Category Archives: Fallacies of Relevance

Academics, Ad hominem circumstantial, General discussion, Lack of Evidence

More on bias in academia

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The New York Times and the Washington Post must be under some kind of obligation to run an “academia is biased to the left” piece once or twice a year (excluding, of course, the regular appearance of this theme in the columns of David Brooks and George Will, to give two examples). And yesterday’s Outlook section in the Washington Post has another one.

According to the formula, it begins with an unverifiable anecdote:

>A sociologist I know recalls that his decision to become a registered Republican caused “a sensation” at his university. “It was as if I had become a child molester,” he said. He eventually quit academia to join a think tank because “you don’t want to be in a department where everyone hates your guts.”

>I think my political views hurt my career some years back when I was interviewing for a job at a prestigious research university. Everything seemed to be going well until I mentioned, in a casual conversation with department members over dinner, that I planned to vote Republican in the upcoming presidential election. Conversation came to a halt, and someone quickly changed the subject. The next day, I thought my final interview went fairly well. But the department ended up hiring someone who had published far less, but apparently “fit” better than I did. At least that’s what I was told when I called a month later to learn the outcome of the job search, having never received any further communication from the school. (A friend at the same university later told me he didn’t believe that particular department would ever hire a Republican.)

>Now there is more data backing up experiences like mine. Recently, my Villanova colleague Richard Redding and my longtime collaborator Frederick Hess commissioned a set of studies to ascertain how rare conservative professors really are, and why. We wanted real scholars to use real data to study whether academia really has a PC problem. While our work was funded by the right-of-center American Enterprise Institute, we (and our funders) have been very clear about our intention to go wherever the data would take us.

For those of you who don’t know what it’s like to look for a job in academia, the experience he mentions is completely common. Having been on both sides of hiring committees, “fit” considerations (not merely publications) can play a very central role. Besides, how can the author tell that he was rejected because he said he would vote Republican? He can’t read the minds of that committee, and no amount of research of the AEI is going to vindicate him. That anecdote, in other words, illustrates nothing other than the lazy way this guy reaches conclusions.

Of course, I’m just saying that because I’m biased.

There’s a better discussion of this piece (and this type of piece) at LGM.

George Will, Straw Man

Childishness

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Whatever one’s position on the desirability or plausibility of government funded health insurance, this remark is just plain childish:

>About one thing, Hillary Clinton is, remarkably, both clear and opaque: Jefferson is anachronistic. “We can talk all we want about freedom and opportunity, about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but what does all that mean to a mother or father who can’t take a sick child to the doctor?” Well, okay, what does “all that” mean to someone stuck in congested traffic? Or annoyed by the price of cable television? What does Mrs. Clinton mean?

One can always make this kind of fundamentally crappy, not to mention dishonest, argument. For anyone’s view x, replace it with something manifestly different, then claim they are also arguing for that different thing. For those of you playing along at home, try this out on your friends. See if it works.

Michael Gerson, Straw Man

Exactly as I predicted

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If you relocate the horizon of success, you can win at anything. Michael Gerson teaches us how to do that with arguments:

>On cultural issues, conservatives have been ambushed by hope. And Wehner and Levin provide two main explanations.

>First, societies can, over time, recognize their own self-destructive tendencies and reassert old norms — not just arresting decline but even reversing it. Many Americans, for example, have seen the damaging effects of divorce on children — sometimes from the firsthand perspective of their own childhoods — and divorce rates, especially among upper-income couples, have fallen. Over the decades the social wreckage of drug use has become undeniable — and the social judgment on this practice has shifted from “stylish rebellion” to “suicidal idiocy.” In many cases, our culture has benefited from the natural healing mechanism of simple sanity.

>The second reason for this cultural renewal is bold, effective public policy — welfare reform with time limits and work requirements; zero-tolerance approaches to crime; education reform that tests and requires basic skills; and comprehensive anti-drug efforts, including enforcement, treatment and education. In all these cases, good government and rational incentives have made a tremendous difference.

Lower crime, less drug abuse, lower divorce rates, real book learning of course, are all of them uniquely conservative positions. Liberals, of course, advocated drug abuse as stylish rebellion, no investment in quality public education, unlimited welfare, and a tolerant attitude towards crime.

Equivocation, Ignoratio Elenchi, Kathleen Parker, Straw Man

I fought the law

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Kathleen Parker, a deeply empathetic person, puts herself in the shoes of the typical illegal immigrant:

>As long as we offer jobs, medical treatment, driver’s licenses and in-state tuition to those who come here illegally, why would any right-thinking, would-be immigrant take a number and wait his or her turn? Why not just throw in the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders and free tequila while we’re at it?

Indeed, the life of the typical illegal immigrant is full of all sorts of freebies; indeed, the only thing missing is the fulfillment of some kind of alcohol-fueled male adolescent sexual fantasy.

It gets worse:

>Arguments favoring services and privileges for illegal immigrants always point to the broader benefits to society.

God forbid.

>Healthy immigrants mean a healthier America; an educated populace means fewer jobless dependents; legal drivers are more responsible because, allegedly, they’ll also buy insurance and stick around when they have an accident.

>The latter seems unconvincing given that illegal immigrants, by definition, tend not to think legally.

A bachelor, by definition, is an unmarried man. An illegal immigrant, by definition, is someone who does not have legal status; but this actually doesn’t mean that this illegal immigrant has broken the law. The law might have been broken–as it is in numerous cases–when they were children. Besides, it’s not the case that anyone who breaks the law, in any regard, “tends to think illegally.” I’d be interested to find out what the thinking illegally tendency is.

She continues:

>In any case, by the same logic, we might also say that amnesty is good for the country because then everyone would be legal. Rather than fix something, we simply accommodate circumstances. As in: Kids are having sex anyway, so we’ll just give them condoms.

Parker suggests that the response to every problem is the same: stop it. While that might be desirable, as any sociologist could tell you, it’s not going to happen. Denying the reality and complexity of illegal immigration will not achieve much, however much you assert that illegal is as illegal does.

Stanley Fish, Straw Man

Never knew you cared

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Stanley Fish reads two books on religion–one for, one against–and comes to a stirring, there-are-good-arguments-on-both-sides conclusion:

>Perhaps an individual reader of either will have his or her mind changed, but their chief value is that together they testify to the continuing vitality and significance of their shared subject. Both are serious inquiries into matters that have been discussed and debated by sincere and learned persons for many centuries. The project is an old one, but these authors pursue it with an energy and goodwill that invite further conversation with sympathetic and unsympathetic readers alike.

>In short, these books neither trivialize their subject nor demonize those who have a different view of it, which is more than can be said for the efforts of those fashionable atheist writers whose major form of argument would seem to be ridicule.

The chief value of these books on religion is that they are books on religion.

George Will, Straw Man

School rites

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George Will, sometime libertarian, writes:

>In today’s political taxonomy, “progressives” are rebranded liberals dodging the damage they did to their old label. Perhaps their most injurious idea — injurious to themselves and public schools — was the forced busing of (mostly other people’s) children to engineer “racial balance” in public schools. Soon, liberals will need a third label if people notice what “progressives” are up to in Utah.

>There, teachers unions, whose idea of progress is preservation of the status quo, are waging an expensive and meretricious campaign to overturn the right of parents to choose among competing schools, public and private, for the best education for their children.

The “campaign” they’re waging involves a referendum on a school choice law. People can vote for it and people can vote against it. But people can choose private schools right now if they can afford them. But more basically, “meretricious” is not a term Will, what with his perpetual dishonesty about anyone’s view but his own, ought to be using. Of him, one might say:

>Intellectually bankrupt but flush with cash. . .

But that was his line (later in the piece). The idea that there is a right to choose among competing schools (some of them–nay the majority of them–religious) using public money is an astounding one–especially for a simple-minded constitutional minimalist, such as Will is (when it comes to the limiting rights of other people). Indeed, allowing parents to take public tax money to private schools, one might reasonably argue, greatly expands the reach of the government into the private sector: private schools, what with their “competitive” edge, are now public schools. Do they need federal money to compete?

Ad Hominem Abusive, False Dichotomy, Sebastian Mallaby, Straw Man

As if it were yesterday

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Sometimes it seems like so long ago that we marched off to war in Iraq. For some, that distance has blurred their memory of events. Writing the "grown-ups" or, as it has become known in the blogosphere, the "very serious persons," foreign policy piece, Sebastian Mallaby, professional contrarian, illustrates that very smart looking people can make some really silly arguments:

Clinton's rivals are contemplating history and deriving only a narrow lesson about Bush: Don't trust him when he confronts a Muslim country. But the larger, more durable lesson from Iraq is that wars can be caused by a lack of confrontation. The Iraq invasion happened partly because the world had lost the stomach to confront Saddam Hussein by other means. By 2002, the sanctions on Hussein's regime had been diluted, and there was pressure to weaken them further. Hussein was no longer "in his box," to use the language of the time: If you believed that a resurgent Saddam Hussein presented an intolerable threat, it was worth taking the risk of unseating him by force, sooner rather than later.

Alone among the Democratic candidates, Clinton has the honesty to insist that the case for war was reasonable at the time — even if, with the benefit of hindsight, the invasion has proved disastrous. In sticking to that politically difficult position, Clinton is saying that, despite its awful risks, war can sometimes be the least bad choice. She is not running away from military power, even in a political climate that makes running attractive.

That's not how I remember it. Nonetheless, more annoying that Mallaby's ignorant contextualizing of history ("at the time") is his pointless hypothetical ("If. . . "). The point of history is not to relive it, but to learn from it: one can learn from history because we know what happened. And you can't forget that all of the things said by Bush, et alia, about a resurgent Saddam were false–false in the sense of not being true.

If you believed that they were true, indeed, then you believed that Saddam posed a threat. But you had a false belief. And more than that. Bush's false belief about Saddam was rather less justified than Joe Citizen's: Bush and his war making party had access to facts that made the case for war against Saddam even less justified than it otherwise appeared. Mallaby writes all of this on the manifestly silly premise that any opposition to Bush's policies–foreign or domestic–can only be explained by the silly ad hominem of Bush derangement syndrome.

I suppose it's "deranged" and "immature" to have been right.

Accident, George Will, Straw Man

Big boss man

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Commenters on the Washingtonpost.com website make all of the good points about George Will’s latest failure to understand that general rules of human behavior have obvious limitations while the imagination of those who would like to cheat does not.

>Restrictions on freedoms, and especially freedoms as fundamental as those of the First Amendment, require serious justifications. So the question is: To what pressing problem did the university’s $100 limit respond? Or is it merely another manifestation of the regnant liberalism common on most campuses — the itch to boss people around?

The reason for this? Some kid broke the universities rules regarding spending for a school election. Are the rules fair? Maybe not. But that’s got nothing to do with the McCain-Feingold campaign law:

>Thus do the grossly anti-constitutional premises of McCain-Feingold seep through society, poisoning the practice of democracy at all levels

Nor is “you’re not the boss of me” the proper response to rules you don’t agree with.

David Broder, Ignoratio Elenchi

Armed with information

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A PBS show about a successful but financially strained state run health care program for the poor in Tennessee featured someone–a state representative dead set against the program–who said: not all problems can be solved with money. Fair enough. But all money problems can be solved with money, and that was a money problem. David Broder isn’t far away from that when he writes:

>What I learned about Leavitt in his years as governor is that he is blessed with vision that sees future policy challenges and developments more clearly than most politicians. In this case, he is visualizing a radically different kind of medical marketplace, in which families armed with specific information about the treatment success and prices of hospitals and doctors can shop at will for the best quality and most affordable care.

There’s no shortage of information about health care success. Here’s one that even I know: seeing a doctor for basic health care needs increases one’s healthness quotient. The primary shortage, as anyone can tell you, is access to affordable health care for millions of employed as well as unemployed people.

Michael Gerson, Straw Man, Things that are false

So cool it’s uncool

Michael Gerson, protege of the great David Brooks, visits a coffee shop near his home in Northern Virginia. He sees pictures of radicals, makes some remarks about how they were Stalinists, or something, and draws the conclusion that the left suffers from radical chic. Not only that, but the right is so cool its uncool: it’ll never be popular man. That’s right, you’d never be cool enough to wear a Reagan shirt.

But only late in the piece does he notice the obvious:

>Some on the left are suspicious of this trend, which social critic Thomas Frank calls “commercialized dissent.” “It is,” he told me, “symbolic of the eternal revolution of the market” and its “constant search for the new.” “The ideology expressed is generally not liberalism; it is the ideology of the market, libertarianism.” Political trendiness of the Body Shop and Whole Foods variety, in short, has little serious emphasis on economic or social justice.

A t-shirt with Che Guevera is not the same as membership in the Democrat(ic) party or the affirmation of its non-work camp or internment policies. No matter, the right has branding problems of it’s own:

>But there also should be concerns on the right. On its current track, the emotional branding of the Republican Party among the young will soon be similar to Metamucil. The party’s emphasis on spending restraint and limited government may be substantively important, but these themes are hardly morally inspiring. And the Iraq war is a serious drawback among younger voters — except, of course, among those 20-somethings with buzz cuts who actually fight the war. Appealing to cause-oriented consumers will require addressing issues such as global poverty and disease, global warming, and economic and racial justice. This reality of the market is also a reality of American politics.

“Spending restraint and limited government” is about as true as saying the democrats are the party of “big government.” But the weirder thing is the claim that those fighting the Iraq war do not find it a drawback, as if they (and not the belligerent scribes at NRO and elsewhere) were the real cheerleaders for the cause of being in Iraq (and later Iran and Syria).