{"id":4299,"date":"2013-07-03T17:07:23","date_gmt":"2013-07-03T22:07:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=4299"},"modified":"2013-07-03T17:07:23","modified_gmt":"2013-07-03T22:07:23","slug":"cheating-at-logic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=4299","title":{"rendered":"Cheating, at logic"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Ouch<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I like cycling and it’s Tour de France season, so here’s a cycling related post.\u00c2\u00a0 Ted King, a rider for the Cannondale squad, found himself eliminated<\/a> from the entire race by seven seconds yesterday.\u00c2\u00a0 The rule goes like this:\u00c2\u00a0all riders must complete the race within 25 percent\u00c2\u00a0of the winning time.\u00c2\u00a0 King’s time fell outside of that, so he was disqualified.<\/p>\n

This certainly sucks for him.\u00c2\u00a0 Now perhaps relevant to this story is the fact that King\u00c2\u00a0was the\u00c2\u00a0victim of a serious crash and was riding on a separated shoulder.\u00c2\u00a0 I say “perhaps” because here we have a\u00c2\u00a0genuine puzzle of the non fallacious ad misericordiam argument.\u00c2\u00a0 It goes\u00c2\u00a0like this: surely\u00c2\u00a0King, who was riding on an injured shoulder, deserves some leniency.<\/p>\n

Questions such as these are very difficult.\u00c2\u00a0 The time cut off exists for a reason (though I don’t know what it is).\u00c2\u00a0 Regardless, appealing to extenuating circumstances in this case seems reasonable.<\/p>\n

What is not reasonable, however, is the following tweet by Garmin Team Director Jonathan Vaughters:<\/p>\n

My reasoning was that if we wish to encourage clean cycling, we can’t impose very high minimum speeds. But “c’est le ciclisme!” wins over logic<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u201d Jonathan Vaughters (@Vaughters) July 3, 2013<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sadly, this reminds me of the student who says high standards made him cheat.\u00c2\u00a0 Should cheating occur, it’s not the result of the rules.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s a result of people failing to deal with the rules fairly.\u00c2\u00a0 Raising the prospect of cheating as\u00c2\u00a0a consequence of rules you don’t agree with is cheating.\u00c2\u00a0 Only it’s cheating at logic.\u00c2\u00a0 Besides, the Tour directors, as far as I know, didn’t set the minimum speed, but rather the percentage of the cut off.\u00c2\u00a0 The riders set the speed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I like cycling and it’s Tour de France season, so here’s a cycling related post.\u00c2\u00a0 Ted King, a rider for the Cannondale squad, found himself eliminated from the entire race by seven seconds yesterday.\u00c2\u00a0 The rule goes like this:\u00c2\u00a0all riders must complete the race within 25 percent\u00c2\u00a0of the winning time.\u00c2\u00a0 King’s time fell outside of … Continue reading Cheating, at logic<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[981,807,1691,1690,1688,1689,1692],"class_list":["post-4299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-ad-baculum","tag-ad-misericordiam","tag-cycling","tag-doping","tag-jonathan-vaughters","tag-ted-king","tag-tour-de-france"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4299"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4301,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4299\/revisions\/4301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}