Kathleen Parker, Michael Gerson, Plain Bad Arguments, Weak Analogy

A pro-choice Catholic and a Rabbi walk into a bar

8 Comments

Two columns in the Post.  One from the newly reborn Kathleen Parker, who argues, not that fallaciously, that perhaps lifting the stem cell ban was otiose, as researchers had already found a way around the central moral problem (for some), i.e., the creation of embryonic stem cells from embryos.  Or is it the destruction?  I'm not sure, because she unfortunately characterizes the moral problem in these two distinct ways.  This seems important because some people object to using (therefore destroying) stem cells, others object to creating embryos solely for the purposes of research, which seems, in some sense, much worse.  Nonetheless, other cells, she alleges, work just as well, so lifting the ban on whatever it was that was happening doesn't amount to much.  I have a feeling something in there is false or confused, but this doesn't strike me as a fallacious argument.  So good for Parker, at least we stayed on topic.

Same topic, different writer.  Michael Gerson makes the following very puzzling assertion:

It is probably not a coincidence that Obama has chosen a Roman Catholic — Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius — to implement many of these policies as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Obama has every right to a pro-choice Cabinet. But this appointment seems designed to provide religious cover. It also smacks of religious humiliation — like asking a rabbi to serve the pork roast or an atheist to bless the meal.

Sebelius, though strongly pro-choice, was capable of occasional compromise. But she consistently fought against the serious enforcement of Kansas's late-term abortion restrictions. Kansas became a magnet for late-term abortions.

Still, Sebelius insists that "my Catholic faith teaches me that all life is sacred." This puts her in the same category as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Biden — Catholics who assert the sanctity of life while defending legal abortion. It has also earned Sebelius a firm rebuke from her archbishop.

No, it's not like the Rabbi thing at all: Sebelius is strongly pro-choice, one might presume the rabbi in the joke or the atheist is not "pro pork" or "pro God."  There is much else about this column that would warrant criticism, such as the claim that pro life people's rights are being trampled upon when they lose arguments:

There is a common thread running through President Obama's pro-choice agenda: the coercion of those who disagree with it.

Indeed, laws are coercive.  Elections, someone said, have consequences.  Pointing that out doesn't mean those consequences (i.e., laws which are "coercive"!) are wrong.

General discussion

Responsible Science, Irresponsible Pundits

2 Comments

Think Progress has a nice post about Glenn Beck's comments on Obama's stem cell order.

BECK: So here you have Barack Obama going in and spending the money on embryonic stem cell research, and then some, fundamentally changing – remember, those great progressive doctors are the ones who brought us Eugenics. It was the progressive movement and it science. Let’s put science truly in her place. If evolution is right, why don’t we just help out evolution? That was the idea. And sane people agreed with it!

And it was from America. Progressive movement in America. Eugenics. In case you don’t know what Eugenics led us to: the Final Solution. A master race! A perfect person. …. The stuff that we are facing is absolutely frightening. So I guess I have to put my name on yes, I hope Barack Obama fails. But I just want his policies to fail; I want America to wake up.

 It's pretty hard to parse this rant and find anything like an argument in it, but he seems be suggesting:

1. Progressives advocated eugenics in the past.

2. Eugenics led us to the Final Solution and to goal of creating a master race and a perfect person.

3. Obama is a progressive.

4 [Implicit, I guess] It is likely that Obama as a progressive will advocate eugenics which will lead to the Master RAce.

5. Therefore, Obama's executive order should be opposed.

That's just the best that I can make out of the addled thoughts of Beck. He seems to fallaciously argue by analogy from Obama being a progressive and supporting stem cell research to the likelihood that Obama is endorsing eugenics, and therefore, slippery slopily, will end up supporting the Master Race.

The factual ignorance underlying this argument is staggering. All that Obama has done is reverse the limitation of the use of federal funds to the 20 or so lines that were already in existence at the time Bush signed his 2001 order:

To the delight of patients’ groups and scientists, the order will allow research on hundreds of stem cell lines already in existence, as well as ones yet to be created, typically from embryos left over from fertility treatments that would otherwise be discarded. (NYT, 3/8/09)

There is little reason to believe that this will initiate the slippery slope to the Master Race.

It is interesting to compare this argument with Krauthammer's more measured slippery slope argument against research cloning of embryos. (The fullest version was in the New Republic (there's a link here to it)). There he argues only that there is a need for some line to be drawn that protects embryos from being reduced to mere material and that the line is reasonably drawn at research cloning (creating embryos for research purposes)).

Setting aside the fact that the Obama's executive order does not authorize funding for research cloning (research cloning is not illegal in the US, though the use of federal funds for it is banned by the Dickey-Wicker amendment originally passed in the mid-90's), it seems possible to me to argue that there is some slipperiness to the slope and that at some point we may find ourselves having allowed morally disturbing cases. But, if the argument depends on the likelihood of this being the first step in an ineluctable process to the Master Race, then that just seems intellectually irresponsible at best.

Charles Krauthammer, General discussion, Specious allegations of fallacy, Straw Man

The greatest non sequitur ever foisted

3 Comments

Charles Krauthammer, on Obama's speech of over a week ago:

The logic of Obama's address to Congress went like this:

"Our economy did not fall into decline overnight," he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care and education — importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.

The "day of reckoning" has arrived. And because "it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we'll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament," Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.

Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.

He said "logic" and "non sequitur," so we knew we were in for something good from the guy who thinks a slippery slope is a valid form of argumentation.  And indeed we were.  It seems that Krauthammer has just distorted what Obama said.  Distorting what somebody says in order to knock down the distorted version of what they say is a non sequitur.  To be specific, it's a straw man.  Here's the quoted passage in context: 

We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before. 

The weight of this crisis will not determine the destiny of this nation.  The answers to our problems don’t lie beyond our reach.  They exist in our laboratories and universities; in our fields and our factories; in the imaginations of our entrepreneurs and the pride of the hardest-working people on Earth.  Those qualities that have made America the greatest force of progress and prosperity in human history we still possess in ample measure.  What is required now is for this country to pull together, confront boldly the challenges we face, and take responsibility for our future once more.

Now, if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that for too long, we have not always met these responsibilities – as a government or as a people.  I say this not to lay blame or look backwards, but because it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we’ll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament. 

The fact is, our economy did not fall into decline overnight.  Nor did all of our problems begin when the housing market collapsed or the stock market sank.  We have known for decades that our survival depends on finding new sources of energy.  Yet we import more oil today than ever before.  The cost of health care eats up more and more of our savings each year, yet we keep delaying reform.  Our children will compete for jobs in a global economy that too many of our schools do not prepare them for.  And though all these challenges went unsolved, we still managed to spend more money and pile up more debt, both as individuals and through our government, than ever before.

In other words, we have lived through an era where too often, short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity; where we failed to look beyond the next payment, the next quarter, or the next election.  A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future.  Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market.  People bought homes they knew they couldn’t afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway.  And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day.

Obama has clearly distinguished between the declining economy and "all of our problems."  In particular, the failing economy is just one of the problems we face.  So he is not making, in other words, the non sequitur of the century or whatever, since that isn't even close to the "logic" of Obama's argument.  Whatever the virtues or vices of Obama's proposals, they don't fail for this reason.  

To return to the theme of facts and inference, Karauthammer's claim about Obama's argument does not fall within the realm of plausibility–no fair-minded editor could claim that he has accurately represented what Obama said in his summary.  The Post really ought to have higher standards than this.  

George Will, Inexplicable, Lack of Evidence, Things that are false

Choose your own facts

10 Comments

Everyone has heard the expression, "you can choose your own something or other, but not your own facts."  Well, in a way, no.  Here's the way, according to Washington Post's Ombudsman, Andrew Alexander:

Opinion columnists are free to choose whatever facts bolster their arguments. But they aren't free to distort them.

The question of whether that happened is at the core of an uproar over a recent George F. Will column and The Post's fact-checking process.

That sounds wrong to me.  Two quick reasons.  First, there seems to be a question of scale.  If we have three facts that support a claim, and 97 which don't, an opinion columnist at the post is free to argue talk about the three to the exclusion of the 97.  Let's say, for instance, that one tiny piece of evidence (of dubious origin) holds that a certain person is guilty of a crime, yet a pile of evidence shows the opposite.  The Post's Ombudsman thinks it would be fine to mention the one piece, and not the others, creating the impression that the preponderance evidence leans the other way.

Second, we have a question of context.  Facts have a context in which they are true.  In George Will's recent column (which after all is the occasion for this piece), he alleges–and this is the foundation for his argument–that there was a global cooling hysteria in the 1970s.  This may be true of the popular media, but it wasn't true of scientists (who argued that the climate was warming).  There's a fact, sort of I guess, with no context producing a rather misleading inference.  This is especially true if the audience does not have a very clear grasp of the background information (which information makes Will's columns appear ridiculous). 

Choosing your own facts, in other words, can be a method of distortion, and, in this case it was.

Inexplicable

Evidence versus inference

6 Comments

The following line from the Columbia Journalism Review strikes me as an extremely odd position to take.   

But his point about the wiggly, lawyerly language is especially germane because this is a classic case of evidence versus inference. The Post can argue that, technically, all of the evidence Will presents passed fact-checking; and Will can then infer what he wants about that evidence—even if his inferences differ drastically from those of the scientists who collected the evidence—without journalistic foul.

If I read this correctly, CJR is asserting that the only commitment journalists have is to the facts in the narrowest possible sense of the term.  As an op-ed writer, I can assert any two facts, and, so long as they are true, I can draw any inference I want between them.  I think this is kind of dumb for a number of reasons.

One, it's the job of an Opinion-editorial writer to make inferences between facts; they're not journalists.

Two, inferences are evidence.  Will used those inferences between facts as evidence for the claim that global warming hysteria is sweeping the nation.

Three, inferences vary in type and degree.  Some of them are objectively bad, some objectively good, and some are objectively in the middle. 

Four, it does not violate anyone's freedom of conscience to deny their inferences a public forum.  Holocaust deniers, racists, and the rest make their cases with inferences between things that are facts.  The problem often lies with the inferences they draw from the available facts.  Holocaust deniers will fix on the absence of some one particular kind of evidence in order to infer–got that, INFER–that the Holocaust is a sham.  George Will has fixed on two isolated facts (which weren't as he said they were, but any, for the sake of argument) and drawn a similarly ridiculous conclusion.

Five, for the above reasons, I infer (1) that the Post ought to do a better job of editing, and more importantly (2) the smart guys at CJR ought to take a basic critical reasoning course. 

Ad Hominem Abusive, George Will, specious comparisons, Things that are false, Unclassifiable

Recidivism

4 Comments

We certainly pick on George Will a lot.  This is because he is a recidivist.  Now despite his having been roundly and decisively refuted in his ridiculous global warming denialism, he has returned to the scene of the crime, to repeat his errors and once again to tout the virtues of his skepticism.  His skepticism has little by way of virtue, because it has no factual basis, and he has no business writing anything about a subject in which he has worse than no competence. 

Others have already amply demonstrated the factual errors again in his column.  I would just like to make two points.  Will's most basic problem lies with the inferences he draws.  He insists in his column that dire warnings about global cooling 30 years ago in the popular press have some kind of significance for whether or not one should believe the community of competent and qualified climate scientists when they assert that the globe is warming.  He writes:

Few phenomena generate as much heat as disputes about current orthodoxies concerning global warming. This column recently reported and commented on some developments pertinent to the debate about whether global warming is occurring and what can and should be done. That column, which expressed skepticism about some emphatic proclamations by the alarmed, took a stroll down memory lane, through the debris of 1970s predictions about the near certainty of calamitous global cooling.

Concerning those predictions, the New York Times was — as it is today in a contrary crusade — a megaphone for the alarmed, as when (May 21, 1975) it reported that "a major cooling of the climate" was "widely considered inevitable" because it was "well established" that the Northern Hemisphere's climate "has been getting cooler since about 1950." Now the Times, a trumpet that never sounds retreat in today's war against warming, has afforded this column an opportunity to revisit another facet of this subject — meretricious journalism in the service of dubious certitudes.

Yes, the New York Times' being wrong about global cooling is evidence against a Times' reporter's claims (problematic though they were for being too kind to Will) that scientists have questioned Will's facts.  Sheesh.  You cannot get any dumber than that by way of rejoinder.  Maybe: I know what you are, so what am I?  But this really is a version of that.  

Here's the second point.  Science, as far as I know, thrives on skepticism–qualified skepticism.  Arguing that maybe the Bible is correct and Jesus created the world (okay, it doesn't say that) does not amount to meaningful skepticism.  Neither does George Will's incompetent, ignorant, and self-important bumbling through the facts.  He writes:

The scientists at the Illinois center offer their statistics with responsible caveats germane to margins of error in measurements and precise seasonal comparisons of year-on-year estimates of global sea ice. Nowadays, however, scientists often find themselves enveloped in furies triggered by any expression of skepticism about the global warming consensus (which will prevail until a diametrically different consensus comes along; see the 1970s) in the media-environmental complex.

Nah.  Will has been fairly and roundly criticized for having been wrong in his facts and wrong in his judgments.  This does not amount to evidence of a media-environmental complex, it does, however, suggest that the Post has no interest in reality.  They say as much:

If you want to start telling me that columnists can’t make inferences which you disagree with—and, you know, they want to run a campaign online to pressure newspapers into suppressing minority views on this subject—I think that’s really inappropriate. It may well be that he is drawing inferences from data that most scientists reject — so, you know, fine, I welcome anyone to make that point. But don’t make it by suggesting that George Will shouldn’t be allowed to make the contrary point. Debate him.

That is not the point.  And it's a deliberate misconstruing of the criticism.  In the first place, Will's facts were wrong.  In the second place, his inferences are preposterous (see, for instance, above).  He has no business making them in a public forum such as this and the Post has no business publishing them.  

Bad Explanations, Lack of Evidence, Plain Bad Arguments, Post hoc ergo propter, Unclassifiable, Weak Analogy

Where’s Foucault when we need him?

5 Comments

George Will's been taking a beating lately–His character, his general ignorance of that of which he comments upon, and, our favorite, his logic have all come under increasing attack recently. Today we can give him a pass on his column. Its silliness is not entirely his fault. For some reason he devotes his column to fawning over the relatively uninteresting analogy between past sexual morality and the supposed moralizing about food by one expert in philosophy at the Hoover institute, Nancy Eberhardt who we are told by Will is "intimidatingly intelligent."

The idea seems to be that in the past we moralized sex, but left food to be a mere matter of taste. Now we moralize food, but leave sex to be a mere matter of taste. I think probably both claims are false, though I'm willing to bite that we have stopped moralizing a lot of sex, and some moralize a lot of their choices involving food.

But, then we run into this sort of confusion:

Most important of all, however, is the difference in moral attitude separating Betty and Jennifer on the matter of food. Jennifer feels that there is a right and wrong about these options that transcends her exercise of choice as a consumer. She does not exactly condemn those who believe otherwise, but she doesn’t understand why they do, either. And she certainly thinks the world would be a better place if more people evaluated their food choices as she does. She even proselytizes on occasion when she can. In short, with regard to food, Jennifer falls within Immanuel Kant’s definition of the Categorical Imperative: She acts according to a set of maxims that she wills at the same time to be universal law.

In heavy-handed contrast:

Even without such personal links to food scarcity, though, it makes no sense to Betty that people would feel as strongly as her granddaughter does about something as simple as deciding just what goes into one’s mouth. That is because Betty feels, as Jennifer obviously does not, that opinions about food are simply de gustibus, a matter of individual taste — and only that.

And again:

Most important of all, Betty feels that sex, unlike food, is not de gustibus. She believes to the contrary that there is a right and wrong about these choices that transcends any individual act. She further believes that the world would be a better place, and individual people better off, if others believed as she does. She even proselytizes such on occasion when given the chance.

And to beat the horse within an inch of its life:

Most important, once again, is the difference in moral attitude between the two women on this subject of sex. Betty feels that there is a right and wrong about sexual choices that transcends any individual act, and Jennifer — exceptions noted — does not. It’s not that Jennifer lacks for opinions about sex, any more than Betty does about food. It’s just that, for the most part, they are limited to what she personally does and doesn’t like.

And to make it clearer still:

As noted, this desire to extend their personal opinions in two different areas to an “ought” that they think should be somehow binding — binding, that is, to the idea that others should do the same — is the definition of the Kantian imperative. Once again, note: Betty’s Kantian imperative concerns sex not food, and Jennifer’s concerns food not sex. In just over 50 years, in other words — not for everyone, of course, but for a great many people, and for an especially large portion of sophisticated people — the moral poles of sex and food have been reversed. Betty thinks food is a matter of taste, whereas sex is governed by universal moral law of some kind; and Jennifer thinks exactly the reverse.  

Fortunately she doesn't draw any substantial conclusions from this. With that sort of genial Brooksy, "foibles of the human race exposing, concealed smirk," she contents herself with running this analogy to its exhaustion while ignoring relevant points of disanalogy, and doing little more than pointing out this curious social change, which perhaps seems to be neither curious, nor a social change, with closer scrutiny. But she closes with this whopper of a post hoc propter hoc fallacy wrapped in a bacony strip of psychoanalyzing explanation and deep-fried in a vat of greasy rhetorical questions:

The rise of a recognizably Kantian, morally universalizable code concerning food — beginning with the international vegetarian movement of the last century and proceeding with increasing moral fervor into our own times via macrobiotics, veganism/vegetarianism, and European codes of terroir — has paralleled exactly the waning of a universally accepted sexual code in the Western world during these same years. 

Who can doubt that the two trends are related? Unable or unwilling (or both) to impose rules on sex at a time when it is easier to pursue it than ever before, yet equally unwilling to dispense altogether with a universal moral code that he would have bind society against the problems created by exactly that pursuit, modern man (and woman) has apparently performed his own act of transubstantiation. He has taken longstanding morality about sex, and substituted it onto food. The all-you-can-eat buffet is now stigmatized; the sexual smorgasbord is not. 

In the end, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the rules being drawn around food receive some force from the fact that people are uncomfortable with how far the sexual revolution has gone — and not knowing what to do about it, they turn for increasing consolation to mining morality out of what they eat. 

Perhaps it's just me, but I find it surprisingly easy to avoid this conclusion. 

 

False equivalences, Reporting, specious comparisons

Bicameral poxism

10 Comments

In the category of sloppy pseudo-balance-driven reporting today, we have the following comparison between George Will's making stuff up and Al Gore's exaggerating a consequence of a well-established phenomenon.  The New York Times' Andrew Revkin writes:

In the effort to shape the public’s views on global climate change, hyperbole is an ever-present temptation on all sides of the debate.

Earlier this month, former Vice President Al Gore and the Washington Post columnist George Will made strong public statements about global warning — from starkly divergent viewpoints.

Mr. Gore, addressing a hall filled with scientists in Chicago, showed a slide that illustrated a sharp spike in fires, floods and other calamities around the world and warned the audience that global warming “is creating weather-related disasters that are completely unprecedented.”

Mr. Will, in a column attacking what he said were exaggerated claims about global warming’s risks, chided climate scientists for predicting an ice age three decades ago and asserted that a pause in warming in recent years and the recent expansion of polar sea ice undermined visions of calamity ahead.

Both men, experts said afterward, were guilty of inaccuracies and overstatements.

In the first place, George Will is on record for denying that global warming is taking place–he's not just denying its risks.  

Gore, on the other hand, engaged in hyperbole about the risks of global warming, a phenomenon qualified scientists justifiably believe to be taking place.

The difference, seems to me, is fairly obvious.  Is what Gore says wrong?  Probably.  But obviously not in the same Will is wrong.

Here's some prescience by Revkin:

In a paper being published in the March-April edition of the journal Environment, Matthew C. Nisbet, a professor of communications at American University, said Mr. Gore’s approach, focusing on language of crisis and catastrophe, could actually be serving the other side in the fight.

“There is little evidence to suggest that it is effective at building broad-based support for policy action,” Dr. Nisbet said. “Perhaps worse, his message is very easily countered by people such as Will as global-warming alarmism, shifting the focus back to their preferred emphasis on scientific uncertainty and dueling expert views.”

But Dr. Nisbet said that for Mr. Will, there was little downside in stretching the bounds of science to sow doubt.

Criticism of Mr. Will’s columns, Dr. Nisbet said, “only serves to draw attention to his claims while reinforcing a larger false narrative that liberals and the mainstream press are seeking to censor rival scientific evidence and views.”

Indeed, perhaps Nisbet could add that a primary cause of doubt in the public's mind is reporting of this variety.  Perhaps it is Revkin's job to help us see the difference between Al Gore's occasional and not wholly unsupported exaggeration and George Will's dishonest rejection of well-established science.  George Wil, in other words, is to blame for making stuff up.  This is not somehow Al Gore's fault.

General discussion, George Will, Inexplicable, Plain Bad Arguments

Don’t try this at home

1 Comment

Apropos of the difference between errors of fact and errors of reasoning, Carl Zimmer (blogger at Discover Magazine) asked Bill Chapman, a University of Illinois climate scientist, about George Will's recent bungling of Chapman's data as well as the Washington Post's defense of Will.  Chapman said:

Since their statements were based on the end of the previous year, and more importantly the end of 1979, the statement ‘global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979′ just didn’t make sense any more. We have received 80-100 emails from confused people who had read George’s column and looked up the graphs on the Cryosphere Today [one of the center’s web pages] and said they came to a different conclusion, or, could we point them to the report that said that Feb 1979 and Feb 2009 sea ice area was nearly the same. We had to post the current and corresponding 1979 values to avoid the inconsistency that readers were noting. After doing some googling, it appears that Daily Tech article got repeated on a lot of blogs, so it’s not surprising George Will came across it at some point. Still it was sloppy for them to not double check with the original source and it really points out the danger of making any conclusions on climate change based on any two days in history. I really wish they would have contacted us at some point to avoid this.

Our goal is to present the data in as concise and useful format as possible for interested users. Whether the Washington Post decides to publish a correction is up to them.

Here's what Will wrote:

As global levels of sea ice declined last year, many experts said this was evidence of man-made global warming. Since September, however, the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began. According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.

What Chapman points out is important.  It's not only the misrepresentation and the laziness of it all (Will didn't bother to inquire with them, while Zimmer and others have), it's the fact that he made some kind of spectacularly giant inference on the strength of two isolated facts.  Even if those facts had been true in the sense he alleged, there is no way he should have been allowed to make that inferential claim without relying substantially on the common sense of the relevant experts–who, by the way, nearly unanimously disagree with him.  

It does not advance the public understanding if scientists must continue to debate intellectual children who (1) have no basis for disagreeing with them (2) don't accurately represent the views of the scientists in question and (3) accuse everyone else of being hysterical.  That's more or less what the Post considers meaningful public discourse–worthy of publication in their paper and syndicated across the country.

Equivocation, George Will, hollow man, Straw Man

Facticity

10 Comments

That's actually a word, but it's not particularly related to what I will say here.  

Last week George Will wrote a column sufficiently full of outright falsehoods–non facts as it were–such that people all over were demanding retractions, corrections, etc.  Rightly so, as the falsehoods were fairly egregious (it wasn't just forgetting who argued that philosophy is preparation for dying).  He completely misrepresented research on global warming in order to claim that it wasn't happening.  Strangely enough, the Washington Post has issued nothing by way of a retraction, and they have claimed that the column made it through their multi-layered editing and fact-checking process.  So much the worse for them.  Click here for a discussion of the factual errors, and here for our original post.

There is something slightly odd about the whole matter, however.  He got some facts wrong.  So did Bill Kristol (formerly of the New York Times now–get this–of the Washington Post).  People screamed about that as the height of sloppiness.  Which it is.  But op-ed columnists do not really deal primarily in facts anyway.  They deal primarily in arguments–the argumentative ones at least (which is mostly the conservative ones by the way–don't know why that is, it just is). 

Arguments are one part fact, one part inference.  As a matter of fact, they're mostly inference.  Getting facts wrong is bad, but I think it is a comparably less egregious problem than repeatedly authoring crappy, to use a technical term, arguments.  For the sake of clarity, a crappy argument is one whose conclusion likely wouldn't follow even if they premises were true.  Seems to me that if one repeatedly makes these sorts of arguments, then one's getting the occasional fact wrong is a comparatively minor problem–easily correctable by a (competent) fact checker.

Correcting crappy arguments is rather more difficult, as many lay people don't seem to have a good idea what a crappy argument is.  Many lay people think that pointing out an argument's crappiness, in fact, is a kind of crappy argument.  I think someone–maybe me, maybe our Australian friends–suggested a name for this–the fallacy fallacy fallacy (the fallacy of thinking pointing out fallacies is a fallacy of some sort).  It takes some amount of training to point out sophistries.  But it's at least as important if not more than the pointing out errors of fact.  So I'd like to propose that the Post, in addition to hiring a new fact-checker (not one paid by George Will–seriously, he's got like two of them), hire a kind of sophistry checker.

That way we wouldn't be subjected to things like this (from Will's column yesterday):

Although liberals give lip service to "diversity," they often treat federalism as an annoying impediment to their drive for uniformity. Feingold, who is proud that Wisconsin is one of only four states that clearly require special elections of replacement senators in all circumstances, wants to impose Wisconsin's preference on the other 46. Yes, he acknowledges, they could each choose to pass laws like Wisconsin's, but doing this "state by state would be a long and difficult process." Pluralism is so tediously time-consuming. 

The sophistry detector might say the following: Mr.Will, you're going to have be a lot more specific here.  In the first place, who are "liberals"?  Second, you're equivocating on "diversity."  "Liberals"–whoever the hell they are–can consistently be for one kind of diversity but not another.  Aside from this, "impose" seems to have a different meaning for you.  Feingold seems to be advocating a change in electoral procedure by democratic means–amending the Constitution.  Such an activity requires signifcant electoral participation and agreement.  One can hardly call that "imposing."

These, I think, are serious and egregious problems with just this one paragraph, yet none of them are factual problems in any direct sense. They do, however, make the argument here rather sucky.

Your argument is invalid