Category Archives: Other problems

Problems other than specific logical fallacies–poor explanations, things that are false, and so forth.

Harold Meyerson, Inexplicable, Lack of Evidence, Michael Gerson

Moderatism

This point from Harold Meyerson is where the health care debate ought to start:

Every other nation with an advanced economy long ago secured universal health care for its citizens — an achievement that the United States alone finds beyond the capacities of mortal man.

One might also add that health outcomes in those countries are generally superior to ours for sometimes half the money.  Notice also that the plans that these other countries have implemented are far to the "left," as it were, of anything being considered today.  In light of that, Michael Gerson's endorsement of centrism merely because it is centrism is baffling:  

Some may accuse such moderates of lacking in boldness or ambition. It is better than lacking in responsibility and good judgment.

I suppose I should mention that Gerson hasn't done anything (in the rest of the piece) to establish that moderates have exhibited anything like good judgment.  He has simply assumed that the moderate position is superior to the one advocated by "liberal interest groups."  Yet, as Meyerson points out, the fiscally responsible good judgment seems to be far to the left of anything being proposed.  Few also could deny that the current system has been a striking success for anyone not in the insurance business.  In light of the reality we face, and the possibilities actually realized in every other nation with an advanced economy, one wonders what the virtues of the moderate position, because it is the moderate position, must be.   

Specious allegations of fallacy

Too stupid to notice

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Here's a fun item in the Wall Street Journal.  It's fun because it's an intellectual disaster.  Here, just for entertainment, is one glaring and obvious problem:

– "The cost of treating the 45 million uninsured is shifted to the rest of us."

So on Monday, Wednesday and Friday we are harangued about the 45 million people lacking medical care, and on Tuesday and Thursday we are told we already pay for that care. Left-wing reformers think that if they split the two arguments we are too stupid to notice the contradiction. Furthermore, if cost shifting is bad, wait for the Mother of all Cost Shifting when suppliers have to overcharge the private plans to compensate for the depressed prices forced on them by the public plan.

This is is not a contradiction, as the clueless author of this dismal piece suggests.  Besides, 45 million people lack health insurance (of any variety) but many more lack meaningful health insurance.  For the consequences of that, read this article in the New York Times.  Because it is printed in that paper, it is indisputably true.  Anyway, back to the point, people who lack health insurance, the good argument goes, still will seek life-saving medical care (after having put off routine care).  Someone will pay for that.  The cost will be much higher than it would have been had these people been insured like the rest of us. 

The rest of the piece reads like a series of examples from a textbook on informal fallacies.  More on that later, maybe.  But let me close with this tidbit from the Times' article mentioned above:

At St. David’s Medical Center in Austin, where he went for two separate heart procedures last year, the hospital’s admitting office looked at Mr. Yurdin’s coverage and talked to Aetna. St. David’s estimated that his share of the payments would be only a few thousand dollars per procedure.

He and the hospital say they were surprised to eventually learn that the $150,000 hospital coverage in the Aetna policy was mainly for room and board. Coverage was capped at $10,000 for “other hospital services,” which turned out to include nearly all routine hospital care — the expenses incurred in the operating room, for example, and the cost of any medication he received.

In other words, Aetna would have paid for Mr. Yurdin to stay in the hospital for more than five months — as long as he did not need an operation or any lab tests or drugs while he was there.

Aetna contends that it repeatedly informed Mr. Yurdin and the hospital of the restrictions in policy, which is known in the industry as a limited-benefit plan.

Hurray for private insurance!

George Will, Plain Bad Arguments, Red Herring

Rational allocation

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George Will has seen why health care in the US costs so much, and it is (the) US (government).  He writes:

The president says that the health-care market "has not worked perfectly." Indeed. Only God, supposedly, and Wrigley Field, actually, are perfect. Anyway, given the heavy presence of government dollars (46 percent of health-care dollars) and regulations, the market, such as it is, is hardly free to work.

As market enthusiasts, conservatives should stop warning that the president's reforms will result in health-care "rationing." Every product, from a jelly doughnut to a jumbo jet, is rationed — by price or by politics. The conservative's task is to explain why price is preferable. The answer is that prices produce a rational allocation of scarce resources.

Blaming the government for the high cost of health care comes out of left field (that's a baseball metaphor) in this piece.  Will has in other words done nothing to establish that claim.  He has argued that Americans spend more on health care–the only reason he has given is this:

Today the portion of income consumed by those four has barely changed — 55 percent. But the health-care component has increased while the other three combined have decreased. This is partly because as societies become richer, they spend more on health care — and symphonies, universities, museums, etc.  

He hasn't addressed two very obvious objections to this: (1) just about every other advanced society pays less for health care and gets more (every citizen covered, better overall outcomes) and (2) paying more for health care does not entail getting more: A "free market" for health care services, in other words, may not produce the most rational outcomes.  That "truism" may not be so true.  And besides, very few people would really view their needs for basic health care as they would Cubs' tickets. 

All of this amounts to a subtle change of subject: let's not talk about (1) the uninsured, (2) the under-insured, (3) the insured but not for long, (4) the limitations of employer-based insurance on the lives of people, (5) the devastating effects of health care related bankruptcy (for people with and without insurance), (6) the empirically verifiable existence of vastly superior systems, (7) the rationing of health care to people who pay tons for it in a "free market," and (7) much more.  Let's instead talk about the glory of choices in the free market–shiny things, in other words:

Your next car can cost less if you forgo GPS, satellite radio, antilock brakes, power steering, power windows and air conditioning. You can shop for such a car at your local Studebaker, Hudson, Nash, Packard and DeSoto dealers.

Keep that in mind, folks, next time you're "free market shopping" for health care.

David Brooks, Plain Bad Arguments

David Brooks on human nature

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David Brooks asks:

Has there ever been a time when there were so many different views of human nature floating around all at once?

Answer: Yes.  But he proceeds:

The economists have their view, in which rational people coolly chase incentives. Traditional Christians have their view, emphasizing original sin, grace and the pilgrim’s progress in a fallen world. And then there are the evolutionary psychologists, who get the most media attention.

Only three?  Anyway, in addition to that colossal dumbness, he really wants to argue that evolutionary psychology, as emboddied in the work of one popular author's narrow view of evolution, is wrong, because, err, evolutionary psychology has gotten evolution wrong:

The first problem is that far from being preprogrammed with a series of hardwired mental modules, as the E.P. types assert, our brains are fluid and plastic. We’re learning that evolution can be a more rapid process than we thought. It doesn’t take hundreds of thousands of years to produce genetic alterations.

And so on.  So the problem isn't evolutionary psychology–since evolution as a theory seems clearly right to Brooks, it's wrong versions of evolutionary psychology.  And who can't get behind that?

 

ignorance of basic matters of logic, Plain Bad Arguments, Specious allegations of fallacy, Things that are false

Mr.Spock

Yesterday I mentioned Obama's response to the argument (made by George Will inter alia) that the "public option" (in part on account of its being not-for-profit) will kill private for-profit insurance.  Here again is Obama's response:

OBAMA: Why would it drive private insurance out of business? If — if private — if private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality health care; if they tell us that they're offering a good deal, then why is it that the government, which they say can't run anything, suddenly is going to drive them out of business? That's not logical.

Now, the — I think that there's going to be some healthy debates in Congress about the shape that this takes. I think there can be some legitimate concerns on the part of private insurers that if any public plan is simply being subsidized by taxpayers endlessly that over time they can't compete with the government just printing money, so there are going to be some I think legitimate debates to be had about how this private plan takes shape.

But just conceptually, the notion that all these insurance companies who say they're giving consumers the best possible deal, if they can't compete against a public plan as one option, with consumers making the decision what's the best deal, that defies logic, which is why I think you've seen in the polling data overwhelming support for a public plan.

As anyone can tell, Obama is making a point that that particular argument against the public option suffers from a logical defect.  In particular, he is claiming (I can't believe I have to spell this out, but you'll see in a second why) that the claim we have a perfectly competitive business environment must therefore be false, because the addition of new competetion would destroy existing competitors.  We therefore either have an artificial insurance market which cannot sustain substantial or real market-driven competition (which would be provided by the market driven choice of a not-for-profit model).  Or perhaps the private people just don't want competition from a plan more people would choose–in which case we wouldn't have a free market either.  Notice, dear readers, that Obama concedes there would be "healthy debates" about the nature of the private plan.  That's good–very conciliatory.  But if were up to George Will and friends, that debate can be resolved a priori, as a logical matter.  Obama, correctly points out that the allegation of the logical flaw is erroneous.

Enter Jake Tapper, journalist:

And, while I appreciate your Spock-like language about the logic of the health care plan and the public plan, it does seem logical to a lot of people that if the government is offering a cheaper health care plan, then lots of employers will want to have their employees covered by that cheaper plan, which will not have to be for-profit, unlike private plans, and may, possibly, benefit from some government subsidies, who knows.

 

And then their employees would be signed up for this public plan, which would violate what you're promising the American people, that they will not have to change health care plans if they like the plan they have.

First of all, it is not the case that all private plans are for-profit, but besides, Spock-like?  For Chrissake.  The question deserves a little spock-like criticism of its own.  Take the second part, how many employees have control over the health plan their employer chooses for them now–raise your hands.   

Hasty Generalization, hollow man, Lack of Evidence, Richard Cohen

The average person must think

Richard Cohen, liberal columnist for the Washington Post, has struggled with some very basic logical notions.  Today is no exception.  Today again he puts on his contrarian hat and accuses a lot of unnamed people–admirers of Sonia Sotomayor (Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court) of elitism and racism.  He writes:

With the nose of a trained columnist, I detect the whiff of elitism-cum-racism emanating from the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. The whiff does not come — Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich notwithstanding — from Sotomayor's own statements; nor does it come from her controversial decision upholding race-based affirmative action. It comes, instead, from the general expression of wow about her background. Imagine, someone from the projects is a success!

"Nobody expects you to be chosen someday for the Supreme Court when your father was a welder with a third-grade education," wrote Richard Lacayo in Time magazine. He is right — the expectations are all otherwise. You can see them on display in many of the reports about Sotomayor's background. She was raised in public housing projects. She grew up in the Bronx, which the average person must think of as a particularly nasty part of Mumbai, and she is, finally and incriminatingly, Puerto Rican. This is all, apparently, very hard to imagine.

With the nose of a trained nonsequitarian, I detect a whiff of it-does-not-follow here.  Cohen's only evidence of a "general expression of wow" is some guy writing in Time and his own "the average person must think."  He then goes on to debunk this not-established-to-exist general expression by running through a list of unnusually successful (and therefore completely unrepresentative) people (for any background) who come from public housing projects (Mike Tyson, Jay-Z, Ken Auletta, etc.).  No one can plausibly deny the empirical possibility of being a success in any endeavor despite having been born in the projects.  But what wows people are the probabilities.  As Cohen ought to know, the expectations for people in the projects are indeed very different, not out of racisim, but out of a realistic sense of how one is successful in America.  I doubt it is really elitism to think that.

General discussion, Plain Bad Arguments, Robert Samuelson

Mission accomplished

Robert Samuelson, opinion writer for the Post, thinks the Press has been too kind to Obama.  They are, he claims, "infatuated" with him; they have, as it were, a crush on Obama.  What is the evidence for this claim?  Why, studies, of course:

Obama has inspired a collective fawning. What started in the campaign (the chief victim was Hillary Clinton, not John McCain) has continued, as a study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism shows. It concludes: "President Barack Obama has enjoyed substantially more positive media coverage than either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush during their first months in the White House."

The study examined 1,261 stories by The Post, the New York Times, ABC, CBS and NBC, Newsweek magazine and the "NewsHour" on PBS. Favorable articles (42 percent) were double the unfavorable (20 percent), while the rest were "neutral" or "mixed." Obama's treatment contrasts sharply with coverage in the first two months of the Bush (22 percent of stories favorable) and Clinton (27 percent) presidencies.

Unlike George Bush and Bill Clinton, Obama received favorable coverage in both news columns and opinion pages. The nature of stories also changed. "Roughly twice as much of the coverage of Obama (44 percent) has concerned his personal and leadership qualities than was the case for Bush (22 percent) or Clinton (26 percent)," the report said. "Less of the coverage, meanwhile, has focused on his policy agenda."

Gee.  None of this supports Samuelson's claim that there is "collective fawning" or "infatuation" on the part of the media for Obama.  Besides, he's not even mildly suspicious of the metrics of the study.  What does it mean, for instance, that an article is "favorable"?   Does it advocate Obama's position (whatever that may be) or does it just report that that position enjoys broad support?  Newspapers are filled with all kinds of articles (many of them are of the inside baseball variety); lumping them all together under the simple "favorable/unfavorable" metric is bound to obfuscate questions of bias rather than clarify them.  More importantly, however, increasing "unfavorable" does not entail that the press has grown any more critical or skeptical.  Knee-jerk skepticism in the name of balance is (ironically) worse than none at all.  Finally, its seems wrong to presume, as Samuelson has, that there is some ideal position for the favorable/unfavorable ratings.  Perhaps this is where it ought to be.  But that's another matter.  

Charles Krauthammer, General discussion, ignorance of basic matters of logic, Inexplicable

Use mention torture

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If one consumes enough news and commentary, one begins to notice the same (crappy) arguments over and over in certain circles.  This of course can happen anywhere–on the right, or on the left.  The left, however, in my unscientific opinion, just doesn't have the discipline or organization or perhaps heart to carry it off very well.  Few, I think, will repeat Richard Cohen's latest ideas.  That's not a virtue, however.  It kind of reminds in fact of the old paradox of moral weakness: vice plus moral weakness equals virtue.  Not having the stamina to be evil, I end up doing the right thing.

Back to the point.  There's an argument that's been rolling around the world of torture justifying commentary lately. It goes something like this:

MILLER: And I’m going to move beyond that and say the pertinent question to me is, is it necessary. Where do you stand on this?

KRAUTHAMMER: You know, I’m in the midst of writing a column for this week, which is exactly on that point. Some people on the right have faulted me because in that column that you cite I conceded that waterboarding is torture. Actually, I personally don’t think it is cause it’s an absurdity to have to say the United States of America has tortured over 10,000 of its own soldiers because its, you know, it’s had them waterboarded as a part of their training. That’s an absurd sentence. So, I personally don’t think it is but I was willing to concede it in the column without argument exactly as you say to get away from the semantic argument, which is a waste of time and to simply say call it whatever you want. We know what it is. We know what actually happened. Should it have been done and did it work? Those are the only important questions.

Never mind the fact that Krauthammer writes stuff he doesn't believe (without saying so).  He reasserts the manifestly absurd argument that anything done in the SERE program (Survive Evade Resist Extract) cannot be torture, as that would mean we have been torturing our own people.  The SERE program however trains people to resist the kinds of illegal torture used by our illustrious enemies.  Part of the training involves a little taste.  (Someone who went through this training tells me in his final paper for one of my spring courses (true story) that even that little taste can give you raging nightmares).

Not content with that line, Krauthammer, who fancies himself some kind of logician, pats himself on the back for having avoided the "semantic argument."  The semantic argument, in this case I suppose, is whether you call something torture or not.  That's important.  Because if it is torture, then it broke the law, and if it broke the law, then there ought to be prosecutions.  That's the problem with legal semantics.  In the end someone goes to jail.

But that's just what's so absurd about this line of reasoning.  Krauthammer makes a semantic claim–we cannot by definition torture our own people ("it's absurd!")–in order to claim that waterboarding isn't "torture."  But that's just to confuse "use" and "mention."  What's "use" and "mention"?  Well, if I pretend torture my own guy to show him what to expect, I am "mentioning" torture.  I don't really do it, I just kind of do it.  This is kind of like acting.  The actors don't really say the things they say ("I'm going to kill you"), they mention them.  Using torture, on the other hand, is illegal. 

ignorance of basic matters of logic

The comfy chair*

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This is an argument from definition:

Bob is a bachelor, then ipso facto Bob is unmarried–and male.  

This is not:

Q: Is waterboarding torture?

RICE: The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations under the Convention Against Torture. So that’s — And by the way, I didn’t authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency, that they had policy authorization, subject to the Justice Department’s clearance. That’s what I did.

Q: Okay. Is waterboarding torture in your opinion?

RICE: I just said, the United States was told, we were told, nothing that violates our obligations under the Convention Against Torture. And so by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.

Bob, by the way, might not in fact be unmarried (and therefore not a bachelor) but it is certainly the case that if he were unmarried than by golly the definition of an umarried male is a bachelor.  Now unless the Convention Against Torture includes the provision that anything authorized by a President is not by definition torture, then the President probably has no power under it–logical or otherwise–to make it not torture (or maybe even, in a bizzaro soft pillows way to declare something torture which isn't).  Here, by the way, is the definition of torture in the 1985 United Nations Convention Against Torture:

For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.  

*=click here.

hollow man, Red Herring, specious comparisons, Things that are false

Diminished mental capacity

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Kathleen Parker concern trolls on behalf of homophobic Christian ministers:

When whites lynched blacks with the tacit approval of the state, the entire African American community was terrorized. No one can pretend otherwise. It is this immeasurable horror that hate-crimes laws attempt to address by adding another layer of punishment to the primary crime.

What fair-minded person could object? On the other hand, how do we read the minds of our worst actors? Is it possible to say conclusively that these killers were motivated by hate to the exclusion of other potentially confounding factors?

These are legitimate questions that deserve rational debate without the dueling rants of hyperbole and outrage. Ultimately, that debate leads to free-speech issues — especially religious speech — and the real crux of the opposition.

Some conservative groups worry that hate-crimes laws might lead to restrictions on churches or other religious organizations' freedom to quote Scripture that might be deemed hateful toward gays. Might a passionate preacher's invocation of, say, Leviticus 20:13, which condemns homosexual behavior, be interpreted as conspiracy to commit a hate crime?

In fact, the legislation applies when a physical assault or attempted murder takes place. And, so far, the First Amendment still protects the rights of even the Rev. Fred Phelps to take his "God Hates Fags" show on the road.

But in a country where eating Twinkies can be a defense for murder — and a Miss USA contestant can be publicly denounced as a "dumb bitch" for saying that marriage should be between a man and a woman — stranger things are sure to happen.

As an operating principle, meanwhile, it seems wiser to hear and see the haters rather than criminalize their thoughts and banish them to the underground where their demons can fester and where no law can breach their purpose

There's a neat collection of straightforward fallacies here.  In the first place, there is the oft-repeated objection that bias crimes involve an impossible form of "mind reading."  That is just dumb.  "Intentional murder" involves mind reading.  

Second, that the existence of hate crimes laws will ultimately (that's the word that indicates the bottom of the slippery slope–here a fallacious one) inhibit religious speech is just crazy.  Hate crimes laws, as the very name makes clear, involve crimes.  Click here for the FBI page on hate crimes.

That–the alleged slope–completes the red herring–the bait and switch.  For the initial point of the piece regarded including crimes against homosexuals (and others) in hate crimes laws.  Including them seems perfectly reasonable.  It has nothing to do, as Parker even seems to admit without realizing it, with people's "thoughts" (taken by themselves).  Non-existent restrictions on free speech, in other words, are not the issue at all.  On account of that obvious fact, we don't need to worry about "criminalizing" anyone's thoughts.  

Finally, it's ludicrous (and just plain baffling) to group the (not actually real) "Twinkie defense" (supposedly used to justify the murder of Harvey Milk and George Moscone in San Francisco) and the completely reasonable negative public reaction to a beauty contest's lame and ignorant defense of opposite marriage.  She made a contentious point about what rights certain people should have–many have objected to her reasoning.  She's a public figure and ought to expect that.  

One more thing, however, about the murderer of Harvey Milk.  The jury, reading the defendents mind, found him unable to have engaged in premeditated murder on account of diminished mental capacity.