General discussion

Risky strategies

ad Hitlerem and straw man

Like the ad Hitlerem, there is a paradoxical admission involved in straw manning, viz., you don’t actually have an argument against your opponent’s view.  You have an argument against Hitler, in the case of the ad Hitlerem, which your opponent is very likely not; in the case of the straw man, you have an argument against a distorted, selected, or made up position or opponent, when your real opponent’s real view is still hanging around.  If you get caught, you first of all look like a liar; but more seriously, you’ll look like you’ve just made the case for your opponent.  Crucially, however, you’ve wasted precious time and attention attacking a pseudo-position.

This struck me when I read the following snippet from a New Yorker piece about the Tea Party:

The really weird thing—the American exception in it all—then as much as now, is how tiny all the offenses are. French right-wingers really did have a powerful, Soviet-affiliated Communist Party to deal with, as their British counterparts really had honest-to-god Socialists around, socializing stuff. But the Bircher-centered loonies and the Tea Partiers created a world of fantasy, willing mild-mannered, conflict-adverse centrists like J.F.K. and Obama into socialist Supermen.

As many supporters have pointed out, all of the attention given to death panels and Hitler socialism has left the law, with all of its actual flaws, standing.  One would think that concerns over practicality and efficiency would be sufficient to eliminate the straw Hitler arguments.  One would think.

General discussion, Ross Douthat, specious comparisons

Almost, Douthat, almost. . ..

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But it seemed that way because it was hard to imagine the Obama White House botching the design and execution of its national health care exchange. Building Web sites, mastering the Internet — this is what Team Obama does!

Except this time Team Obama didn’t. Like the Bush administration in Iraq, the White House seems to have invaded the health insurance marketplace with woefully inadequate postinvasion planning, and let the occupation turn into a disaster of hack work and incompetence. Right now, the problems with the exchange Web site appear to be systemic — a mess on the front end, where people are supposed to shop for plans, and also a thicket at the back end, where insurers are supposed to process applications.

The disaster can presumably be fixed. As Cohn pointed out on Friday, many of the state-level exchanges are working better than the federal one, and somewhere there must be a tech-world David Petraeus capable of stabilizing HealthCare.gov. And the White House has some time to work with: weeks before the end-of-year enrollment rush, and months before the mandate’s penalty is supposed to be levied.

Yep, it’s a disaster almost like Wolfie and J-Paul’s destruction of a nation, loss of millions billions of dollars, and bringing about an insurgency against the US occupation.

Almost, Douthat, almost. . ..

General discussion

Unabomber

Sophist

The narrative goes that Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, crazed Heideggerian serial killer, was wicked smart.  That may be; it takes a lot of intelligence (and patience, etc.) to construct mail bombs.  He, however, was a terrible arguer.  Peter Ludlow, of Northwestern University, has a slide show presentation showing us how.  Check it out.

Now if someone would do this for the most recent Joker of Batman movie fame.

 

General discussion

A foolish consistency*

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Here is an extreme libertarian type (wrongly identified, I think, as a Tea Party type by Gawker, etc.), Greg Collett, father of 10, from Utah, going all Ayn Rand on social programs he makes use of.  Which is to say: “I’m against Medicaid, but I use it for financial reasons” (or something, because he doesn’t really say why).  He writes:

The vast majority of the comments directed towards me try to paint me as a hypocrite for being a limited government advocate and having my kids on Medicaid. My political beliefs are certainly not popular, and in this case, there are many people in the liberty movement who want to take me to task. Again, we are dealing with a situation where people have been socialized into believing a lie.

Let me set the record straight. Yes, I participate in government programs of which I adamantly oppose. Many of them, actually. Am I a hypocrite for participating in programs that I oppose? If it was that simple, and if participation demonstrated support, then of course. But, my reason for participation in government programs often is not directly related to that issue in and of itself, and it certainly does not demonstrate support. For instance, I participate in government programs in order to stay out of the courts, or jail, so that I can take care of my family; other things I do to avoid fines or for other financial reasons; and some are simply because it is the only practical choice. With each situation, I have to evaluate the consequences of participating or not participating.

Collett is a kind of anti-government purist (all government taking is theft, essentially).  He doesn’t personally carry health insurance, but he uses government programs (Medicaid but not public schools–you really have to read the manifesto) to cover his children.  Children are expensive, sickness is expensive and can be financially devastating.  His choice of Medicaid to cover his children  (as well as his choice of becoming a foster parent to eight children) demonstrates that perhaps his insistence that government leave this role is not actually feasible.  It’s nice, in other words, to have ideals, but seriously, they have to be practical.

And this is a critical point about non-fallacious tu quoques.  They do not demonstrate that your beliefs are false.  They demonstrate that your beliefs may be too hard to put into practice if not even you, ardent exponent of milking your own cows, cannot do it.

*Here’s the rest of the Emerson passage (from “Self Reliance”):

 A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored  by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a  great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself  with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words,  and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though  it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be  sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be  misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and  Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every  pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be  misunderstood.

General discussion

Applied epistemology

Interesting read over at the Leiter Reports (by guest blogger Peter Ludlow).  A taste:

Yesterday some friends on Facebook were kicking around the question of whether there is such a thing as applied epistemology and if so what it covers.  There are plenty of candidates, but there is one notion of applied epistemology that I’ve been pushing for a while – the idea that groups engage in strategies to undermine the epistemic position of their adversaries.

In the military context this is part of irregular warfare (IW) and it often employs elements of PSYOPS (psychological operations).  Applied epistemology should help us develop strategies for armoring ourselves against these PSYOPS.   I wrote a brief essay on the idea here. What most people don’t realize is that PSYOPS aren’t just deployed in the battlefield, but they are currently being deployed in our day-to-day lives, and I don’t just mean via advertising and public relations.

This very much seems like a job for fallacy theory, broadly speaking.  Here’s an example from the article referred to above:

One of the key observations by Waltz is that an epistemic attack on an organization does not necessarily need to induce false belief into the organization; it can sometimes be just as effective to induce uncertainty about information which is in point of fact reliable. When false belief does exist in an organization (as it surely does in every organization and group) the goal might then be to induce confidence in the veracity of these false beliefs. In other words, epistemic attack is not just about getting a group to believe what is false, it is about getting the group to have diminished credence in what is true and increased credence in what is false.

One obvious mechanism for this goal is the time-honored art of sophistry.

Thanks Phil Mayo for the pointer!

Weak Analogy

Ad Fuhrer-em

5 Comments

We’ve been doing a lot of Ad Hitlerem–spotting these days at the NS, but, hey, it’s the season of the Godwin.  Check out the statement from Brenda Barton (R) from Arizona on Facebook:

Someone is paying the National Park Service thugs overtime for their efforts to carry out the order of De Fuhrer… where are our Constitutional Sheriffs who can revoke the Park Service Rangers authority to arrest??? Do we have any Sheriffs with a pair?

I object for a few reasons.  First is just linguistic.  It’s der Fuhrer.  Second is analogical – how in any way is using the force charged with protecting the parks to close the parks like Hitler’s abuse of power in Germany? And park service rangers are given police force training.

Here’s the rich part.  Barton’s responded to criticism of her post, and she’s issued the following clarification.

What I did suggest, rather directly, was that the National Park Service enforcement personnel (referring to them as ‘thugs’ for their reported behavior) were simply following orders of ‘their leader’ – and I used the German phrase for emphasis, Der Fuhrer. . . .I am referencing the Presidents behavior as indicated by his actions. The Merriam-Webster New Collegiate Dictionary defines ‘Fuhrer’ as ‘(2) a leader exercising tyrannical authority. . . . As many are aware, some recent comments of mine on Facebook have touched a sensitive nerve with many people. Additionally, many have simply taken my posting out of its contextual environment. . .  Had I chosen my words differently, or had the President offered to use the power of his office to lessen or mute the public impacts of this impasse in Washington, we might not be having this discussion.

OK, so the defense is as follows:

1. When I use ‘De Fuhrer’ I just mean ‘tyrant’

2. When I used the term it was for emphasis, and to take it as more is to take it out of context.

3. It’s the president’s fault that I had to compare him to Hitler.

Point-for-point, silly.  In fact, to use 1 and 2 together is inconsistent.  The term ‘Fuhrer’ has the emphasis it does not because its usage as leader, or even tyrant, but as THAT tyrant named Adolph.  The context of using ‘Fuhrer’ is the context of exemplifying Godwin’s Law.  3 is amazing.  In effect – it’s not my fault that I can’t think of another apt analogy… I mean the guy’s literally like Hitler when he does this!   (This is, really, a case of instead of backing away from the Ad Hitlerem, but embracing it!)

General discussion

The Godwinator

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Fig.1: Obamacare analogy

George Will, whose pseudo-logical musings at the Washington Post inspired our work here so many years ago, has moved from ABC to Fox News.  In keeping with the tone of his new employer, he waxes historical about the legality of Obamacare (via Talking Points Memo):

In an interview with NPR’s “Morning Edition,” host Steve Inskeep asked Will about President Barack Obama’s argument that Republicans are short-circuiting the system by using government funding and the debt ceiling as leverage to dismantle Obamacare, rather than repealing the law outright.

“How does this short-circuit the system?” Will said. “I hear Democrats say, ‘The Affordable Care Act is the law,’ as though we’re supposed to genuflect at that sunburst of insight and move on. Well, the Fugitive Slave Act was the law, separate but equal was the law, lots of things are the law and then we change them.”

Many here are familiar with Godwin’s law, where as a discussion grows longer, the probability of a Hitler analogy approaches 1.  We might now offer two variations on that.  Given any possible disagreement, the probability of a completely inept Hitler is initially 1.  The second variation is implied in the first: Hitler is a mere stylistic choice: the invoker can select any other moral abomination according to need.

One further rule: some iron-manner will come to the defense of the Godwinator:

I generally agree with TPM, but this headline is an outrageous distortion of what GW said.

His view is that Obamacare law is wrong, which is a legitimate view (not  mine).  He then points out that we have rescinded laws that we all regard as wrong.  He was speaking to the process, not the content.

Nah.  That isn’t his view and this ignores the inappropriate analogy.  Looking past these kinds of rhetorical outrages keeps them alive.

General discussion

I’m already plenty good at logic

Charles S. Peirce opens the “Fixation of Belief” with the observation:

Few persons care to study logic, because everybody conceives himself to be proficient enough in the art of reasoning already.

Many of the NS readers are familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect.  In short, it’s that the less you know, the less likely you’ll recognize that you don’t know.  Poor performers regularly overestimate their abilities.  This is borne out in Dunning and Kruger’s case in grammar tests, logic tests, humor-recognition tests and in a variety of other areas (e.g., tests taken by medical students, engineers, and so on).   The trouble is that self-monitoring can’t give reliable feedback when you don’t have the proper criteria for evaluation.

So the question is: how do people perform when, after having done badly and evaluated themselves well, we give them clear criteria for evaluation?  How do they do, and how do they rate their performances? For sure, without this intervention, the D-K Effect becomes the D-K Cycle.  But can intervention as education work?

So after having bombed the last logic test, the subjects are brought back in and given a mini-lecture on how to solve the logic problems they were tested on last time.  They, then, had the criteria for discriminating good from bad performances. The result?  They judged their prior performances quite harshly and came to see that they had a long way to go before they were good at the tasks.  That’s pretty great news to logic teachers.

Ah, but an interesting wrinkle about the need for this intervention.  Dunning and Kreuger gave the same test to two different groups, but told one group it was a logic test and the other group that it was a computer-test.  Here’s the big difference:  people who took the logic test systematically more confident (and thereby overrated themselves in poor performances) than those who took the computer test.  Same test, but different name.  Why is this?  The thought is that it’s because we all think we’re already pretty good at reasoning.  We do it every day, so we must have some skills.  And it’s right there that logic teachers cringe.

 

 

Ad Hominem, Ad hominem circumstantial

Judged by your fans

Pope Francis I has criticized corporate greed and capitalism’s systematic failure to ensure that people are not exploited.  Despite the fact that the communists have a longstanding critical attitude toward the Catholic Church, Mark Gruenberg at The People’s World, has applauded the new pope’s statements. (More on the pope’s views regarding the church’s “worldliness” here.)

When communists agree with the Pope, it’s time for conservatives to get antsy.  Especially conservative Catholics.  Cue Paul Kegnor at AmSpec.  Kegnor is careful to note first that:

The article quoted the pontiff several times. To be sure, few of us would disagree with any of the quotes.

So not it’s that the communists agree with what the Pope says that’s the problem.  It’s that communists agree with pope says.  That’s the problem.

Communists, of all people, finally believe they have a pope who agrees with them, that they like, that they can embrace, that they can encourage. I knew that Francis’ controversial interview on abortion, contraception, and gay marriage had thrilled liberals, liberal Catholics, dissident Catholics, secular progressives, agnostics, atheists, and socialists. You can read their websites. They love this guy. But communists?

Oh, yeah, I hear you.  When I find out that I endorse views held by a group I hold in contempt, I never take that as evidence that I may not have an accurate representation of that group.  I always take it that their agreement with me (or with the things said by another person that I agree with) is either strategic or based on their misunderstandings.  Never ever should, say, a Catholic think that Luke’s social justice doctrines have any resonance with concerns about capitalism.  Kegnor’s clear about it:

It seems to me that this is not the kind of praise that the pope should want.

Of course, the problem is that if Kegnor thinks that few people would disagree with what Pope Francis said, then aren’t there many, many others who’d be trouble, too?  For sure, politics makes strange bedfellows.  But why is one’s credibility in question when there are many who take you as credible?

 

General discussion

Salarywoman

Fig 1: hypocrite

As we’ve argued here many times before, not all charges of hypocrisy are logically vicious.  Someone’s hypocrisy might be evidence that her view is too difficult to enact (like Newt Gingrich’s conception of traditional marriage) or, more importantly, that she’s logically incompetent.  Here is an example (from Talking Points Memo):

Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-NC) told a local television station that she would not be deferring her pay during the government shutdown, as some other members have done.

“I need my paycheck. That’s the bottom line,” Ellmers told WTVD in Raleigh, N.C. “I understand that there may be some other members who are deferring their paychecks, and I think that’s admirable. I’m not in that position.”

According to Ellmers’s official website, she was a registered nurse for 21 years before being elected to Congress. Her husband Brent, the website says, is a general surgeon.

Democratic Rep. G.K. Butterfield also told WTVD that he wouldn’t be deferring his pay. “I don’t think there should be a shutdown,” he said. “I didn’t create the shutdown.”

The other federal employees–some of whom continue to work–also need their paychecks.  That you cannot sustain the very thing you advocate is evidence that the thing you advocate is unsustainable.

Your argument is invalid