Let’s say I write an article in which I assert that the mid-day sky is actually bright scarlet red in color.
You might respond “You’re just Mitch Berg. You’re a conservative, so you always think stupid things”. That response is half, maybe 3/4 true – but doesn’t say anything about the color of the sky. What it does is say “your argument is false because of who you are”. The term is “Argumentum ad Hominem” – latin for “arguing against the man”, rather than the facts the Man presented. It’s a logical fallacy. Who I am has no bearing on the facts I present, right or wrong.
You might then respond “You don’t have a degree in meteorology – how would you know anything about the sky?” That’s also true – I’m not a meteorologist. But it doesn’t address the facts presented, but rather my credentials. It’s called an “Appeal to Authority”, and it’s another logical fallacy. One’s credentials might lend authority to a statement – but not truth or falsity, all by themselves.
You could try another tack, something like “you are an idiot”. That’d be called an “Appeal to Ridicule”. Again – I might be actually an idiot, but it doesn’t address my factual assertion in any way. It’s…yep, another logical fallacy.
Maybe you could dig back on Twitter, and find some example of me saying “the sky is blue”, and post a before-and-after saying “Hah! You’re being inconsistent!”. That’s called the “Argumentum Tu Quoque” – focusing on the fact that one has changed their mind on a subject, rather than the facts at hand – which is a really dumb one; the fact that I was a Democrat growing up, for example, doesn’t make me less a conservative today (or vice versa for someone else).
You could go on the offensive, and claim that if I believe the sky is scarlet with “Sooooo, what you’re saying is you want old people to die”. That’s called a “Straw Man Argument” – trying to make someone defend an argument they never made. I said the sky was scarlet – nothing about Grandma at all.
You could write “the sky is blue, because as I noted above, the sky is blue”. That’s called “Begging the Question” – perhaps the most mis-used phrase in the quasi-educated dialect of English, which people usually use to refer to “asking a question again”. It means “using your conclusion as proof of your conclusion”.
Or – here’s a radical thought, you could post a picture of a bright blue, or dull gray, sky and tell the world “Look! The sky above is blue! It’s not even a little bit scarlet!”. That would address the actual facts of my assertion that the sky was bright scarlet.
And the technical term for that is “a factual argument”.
I’m writing this not because I’m trying to go all Jordan Peterson on you, but because our society would be a lot stronger, smarter and BS-proof if more people learned how to make a logical argument, and to spot and call out an illogical one.
“That’s just NPR!” or “That’s just National Review” or “that info came from people allied with “the swamp”” and many other arguments…aren’t really arguments at all. They are illogical deflections.
Not to go all Walt Kowalski, but there was a time people had to learn this stuff. And there are times I think, reading social media, that learning the basics of, if not logic, at least spotting gross illogic and not being illogical, should be required before people can vote…
…much less post on Facebook or Twitter.
And if I’m ever appointed king, or otherwise become a benevolent strongman…
(Careful, kids – in some quarters, particularly academia, the above is very un-PC. It’s what we used to call Samizdat. )
This post was originally run on May 11 2020. I’m re-running it because, well, it seems appropriate.
Good post, Mitch. I bookmarked Ms. Cook’s excellent article.
there was a time people had to learn this stuff
I don’t believe this to be true unless you’re going back some 200 years when education really did educate and transform people. If we learned any of this in the 60s and 70s, it was a one day event taught as check-off item by one of the lesser qualified teachers in one of those catch-all classes like Social Studies.
These oh-so better educated people in the past elected Wilson and the white Obama, FDR. I’m not impressed.
JDM,
ese oh-so better educated people in the past elected Wilson and the white Obama, FDR. I’m not impressed
Right. Like I said, credentials aren’t truth.
This is plainly wrong, as it conflicts with Social Value Theory, which is the New Hotness.
Social Value Theory is a relatively new concept that originated with the Harvard University debate team. In the past, debates had been won by the side with the most persuasive arguments based on facts, logic and rhetoric. Social Value Theory proponents argued those factors were themselves tools of oppression that perpetuated injustice. Instead, they argued, the validity of a proposition depended on the Social Value of the person advancing it. The rejoinder that this was simply Ad Hominem layered with Appeal to Authority was dismissed as too complicated to understand.
For an illustrative example, a geeky White Male PhD wearing the lucky shirt his girlfriend gave him as he lands a satellite on a comet traveling a million miles an hour is less qualified to comment on it than a 20-something woman who is offended by the shirt. She has higher Social Value.
Get with the times, Grandpa!
… actually, in keeping with JD’s haha-only-serious aside, it’s worth noting that those Logical Fallacies were created by old (ancient even) Whypeople and thus are Socially Valueless meaning they’re invalid.
That’s the thing about gaslighting, at some point the fog clears
The gaslighting fog might clear when a careless match blows the whole thing up.
“Social value” == “might makes right.”
All of O’Brien’s justifications of the rule of Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-Four amount to “might makes right.”
On 11 May 2020 09:44, Emery writes this:
That’s the thing about gaslighting, at some point the fog clears
Yet, on 1 May 2020 12:04, Emery wrote this:
It will take a truckload of ignorance or irrational love for the guy to conclude anything other than that he seriously thought that just because a cleaning agent kills the virus on the outside, somehow we should inject it inside and ‘test’. ~ Donald Trump
Physician, heal thyself.
Ian,
It’s a tu quoque argument.
But it’s also a sick burn. +100 points.
Don’t assume that a single individual comments under the “Emery” nic.
Indeed, MP.
I want to talk to Emery, now.
There is no Emery, there is only Zuul.
@Ian: here’s another Trump classic when he refers to Pence spokesperson Katie Miller’s positive test for Covid-19.
“This is why the whole concept of tests aren’t necessarily great,” the president told reporters on Friday. “The tests are perfect, but something can happen between the test where it’s good and then something happens and all of a sudden — she was tested very recently and tested negative and today I guess for some reason she tested positive.”
Trump doesn’t even understand what viruses are or what testing means. I prefer presidents who are better at the job than I would be.
You’ve already got that. Trump’s far better at the job then you could ever be.
You’re just a troll; and frankly, you’re an appallingly bad at it. I hope the Chinese aren’t paying you much – they’re not getting their money’s worth.
Private payrolls were cut by 20 million in April. How many lives and jobs could have been saved if Trump hadn’t ignored Covids-19 for two + months? We have an economic crisis because we have a public health crisis — and we have a public health crisis because he failed to act.
It is interesting that you read the foreign press, the US response to the coronavirus is very even handed. You don’t see the partisan bile that you see in the US “non-partisan” media. In fact the US response, so far, has been middle of the pack.
Trump’s political enemies, if they had had their way, would not have instituted a travel ban. There are still powerful voices on the Left, like AOC, who believe that should let people in who test positive for covid-19 at the border, and believe the government should release ALL those detained for violating immigration laws out and into our population.
Again, I would point you to this graph: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-per-million-3-day-avg?tab=chart&country=FRA+DEU+ISR+ZAF+SWE+GBR+USA
Show me how the ignorance and stupidity of Trump caused the US to become an outlier among nations. Because it hasn’t.
There is only Trump Derangement Syndrome, which demands that EVERY bad thing that happens be laid at the feet of Donald J Trump, however tenuous or even imaginary the connection.
How many lives and jobs if Trump . . . none. Zero.
Trump did not impose the shut-downs in a panic of virtue-signaling, Democrat governors did that. Trump does not refuse to lift the shut-downs despite evidence they were hurting more than helping, Democrat legislatures are doing that.
I wish there was a way to get that fact through people’s heads. Democrats are killing the nation.
Who is dumb enough to trust the guy who stole money from his charity?
Better to believe in fake conspiracy theories and blame others to rally the troops than in actual facts and science where you have to do something to address the problem, in a timely manner.
The Trump economic disaster is going to be rough. Who would have figured that a man who was a complete and utter failure at business would run the economy into the ground as president.
We do not have a public health crisis. We have a nursing home crisis.
The news media is carefully concealing that. “Cases” are not a “crisis.” Sure, there are cases in meat packing plants (nobody died). There are cases in prisons (nobody died) and in politician’s offices (nobody died). There are cases all over, but the infected have mild symptoms if any, just like any other influenza. The infected are not flooding the hospitals. They’re not dying in the streets. There is no “crisis” for children, teens, working adults, and therefore no reason to keep them under house arrest.
We may face a public health crisis, if the economy tanks. But not from Covid.
The news that the virus has invaded the White House, and that they’re using testing and tracing against it, doesn’t just show a depraved double standard. It also wrecks Trump’s whole deception campaign about the safety of reopening the country.
Suddenly tests are so important.
Close, Emery. Lose the first line and you’re right on message.
It’s not a conspiracy theory if there’s an actual conspiracy.
Democrat governors imposed the lock downs. Democrat legislatures are maintaining them. Democrats like Cuomo refuse to lift the lock down without a federal bailout. And Democrats are sending people like you to blame it all on Trump.
You are using the same excuse as every wife-beater, standing over her and screaming: “Look what you made me do!”
I’m going to wait for you to cut-and-paste a few more items from Today’s Daily Briefing, since you’re obviously not reading and responding to anything in a logical, rational, scientific, way.
On second thought, I think I’ll just click over to the mainstream media to get my propaganda direct. No point running it through a mindless filter.
Perhaps you and jdm can share some popcorn and watch Plandemic which jdm is recommending to STiD readers.
Plandemic is produced by Judy Mikovits a failed scientist with demonstrated tendencies to lie and steal and a clear case of borderline personality disorder decides to take advantage of many people’s gross scientific illiteracy by spreading deadly conspiracy theories so she can boost her status and income and get back at the scientific community that exposed her.
If she were fifty years younger, Trump would marry her.
You must be doing good with the troll fighting, JD: the Other Little Weasel changed the subject completely and dragged me in to a new thread.
Germany’s Bild Newspaper Says ‘Lockdown Was a Huge Mistake’. Curious how long it will be before our brave media reports on this.
Emery, given that 78% of US COVID cases descend from those in New York, let’s ask a different question. Instead of pointing at the President, let’s ask the (Democratic) governors of New York and New Jersey why it was just last week that they decided to start cleaning the (*&)(_) subways each night, why until yesterday they forced nursing homes to accept COVID patients, and why even today they allow nursing homes to re-admit workers who have tested positive after only 7 days.
You want decisions that are killing people, there you go. Perhaps the President could have spared flyover country by shutting down LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark, but you’d be savaging him if he’d done that, too.
It’s becoming boring, jdm. Mitch’s list is an excellent start to reading Emery posts, since he engages in all those logical fallacies and more. His 7:18 is Ad Hominin, straight up. No attempt to refute the message, only to slander the messenger. Textbook. His 6:29 is Tu Quoque.
Another excellent one to watch for it False Premise. His May 11, 9:51 begins “Private payrolls were cut by 20 million in April.” No, they weren’t “cut” by the employer, they were “prohibited” by Democrat governors.
False Premise is like saying, “Given that the world is flat, if you sail too far, you’ll fall off the edge.” Well, yes, that would be true IF the world was flat. But it’s not. And the economy isn’t in freefall because business owners are idiots, it’s in freefall because Democrat politicians are.
One of Emery’s most annoying habits is Having The Last Word. Watch for it, he does it a lot, generally a day after we’ve all moved on. He goes back to post some inane comment to make the Comment Counter click one number higher, so we go back to see who commented, and then discover it’s more drivel. Watch for him to come back now and comment, “Does not,” just to have the last word.
Are you old enough to remember Primitive Pete? He was a cartoon character in a series of filmstrips that I watched in Shop Class, long, long ago. He was famous for never using the Right Tool For The Job. Use a chisel for a pry bar, use a screwdriver for a chisel, pound a nail with a wrench, that sort of thing.
We should put together an on-line class teaching “How To Think” and market it to homeschoolers. Emery could play the part of Primitive Pete.
One more time: stop reading him. I have, and am much happier for it.
You’re right, of course, kinlaw.
I think the temptation lies in confronting the Usual Lefty Arguments and smashing them! Especially because, as JD pointed out with regards the Other Little Weasel, all the local trolls are so “appallingly bad” at their job and their arguments are so easily brushed aside. The thrill of victory is all a mirage tho’, because the most common lefty tack is to change the thread topic or just “disappear” for a while.
That said, I’ve been making an effort of late to do as you recommend. Keep on recommending as you do.
Regarding a comment JDM made much earlier about whether people used to, as a rule, learn the rules of informal and/or formal logic, my impression from reading history is that the educated classes–those who could have attended a college or university, whether or not they did–did indeed attempt to learn the rules of logic. Presumably the college educated learned them better–whether they used them better can be a topic of debate.
I would also presume that those who would have aspired to be able to go to college would have tried to emulate this. OK, so why did this change? Easy; major education leaders (e.g. Dewey) argued against classical education and for a “practical” education. They’ve largely carried the day, and we’ve forgotten the rules of logic over the past century or so.
I would agree with that, Bike
So terrifying I can hardly comment for fear of catching it off the Internet
Told ya.
“Dr. Anthony Fauci in a highly anticipated hearing on Tuesday warned the Senate health committee of “really serious” consequences if states ignore federal guidelines and reopen too early during the coronavirus pandemic.” ~ The Hill
So Rubes, what is the crime of the century, Obamagate?
Ah, remember the days when Emery used to say that Republican politicians were fear mongers?
Good time, good times.
Huh. Emery once again displays his amazing inability to stay on topic. I believe that would be called the “red herring” fallacy, reborn more recently as the “Squirrel!” fallacy.
But if we must indulge talk over a crime of the century related to COVID, crime #1 would be China’s suppression of knowledge about the disease, crime #2 would have been the left wing media’s early dismissal of its significance despite having the tools to know better, and crime #3 would be the failure of New York and New Jersey to do basic things like “clean the d**n subways” and “keep COVID out of nursing homes”.
Oh, facts don’t fit your narrative very well, do they, Emery? Well, take heart, neither do your attempts at logic.
Trump has offered America as the largest-scale lab experiment done to date, with the citizens as lab rats. Some will live and some will die, but the data will be huge, the greatest data.
You can have a pro-business attitude if you recognize the problem and aggresively implement measures like testing and limited confinement. If you want to open the economy while ignoring the virus, you end up with a devastated health system and economy.
“Dr. Anthony Fauci in a highly anticipated hearing on Tuesday warned the Senate health committee of “really serious” consequences if states ignore federal guidelines and reopen too early during the coronavirus pandemic.” ~ The Hill
So Rubes, what is the crime of the century, Obamagate?
So what’s the implication here, Emery (I’m addressing the persona that wrote the 10:46 comment)? That elected officials can’t or shouldn’t focus on more than one topic at a time?
AIDE: “Mr. President! Tanks have crossed into the U.S. from Canada! We’re under invasion!”
PRES. EMERY: “Not now, I’ve got focus all my time on this COVID-19 before any more people with underlying health conditions die!”
On 11 May at 12:39, Mitch wrote:
It’s a tu quoque argument.
You’re right, Mitch. And like others have pointed out, I can’t be sure which persona wrote which posts 🙂
Emery, your record at predicting the future is abysmal. Time and again you have been proven wrong. The more adamantly you insist something will happen, the less likely it is to happen.
The governors can lead or follow, but their states will reopen. Take precautions. Protect at risk populations. This is what I, and others, have been saying for weeks. The governors are the people who are lacking in common sense.
I would be willing to bet some of the 20+ million people who have been forced out of work through no fault of their own would say they are part of the “largest-scale lab experiment” ever …….
The worst thing that can happen, if you are pro-lockdown, is for the lockdowns to be lifted and the Wuhan flu death rates to remain steady or decline.
Because that would mean that people who opposed the lockdowns would be proven right. The lockdowns, undertaken on the solemn advice of the experts, would be shown to have been the wrong thing to do.The universe will have proven the faucis of the world wrong. People then might question other expert opinions that the elites believe should be the basis of public policy.
I have looked at the time series of covid-19 deaths of several countries. There is no correlation between per capita covid-19 deaths and the strictness of social distancing orders, or the time the social distancing orders were put in place.
There is a strong correlation in most countries between time and the number of covid-19 deaths per capita. in almost all cases, you had a sharp rise to peak between mid March and mid April, followed by a decline, sometimes sharp, sometimes shallow.
Look at the data, not at your imagination.
Emery, your record at predicting the future is abysmal. Time and again you have been proven wrong. The more adamantly you insist something will happen, the less likely it is to happen.
Huh, pretty true. Emery, keep predicting disaster, then. :^) (hey, I’m a bit overweight, slightly diabetic, asthmatic, taking blood pressure medication and statins….I’m not an 85 year old nursing home resident, but I figure I’ll take all the help I can get!)
Seriously, this whole kerfuffle is clear evidence of how important the tools of logic actually are. The most significant issues are really those of “are we comparing the right categories?”, and a lot of the fiercest arguments involve times when one party or the other is trying to apply data to a category that doesn’t apply, or in a way that simply shows their biases. (“errors of perception”, as Isaac Watts put it)
Emery has seriously misstated what Fauci said. Fauci is a bureaucrat, he rarely speaks in terms of absolutes. In the two hours of testimony, Fauci addressed the issue only twice in short paragraphs, in response to leading questions by Democrat senators.
First in response to Patty Murray:
Senator Murray: (59:10)
If a community or a state or a region doesn’t go by those guidelines and reopens, the consequences could be pretty dire, correct?
Dr. Anthony Fauci: (59:19)
The consequences could be really serious. Particularly, and this is something that I think we also should pay attention to, that states, even if they’re doing it at an appropriate pace, which many of them are and will, namely a pace that’s commensurate with the dynamics of the outbreak, that they have in place already the capability that when there will be cases, there is no doubt even under the best of circumstances, when you pull back on mitigation, you will see some cases appear. It’s the ability and the capability of responding to those cases with good identification, isolation and contact tracing will determine whether you can continue to go forward as you try to reopen America.
Why Emery would take what the reporter from The Hill would write about Fauci’s testimony, when you can read itself, is no mystery. Emery likes his news biased and poorly sourced.
General Hara Warns Of Civil Unrest
https://www.bigislandvideonews.com/2020/05/12/video-general-hara-warns-of-civil-unrest/
Hara said his other concern is “if we let the economy go the way it’s going, there’ll be significant civil unrest that could lead to civil disobedience and, worst case, civil disturbance and rioting.”
When other members of the House committee asked what they can do to help move the process along more quickly, Hara suggested that “maybe a letter from this committee to the governor and Department Health may help,” with everyone’s signatures.
“Maybe to try to say, hey this is a consensus among the committee and we feel strongly that we need to move forward with a decision and then try to open this economy up,” Hara said.
Bottom line: the national guard incident commander of the Hawaii covid-19 response team is trying to get the state legislators to stand up to Governor Ige.
^^ You should give serious consideration to getting off of your ‘fainting couch’ and curtail this drivel.
We are between the Scylla and Charybdis here, let’s not pretend that sailing directly into the Scylla in order to avoid the Charybdis is a wise move.
We might be between the rock and the whirlpool. Or we might be sailing into the whirlpool for fear of a rock that isn’t there.
The much-dreaded Surge never arrived; not here, not anywhere. There was an initial burst of hospitalizations, then they tapered off, exactly like Farr’s Law predicts they would. ICU beds were never overwhelmed. Ventilators were never too few for patients. Social Distancing made no difference. Contact Tracing made no difference. Computer Models made no difference.
Even with lying about the death tolls, The Virus That Ate New York City isn’t much worse than a bad flu season. That’s not worth destroying our economy. We’re steering into a whirlpool because that’s where the captain wants us to go, hoping we’ll panic and throw Bad Orange Man overboard.
.
Between the Trump Depression™️ and Trump’s “we want grandma to die a horrific solitary death by suffocation” policy — who would have thought this to be a good electoral strategy in a swing states?