Welcome to Keith's night. Don't tread on anyone and the
libertarian Institute here are 14 logical fallacies by Michael
humor of the University of Boulder.
Colorado from his book, knowledge, reality and value, a
mostly Common Sense guide to philosophy.
Number one, anecdotal evidence often people try to support
generalizations by citing a single case or a few cases that
support the generalization scientists call this anecdotal
Evidence example. You try to show that immigrants
are dangerous by citing a few examples of immigrants.
Who committed crimes, anecdotal evidence has two problems,
first. Usually, when people do this,
they don't pick a case randomly. They search for a case that
supports their conclusion, while ignoring cases that don't see
cherry-picking, second random variation, even if you pick
these cases randomly, it can easily happen, just by chance
that you picked a few atypical cases.
In the immigration example, what you should actually do is look
up these statistics on crime rates for immigrants compared
with native-born citizens. Number two assumptions.
One of the major ways we go wrong is that we simply assume
things that we don't know. Unfortunately, when you assume
things, you go wrong a lot more often than you expect.
You should assume that most of your assumptions are wrong.
It is hard to combat this because we often don't notice
what were assuming and it doesn't even occur to us.
To question it. Here are a couple examples
suppose you here statistic about Out how common intimate partner
violence is in the United States.
This is where someone physically abuses their girlfriend
boyfriend or spouse you naturally, assume the vast
majority of these cases are men beating up women and you might
just go on reasoning from that implicit assumption in reality.
Though, survey evidence suggests that men and women suffer, this
kind of abuse about equally often or suppose.
You are a statistic stating that most murder victims are killed
by a family member. Or someone they know you
naturally assumed that most murders result from domestic,
disagreements. And that the murders are
committed by ordinary people who lost control during an argument
with a family member or something like that.
In fact, it turns out that almost everyone who commits a
murder has a prior criminal record.
Also the vast majority of these victims are also criminals the
category, a family member, or someone you knew include such
people as the His drug dealer, the victims criminal partner,
the victims fellow gang member and so on.
You just assumed that these were Ordinary People but the original
statistic didn't say that I can't really properly convey to
you. Just how often assuming things
leads, you astray. You need to experience being
wrong over and over again in order to appreciate the point.
Unfortunately, most people never come to appreciate the point
because they never check on their assumptions to About how
many are wrong? Number three, base rate.
Neglect. A base rate is the frequency
with which some type of phenomenon happens in general.
EG. The base rate for heart disease,
is the percentage of people in the general population who have
heart disease. The base rate for war is the
percentage of the time that a country is at War Etc.
When you want to know whether some kind of event is going to
happen or has happened Etc. The best place to start is with
the base rate. If you want to know whether you
have a certain disease, First find out how common the diseases
in general. If one percent of the
population, has it been a good initial estimate?
Is that you have a one percent chance of having it from there.
You should adjust that estimate up or down.
According to any special risk factors or low risk.
Factors that you have. Most people don't do this.
People commonly ignore base rates example.
Suppose. There is a rare disease, that
afflicts one in a million people.
There's a test for this disease. And that's 90% accurate.
Suppose you took the test and you test positive.
The test says, you have the disease disease question, given
all this information. What is the probability that you
have? The disease?
Many people think it's 90%. Even doctors sometimes get this
wrong, which is disturbing. The correct answer is about zero
point zero, zero zero nine percent less than 1 in 100,000
explanation. There are 300 million people in
the country of these 300 one, millionth have the disease and
299 million. Nine hundred ninety, nine
thousand seven hundred, don't the test is 90% accurate.
So 270 of the 300, people who have the disease wouldn't test
positive, that's 90 percent and twenty nine million, nine
hundred and ninety nine thousand, nine hundred and
seventy of the two. Hundred and ninety.
Nine million nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand seven
hundred who don't have the disease would also test positive
that's 10%. So, out of all the people who
test positive, the proportion who actually have the disease is
270 over 270 plus twenty nine million, nine hundred and ninety
nine thousand, nine hundred and seventy approximately zero point
zero zero zero. 09. Number four, cherry-picking,
cherry-picking, refers to the practice of sifting, through
evidence and selecting out, only the bits, that support a
particular conclusion, ignoring the rest.
Simple example. I have a bag of marbles.
I want to convince you that most of the marbles in the bag are
black. I look inside the bag which is
full of Many Colors of marbles. Black red teal chart truce and
so on. I pick out five black ones.
Show them to you and say see. These marbles came from the bag.
I don't show you any of the other colored marbles that were
in the bag. You might be misled into
concluding that the bag is full of black marbles.
That's like what people do in political debate.
If I want to convince you say that affirmative action is bad.
I might search for cases where affirmative action was tried and
it didn't work or it had harmful effects.
If, I want to convince you, that it's good, I search for cases,
where it really helped someone of course.
Course, both kinds of cases exist.
It's a big Society full of millions of people almost any
policy is going to benefit some people and harm others because
of this, you should be suspicious.
When someone tells you stories designed to support a
conclusion, always ask yourself whether they have a bias that
might have caused them to cherry-pick the data.
Number 5, confirmation bias, when asked to evaluate a theory,
people have a systematic tendency to look for evidence
supporting the theory and not look for evidence against it
this happens, especially for theories.
We already believe but can also happen for theories.
We initially have no opinion. About example, if asked, whether
liberal politicians are more corrupt than conservative
politicians, a conservative would search through his memory
for any cases of a liberal doing.
Something corrupt and he would not search through his memory.
For cases of conservatives being corrupt, a liberal on the other,
hand would do the reverse. Each just looks for cases that
support his existing belief and does not look for evidence
against it. This is called confirmation bias
to combat. This, it is necessary to make a
conscious effort to think of exceptions to the
generalizations that you accept an to look for evidence against
your existing beliefs, whenever you feel Inclined to cite some
examples of supporting belief a stop and ask yourself.
Whether you can also think of similar examples supporting
approximately a Number six, for Julie.
Humans are born credulous. We instinctively believe what
people tell us. Even with no, cooperation.
We are especially crunch Allis about statistics or other
information. That sounds like objective
facts. Unfortunately, we are not so
scrupulous when it comes to accurately and non misleadingly
reporting the facts. There was an enormous amount of
disinformation in the world particularly about politics and
other Matters of public interest.
If the public is interested in it, there is bullshit about it.
I have noticed that this bullshit tends to fall into
three main categories. First ideological propaganda.
If you learn about an issue from a partisan source, for instance,
you've read about gun control on a gun control.
Advocacy website, or you hear the day's news from a
conservative radio show, you will get pretty much 100%
propaganda. Facts will be exaggerated.
It cherry-pick deceptively phrased or otherwise misleading.
Normally you will have no way of guessing the specific way in
which the information is deceptive making the information
essentially worthless for drawing inferences.
Second sensationalism mainstream news sources.
Make money by getting as many people as possible to watch
their shows, read their articles and so on to do that, they try
to make everything sound as scary, exciting, outrageous or
otherwise. As possible.
Third laziness, most people who write for public consumption are
lazy and alack. Expertise about the things they
write about. If a story has some technical
aspect example, Science News journalist probably won't
understand it and they may get basic facts backwards.
Also, they often just talked to one or a few sources and print
whatever those sources. Say, even if the sources have
obvious biases. I can't give you adequate
evidence for all that right now. But here's an anecdote that
illustrates what I mean. I once heard a story on NPR
National Public Radio, a left-leaning radio news source,
it was about a man on death row. Who was about to be executed
from the story. It appeared that the man was
innocent new evidence had emerged after the trial.
Several of the witnesses have recanted their testimony yet.
The courts had refused to Grant a new trial.
The only remaining Hope was for the governor to Grant a stay of
execution. There was an online petition
that listeners could sign. Usually I just accept new
stories and then go on with my day, but on that occasion, I
decided to look into the story before signing the petition with
a little Googling. I found the court decision from
the convicts most recent appeal, which had been denied.
I read the decision which contained a summary of The Facts
of the case and an explanation of the judge's decision.
What it revealed was that the NPR story was.
Bullshit. What NPR said was basically just
what the defendants lawyer had claimed.
The court carefully explained why?
Each of those claims was bogus and provided?
No basis for an appeal, the most striking claim which had
initially made me. Think the defendant was probably
innocent, was the multiple Witnesses had recanted their
testimony. What had actually happened was
this the defense lawyer went back to the witnesses many years
after the original trial. And question them on details of
the case. Several of them either couldn't
remember the details or reporter details.
Slightly differently example. What color shirt someone was
wearing the lawyer described this as recanting their
testimony, but none of them had changed their mind about the
defendant being guilty. The NPR journalists had
apparently, just credulous Lee reported want the lawyer told
them without bothering to look up the court documents from The
case, why would they do that? Three reasons, one ideological
bias. The story, painted the death
penalty in a bad light which a left-leaning news Outlet would
like to sensationalism the story of an innocent man about to be
executed, grab the audience's attention and inflamed their
passions three laziness. Checking on the story, would
have required work. Why put in the work?
When you know, almost all of your audience will just accept
whatever you say. Long experience has led me to
think that that case was not unusual.
This is the way the news media Works lesson.
Popular media stories are untrustworthy.
By the way. It's no good.
Checking them against other popular news sources because
they basically all copy from each other.
That also goes for example, most bloggers your next-door neighbor
and other casual information sources for relatively reliable
information. Look at academic books and
articles. And government reports.
For example, Census Bureau reports, FBI crime reports.
Number seven, dogmatism, and overconfidence people who study
rationality have a notion called calibration.
Your beliefs are said to be well, calibrated when your level
of confidence matches, the probability of your being
correct, for example, for all the beliefs that you hold with
90% confidence, about 90% of them should be true.
When you're 100% confident of things.
They should be true. 100% of the Time Etc.
Most people are badly calibrated.
In fact, almost everyone airs in a particular direction almost
everyone's beliefs are too confident.
People say they are 100% certain of a bunch of things but it
turns out that only say 85% of those things are actually true.
There are psychological studies of this.
This is the problem of overconfidence, almost everyone
has it and almost no one has the opposite problem.
L'm under confidence. So you should assume that you
are probably overconfident to you should therefore try to
reduce your confidence in your beliefs, particularly about
controversial things, and particularly for speculative and
subjective. Claims.
Number eight ideological cause judgments back in 2008 to 2009,
America suffered a severe economic recession.
A lot of people lost money and lost their jobs and were
generally. Unhappy would set it off with
problems in real estate. Home prices had gotten very
high, then they dropped a lot of people started defaulting on,
not repaying their home loans. Banks were in a lot of trouble
and other investors and financial companies were in
trouble. Because they'd made Investments
That depended on home prices, Staying High, and Home Loans.
Getting repaid. In the wake of the crisis, many
people tried to explain why it had all happened.
This included people. With opposing ideologies,
roughly, there were people with pro-government and people with
anti-government ideologies and both tried to explain the
crisis. Can you guess what?
The two sides said, the pro-government, people said the
recession happened because there wasn't enough regulation, and
they had listed regulations. That if they had been in place,
would probably have presented the crisis.
The anti-government people said, the recession happened because
there was too much government intervention.
Engine and they listed existing government policies.
That if they hadn't been in place, the crisis probably
wouldn't have happened. Notice that the basic factual
claims of both sides are perfectly consistent.
It's perfectly possible that they were some actions.
The government took such that if the government hadn't taken
them, the crisis wouldn't have happened.
And also, there were some actions, the government failed
to take such that. If it had taken them, the crisis
wouldn't have happened. It's perfectly plausible.
Oil, that the crisis could have been averted in more than one
way, either by adding certain government interventions or by
removing some other government interventions, which alternative
you focus on depends on your initial ideology.
Both sides took the episode to further support their ideology.
We have too much government, or we need more government.
These conclusions were supported by their respective, causal
interpretations. The recession was caused by
government. Interventions, or the recession
was caused by failure of government to intervene.
Who was right, assume the facts are as stated that some
additional interventions would have prevented the recession and
the repeal of some other interventions would have
prevented the recession in that case.
We should either accept both causal claims or reject both
causal claims, depending on what we mean by cause if we mean Soul
cause then we should reject both.
Causal claims IE. We should say, the recession was
not caused either by Government intervention or by failure to
intervene if we just mean Factor such that if it were changed,
the effect wouldn't have happened.
Then we should accept both causal claims.
The recession was caused by intervention and by failure to
intervene. It's okay to say that X was
caused by y provided. That you also recognize all the
other things that cause X in the same sense, if there are many
Different causes then you need additional evidence, or
arguments to establish, which of the causes is the best one to
change. In the recession case, we would
need independent arguments to establish, which, cause of the
recession intervention or failure to intervene.
It would have been better to change.
Number nine over simplification people, very often oversimplify
philosophical issues. Say you're thinking about the
morality of abortion attempting. Simplification would be to say
that there are two positions pro-choice and pro-life or
pro-and anti-abortion. Either fetuses are people in
killing them as murder or fetus as aren't people and killing
them is perfectly fine. But this overlooks the
possibility that late-term fetus.
Our people but early term fetuses are not or maybe
personhood comes in degrees and fetus has become progressively,
more person like as they develop, or maybe, fetuses are
persons in some senses, but non-persons in other senses.
So, there was a range of possible positions not just to
viewing things in black and white terms is a common over
simplification. We look at two simple positions,
rather than, considering a spectrum of Possibilities.
The problem is that often the truth is a more subtle position
that doesn't clearly fall under either of the two simplest
categories of view. Number 10 P hacking similar to
cherry-picking P hacking or data mining.
Sometimes happens in science. A scientist has a large amount
of statistical data with different variables.
Even if all the data is completely random.
Any complex set of data is going to show some pattern that looked
significant, essentially one can take the data and use it to test
many different possible hypotheses.
Even if all the hypotheses are false, eventually just by chance
due to random variations in the data.
One of the hypotheses will pass a test for statistical
significance. This is one reason why many
published research results, especially in medicine
psychology and social science are false example, a study will
find that some food increases the risk of cancer for
non-smoking middle-aged men, but then when someone tries to
replicate it and they don't get the same result, it's because
the original result was just due to chance.
Number 11, speculation speculative claims are
essentially guesses about things that we lack the evidence to
establish as yet claims about the future or claims about What
would have happened in hypothetical alternative
possibilities are good examples of speculative claims example,
you're arguing about whether it's good for government to try
to stimulate the economy by spending money.
You say this is good. Because example, if the
government hadn't stimulated, the economy back in 2009, the
recession would have continued much longer.
This is speculative. We don't know what would have
happened because Was in fact, the government did pass a
stimulus plan and we can't go back in time and change that to
see what would have happened. If they didn't.
The problem with speculative claims is that people with
different philosophical or political or religious beliefs
tend to find very different. Speculations plausible example,
people who are suspicious of government will find it more
plausible that without government stimulus.
The recession would have been shorter.
So Arguments that start from speculative.
Premises are typically not rationally persuasive advice.
If you want to rationally persuade, people of something
try to avoid speculation number 12 subjective claims roughly.
A subjective claim is one that requires a judgment call.
So it can't just be straightforwardly and decisively
established. For example, the Judgment that
political candidate a Is unqualified for office.
The Judgment that it's worse to be unjustly prison for five
years, then to be prevented from migrating to the country.
One wants to live in the Judgment that Louis CK's jokes
are offensive Etc. This differs from speculative
claims because in the case of speculation there might be ways
that the claim could in principle be decisively
verified. It just hasn't.
In fact been verified note. I am not saying that there was
no fact or no. Answer as to, whether these
things are the case, or that they are dependent on people's
opinions. What I am saying is that there
are not clear established criteria for these claims.
So it is difficult to verify them.
Maybe it's true that Louise jokes are offensive.
But if someone doesn't find him offencive there is no decisive
way of proving that he is people often rely on subjective
premises. When arguing about
controversial, All issues. The problem with this is that
subjective claims are more open to bias than relatively
objective. That's the opposite of
subjective claims. So, people with different
philosophical or political or religious views will tend to
disagree a lot about subjective claims.
And for that reason, they are ill-suited to serve as premises
in philosophical political or religious arguments advice.
Try to base your arguments as As possible on relatively objective
claims. Number 13, treatment effects,
adverse selection effects. Let's say you have created a new
educational program for preschool children.
You want to know whether it improves learning or not.
What you would do is look at kids after they've had your
program and compare them to kids of the same age who didn't have
your program and see if the first group perform better on
tests. Let's say, kids who had your
special program perform 10% Her on later tests on average, then
you'd probably conclude that your program works.
But wait here is another possibility.
Suppose as would usually be the case that the kids who entered
your special educational program, where kids whose
parents chose to enroll them in that program.
The rest were kids whose parents did not decide to enroll them.
Furthermore, maybe the parents who enrolled their kids in
special programs are on average. Smarter and value education more
than the parents who didn't do that.
Furthermore, maybe intelligence and value placed on learning are
partly genetic. And so these parents pass those
traits on to their kids. So the children who went into
your program, we're already on average smarter and more
interested in learning than the children who didn't go into the
program and maybe that explains why they did ten percent better
on. Asks, after the program, maybe
your program had no effect at all.
It's just that you got the smart kids in it and that made the
program look good. That is an example of a
selection effect a case where it looks like a causes B, but it's
actually just that the instances of a that you tested were
already more likely to be bees, for other reasons, selection,
effects are contrasted with treatment effects.
Cases, where the thing you're testing, really causes the
effect that it's thought to cause any.
Education example, academic success is correlated with
taking the special program. This could be due to treatment
effects. Meaning, the program causes kids
to learn more or due to selection effects.
Meaning the program, selects students who are already good at
Learning. Selection effects are very often
mistaken for treatment effects. Another example, you want to
know if some vitamin improves People's Health.
So you look at people who take the supplements of that vitamin
regularly and you find that they are healthier than the people
who don't take it. You think that shows that
vitamin supplements are good for people, but actually it's more
likely, a selection effect. People who take vitamins are
more likely to also be exercising eating.
Seafoods and so on which is why they would be healthier on
average, even if the vitamins did absolutely nothing.
Number 14. What about ISM similar to to
quo? Quay C-section 4.1 above?
What about ISM occurs, when someone criticizes something bad
and you respond with what about X where X is some other bad
thing example. Someone complains that the
current president's budget proposal.
All has a very high deficit. You say, what about the previous
president? He had deficits to or someone
complains that the president just murdered a child.
You respond that some other political figure from an
opposing party also murdered children.
What about that? You demand the reason people
engage in what about ism is that rather than being interested in
Practical issues about what should be done in our current
situation? They instead see political.
Discussion as a kind of tribal contest, a competition between
their side and the other side where whoever makes their side.
Look better wins. So they don't want attention
focused on any flaws in one of their sides.
People example, a politician from their own political party.
So they try to divert attention to something.
That's bad about someone on the other side.
The problem. Is that this Practice
systematically prevents evil from being addressed for any
evil in the world unless it's literally the worst thing in the
world. One can always Identify some
other even worse evil and say, what about that for any evil
done by any political leader? It will virtually always be
true. That some other leader from
another party has at some time, committed a similar evil and
also that members of that person's Party didn't do
anything about it. If your response when you hear
about any evil currently happening is to deflect
attention to some past evil committed.
By another person or group. That means that evil never gets
addressed attention. Always gets deflected Away by.
What about his mm. The next time someone else is
doing something evil. That won't be addressed either.
Because people will say what about the present evil that
wasn't properly. Pearly addressed.