, on the face of it, fundamentally absurd, no number of repetitions is going to suddenly render it any less absurd or you suddenly less able to tell that.  You are going to be just as able to glean this absurdity after the thousandth repetition as you are after the third.

            I once heard on NPR about a fellow approaching the Dalai Lama and asking if he had ever been told who Jesus Christ is.

            Now I’ve never met the Dalai Lama personally, and I’m not psychic, but I think it pretty well founded to guess that, upon hearing this question, deep inside, he sighed and thought, “Yes.  I’ve been told.”

            Now it just so happens that there is a much clearer, more straight-forward answer to the question, “Who is Jesus Christ” than most Christians have ever realized.  Jesus Christ is Santa Clause for adults; a cosmic, Jewish zombie who is His own father.

            Sometimes, at the book store, I come across books with titles to the effect of, “The Christian’s Guide to Talking to Non-Christians.”  This, it seems to me, and many other such answers should be written into a book called, “The Non-Christians Guide to Talking to Christians.”

            Christians, many of you, in this increasingly inter-connected world, have no doubt been presented with the Muslim shpiel many times.  Muslims, many of you, no doubt, have likewise been presented with the Christian shpiel many times.  I know that my atheist subscribers get presented with both all the time.  I don’t know if I happen to have any Jewish, Buddhist or Hindu subscribers, but I would guess that if I do, the same thing happens to them all the time as well.  Does it become any more convincing as it is repeated to you over and over again?  Probably not.

            Yet, many a Christian and Muslim laments to me that we atheists won’t ever see the “truth” of your religion, no matter how many times you repeat it us.  Here we have a kind of special pleading which I am compelled to call the ad nauseum fallacy.  It’s a kind of special pleading because it only seems convincing when a double-standard of argument and evidence is applied to it.  Like the ad populum fallacy, it only seems convincing when it supports a position you already hold.  The only reason you find it convincing is that you begin with the assumption that it is true.  Therefore, anyone who doesn’t begin with that assumption is not going to find it convincing.  To these people, it’s just a petty annoyance.

            Well this one has turned out to be surprisingly concise, but that’s all I have to say about that.

Logical Fallacies 29: The Statistical Breakdown (or False Lottery)

Video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DS95LCJYNwM&feature=watch_response

This time, I’ll be speaking less about elemental logic as is the norm in these videos, and more about another subject utterly dependent upon it: statistics.  I’m bringing this up because of a number of people I have found myself dealing with who can’t seem to differentiate between “improbable,” “impossible,” and “miraculous.”

            I once came across a greeting card that said on the front: “You’re one in a million.”  Inside, it said, “...which means that, if you’re in China, there are a thousand other people out there just like you.”  Do you see the joke?  China is a country with a population of more than 1.3 billion.  So if only one in every million Chinese has, say, an extra rib, that’s more than one thousand three hundred people.

            What if one tosses a coin?  What are the odds that it will be heads?  Effectively, they are one in two.  Not precisely, of course, but close enough for this illustration.  What are the odds that it will be tails?  The same.

            What are the odds that it will land on its side?  Well, to be completely honest, they are not nonexistent, but they are small enough that we can probably afford to ignore them for this illustration.

            So what if you toss it three times?  Well given the fact that it’s one chance in two each time, two times two times two is eight.  One chance in two times one chance in two times one chance in two equals one chance in eight.  Therefore, since the odds that it will be tails each time are one chance in two, the odds that it will be tails all three times (two to the third) are one chance in eight.

            What about the odds that it will be tails twice then heads in that order?  One chance in eight.  What about the odds of it being tails, then heads, then tails in that order?  The same.  Tails, then heads twice?  Heads, then tails twice?  Heads, tails, heads?  Heads, heads, tails?  The same.  Each possible outcome of a single toss is one in two.  You just can’t predict which one.  Therefore, each possible outcome of three tosses is one in eight.  You just can’t predict which one.  Therefore, any time you toss a coin three times, the outcome will be something that had one chance in eight of happening.  The “odds” part doesn’t mean that something highly unlikely shouldn’t happen.  It only means that there is no way to predict which unlikely outcome will happen.

            When you toss a coin three times, any possible combination of heads and tails has one chance in eight of occurring.  Since the odds each time are one in two, those odds of a particular outcome double every time you add another toss to the mix.  So any time you toss a coin four times, the odds of any particular combination of heads and tails are one in sixteen.

            So what if you toss a coin ten times?  Two to the tenth is 1024.  So suddenly, the odds become one in 1024.  So if you take a coin and plan to toss it ten times, you can predict in advance that something incredibly unlikely is going to occur.  In fact, if you toss a coin ten times, there is no way to prevent something incredibly unlikely from occurring.  You just can’t be sure in advance exactly what it will be.

            What are the odds of someone winning the lottery with the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5?  In fact, they are exactly the same as with any other five-number combination.

            Now let’s consider this in a different context.  If you look at a professional weather report, you will probably find a percentage indicating a chance of precipitation.  What does it mean if the report says something to the effect of a ten-percent chance?  Does this mean that we can be absolutely certain that it will rain?  No.  Does it mean that we can be absolutely certain that it won’t?  No.  It means that, every hundred times the weather is like this, only ten of those times, on average, will result in rain.  Therefore, rain is unlikely, but not impossible, which means that if it does rain, that’s not a reason to go ridiculing meteorologists or meteorology.  It just means that this is one of those ten times in a hundred.

            I’m bringing all of this up because I recently discussed belief with a girl who argued that, since she was once in a car accident in which all the windows survived intact, there must be a god, who by the way, must be an involved god who gives a damn about windows in a car accident, and furthermore, must be the one from the Bible, even though that one can’t be bothered to protect other people’s windows in car accidents.  Her entire argument here depends on just how uncommon this kind of phenomenon is.  “It is uncommon.  Therefore it must be miraculous.  Therefore it must be the hand of god.  Therefore there must be a god.”  (Non sequitur!)

            Every car accident is absolutely unique.  Every time the windows do shatter, the ways they shatter are utterly unique to that accident.  Therefore every car accident is something highly unlikely.

            Every time someone gets into a car accident, we would be well founded in pointing at the windows and saying, “What are the odds of them shattering in precisely that arrangement?  They’ve got to be pretty small.”  This argument could be made in every single car accident.  Does this justify calling every car accident a miracle?  Surely it can’t.  Such would make miracles impossible to prevent.

            If the odds of a particular event occurring are small, that means this justifies the prediction of a low frequency of occurrence.  The odds of a car coming through a car accident with its windows intact are remote, so we are justified in predicting that it won’t happen that often.  We are definitely not justified in predicting that it will never happen unless in the event of a miraculous intervention, but completely justified in predicting that its occurrence will not be frequent.  Lo and behold, it doesn’t happen that often.  Its occurrence is not frequent.  Our prediction is borne out.

            Ah, but wait a minute.  There’s another wrinkle to this.  You see, we now live in an age of mass media.  I would call this a good thing overall, but we as a society need to understand the ramifications of this.  What if the odds of a particular event are one chance in a million?  That means that, on average, every million times it is possible for that event to take place, it will take place one of those times.  One just can’t be certain which?

            What if the odds of that something happening to a person on any given day are one in a million?  Well, that means that, on average, every day, that event is going to happen to more than 300 people in the United States alone.  We can predict this much, but we can’t predict which 300.

            Now, in an age of mass media, this means that, when that something happens to those 300 people, we’re all going to hear about it, and unfortunately, a lot of us are going to respond by saying, “Whoa!  What are the odds?”

            So I guess, logically speaking, one could call this a statistical breakdown.