Razor Sharp

 

The pre-election torrent of GOP bullshit that's wafting across America has prompted many of my friends to promote the addition of critical thinking to the elementary school curriculum.

They're afraid for their children's future.

I'm all for introducing critical thinking into every classroom—but believe it's unlikely to happen.

So what's a parent to do?

Let your children play with a razor.

The handiest tool in the critical thinking chest is Ockham's Razor.

In logic, Ockham’s Razor, named for a 14th-century philosopher, is the "law of simplicity."

Ockham's Razor cuts through bullshit by insisting pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate ("plurality should not be posited without necessity"). 

As such, the law opposes complexity (plurality) and favors simplicity (unity): whenever you have two competing theories, the simpler one is the right one.

Ockham's Razor can cut bullshit positions to shreds in only seconds, which is why you should let your kids play with it.

Here are just three examples.

Trump's election loss

The GOP insists Trump lost the 2020 election because Democrats in swing states conspired either to alter votes for Trump, discard votes for Trump, inflate the number of votes for Biden, or some combination of all of the above.

The simpler explanation of Trump's loss: the majority of American voters favored his replacement.

Child molestation

The GOP insists all gays molest children because all gays are predatory. It further insists that anyone who molests a child must be gay. Lastly, the party claims any gay who denies that he or she is sexually attracted to children is lying.

The simpler explanation for child molestation: some men fixate on children as a result of developmental problems occurring in utero. Adult sexual preference has nothing to do with pedophilia.

Mass shootings

The GOP insists mass shootings result from evil and are an inevitable "price of freedom." They can only be curbed by increasing the number of armed "good guys."

The simpler explanation of mass shootings: the ready availability of guns enables aggrieved individuals to act out their fantasies. Boosting the supply of guns will only facilitate these acts.

Now it's your turn, parents.

Give your kids a razor to play with. It will make them razor sharp!

Common Sense

It don't make much sense that common sense
don't make no sense no more.

— John Prine

My keyring holds two identical looking keys. 

One unlocks the front door; the other, the back.

Murphy's Law governs my keyring.

No matter which door I'm hoping to unlock, I always choose the wrong key.

That defies common sense.

But common sense is passé, anyway.

Today, we're "structurally stupid."

Or are we?

When I use my housekey, I do so in the firm belief that it will open the lock.

Even though it never does the first time, I believe it will.

I presuppose that turning the key will unlock the door.

Why do I believe so?

Experience. 

Know-how.

Trial and error.

The very same trial and error that underpins science.

I have an inductive means for making judgements about cause and effect in the real world.

Those means aren't perfect, but they're good enough to get me into the house.

They go by the name “common sense.”

No, we're not structurally stupid.

Some of us just prefer to be assholes.

What's Wrong with America

Against one who denies the principles, there can be no debate.

— Aristotle

Breaking my pledge to ignore reactionary loudmouths, I recently reacted to a Facebook post by just such a loudmouth.

He posted a meme blaming the high price of gas on Canada.

Yes, Canada.

When I challenged his unsubstantiated claim, citing the consensus of oil-industry analysts—namely, that Canada is doing its best—he responded by calling me "snarky" and insisting that analysts are all just "spin doctors."

"Facts shmacks," he wrote.

(ICYMI: Canada already supplies the US over 4 million barrels of oil every day, according to oil-industry analysts, who agree the country's oil exports are maxed out because investors refused last year to expand Canada's production facilities.)

Contra principia negantem non est disputandum.

"Against one who denies the principles, there can be no debate."

In America today, we can't agree on facts. 

We can't even agree on that there are such things as facts.

Norman Mailer predicted 50 years ago that America would wind up in this place when he coined the word factoid.

Conservatives dwell in a world of factoids. Trump won. Covid-19 is a flu. Blacks are just immigrants. Disney grooms queers. Canada is denying us oil... and we should nuke them.

Aristotle saw 2,500 years ago that parties who cannot agree on the facts of a case simply cannot reasonably discuss it.

The best the parties can do is name-call.

The 20th-century philosopher Karl Popper believed mankind's greatest enemy was irrational relativism, which prevents our mutual acceptance of facts.

By caving into irrational relativism, "one cannot rationally discuss anything that is fundamental," Popper lamented.

The only way out of the impasse, he said, "lies in the realization that all of us may and often do err, singly and collectively, but that this very idea of error and human fallibility involves another one—the idea of objective truth."

Alas, until every conservative is willing to let go of fear, we're stuck with irrational relativism.

But there is a quick exit from our impasse.

It's the solution to relativism known to philosophers as the argumentum ad baculum ("appeal to the stick"), first suggested by the 11th-century Aristotelian, Avicenna.

Its forcefulness derives from force.

"Those who deny a first principle," Avicenna said, "should be beaten or exposed to fire until they concede that to burn and not to burn, or to be beaten and not to be beaten, are not identical."

I like that solution!

Absurdities

Love the offender, yet detest the offense.

— Alexander Pope

Self-justification is a powerful force.

A recent Goodly post offended a friend of mine, who's rejoicing over the end of mask mandates. 

He was particularly upset by my calling anti-maskers "discourteous" and "miserable" and wanted to know if I was labeling him as such.

"I and millions of other well-informed people are convinced we are well past the point of mandating mask-wearing," he said.

This fallacious argument is known among logicians as the argumentum ad populum. 

It insists that, because a belief is held in common by a large group of people, it is therefore correct.

The fallacy is clear: just because a crowd thinks something is so doesn't make it so. (More on this in a moment.)

In fairness to my friend, I believe he views my criticisms as instances of "name-calling."

Name-calling is mightily offensive to everyone (especially to name-callers).

He also views mask-wearing as an instance of "hygiene theater."

Medical experts now know Covid-19 is transmitted through the air and that many of the now-outdated public-safety protocols we cherish, like surface-scrubbing, hand-sanitizing, plexiglass shields and disposable menus, are worthless "theatrics" designed to soothe anxious citizens.

Mask-wearing, however, doesn't fall into the same category. 

Mask-wearing, in fact, deters the spread of Covid-19.

Naturally, you can always find a medical practitioner or two who insists masks are hooey; but they'd be lacking evidence. 

You can also assert that the entire scientific community is stupid and wrong; but you'd be lacking evidence.

My problem with anti-maskers is simple: their behavior is unconscionable. 

By ignoring the fact that Covid-19 has killed 1 million Americans and isn't done with us yet, they're guilty of criminal negligence.

And rather than delight in their guilt, I'm saddened. 

I'm sad that a microbe is smarter than the millions of our fellow citizens who'd tell you mask-wearing is whimpy.

They skew Conservative and represent the same crowd that voted for Trump in 2020 (although they'd deny it).

They're the "fake news" bunch.

They don't believe in science and medicine and don't accept civic duty, unless it's convenient, justifying their irresponsible behaviors with the argumentum ad populum.

I'm sorry, but accepting without evidence another's beliefs—or even many people’s beliefs—is just wishful, lazy thinking.

It's thinking of the kind that, throughout history, has produced absurdities like these:

• The earth is flat.
• The fifth day of every month is unlucky.
• Drinking gladiators' blood will cure epilepsy.
• Mice originate from cheese wrapped in dirty rags.
• The earth is 6,000 years old.
• Proximity to the sun determines IQ.
• Blistering the skin with a hot iron cures disease.
• Tobacco enemas revive drowning victims.
• Plowing the ground will make it rain.
• The speed of trains crushes passengers’ brains.
• Implanting goat testicles in the scrotum will cure ED.
• Lower taxes for the rich benefit everyone.
• All Mexicans are rapists.
  
• Vladmir Putin is admirable. 

We don't need anti-maskers' absurdities.

The world is absurd enough.

Strawman

There is a strange interdependence between
thoughtlessness and evil.

— Hannah Arendt

I'm tired of Conservatives' relentless use of the strawman.

A "strawman" is an argument that substitutes an opponent's statement with a distortion thereof, in order to "disprove" it.

A strawman is fallacious. It takes its form in this manner:

Liberal: Black lives matter.

Conservative: My opponent says Black lives matter, but White lives don't. I'm sorry, all lives matter. He's dead wrong.

The Conservative in this case has distorted the Liberal's claim by assuming (1) it excludes all lives but Blacks' and (2) that to "matter" means to "prevail."

To prevent use of a strawman, you need to present a steelman.

A "steelman" is an iron-clad argument. It makes the strongest possible case for a claim and prevents your opponent from distorting your position.

It might take this form:

Liberal: Blacks suffer from systemic racism in this country. Our entire way of life devalues Black lives, and puts Blacks at a material disadvantage—socially, economically, and politically. Without conscious effort, we thwart Blacks' attempts to live peacefully and well, and treat them as if their God-given lives didn't matter. But, in their own eyes at least, they do matter.

Conservative: So, you're saying the system is rigged?

Liberal: Bingo!

A steelman grants the opponent the benefit of the doubt and assumes his intentions aren't evil.

Sadly, that's not always the case. And so you often hear debates like this:

Liberal: Blacks suffer from systemic racism.

Conservative: Blacks don't suffer racism—that's ancient history. They just want preferential treatment. The whole idea that there's systemic racism is Marxist hogwash.

Telegraphic counterarguments like the one above betray both the evil intentions and shallow-mindedness of their makers, two common qualities of Conservatives today; qualities that put persuasion out of reach.

As philosopher John Stuart Mill said, "He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of it."

If he only had a brain!

Blarney

 

Legal reasoning can be unreasonable.

The 5th circuit federal appeals court last week allowed Texas to resume its ban on abortions, after Senate Bill 8 had been struck down.

The state attorney general argued that, since Texas does not enforce its anti-abortion law, it cannot “be held responsible for the filings of private citizens.”

The court bought the argument. 

The logic of the decision is as follows:

• Senate Bill 8 endorses vigilantism.
• Vigilantism is outside the law.
• Therefore, Senate Bill 8 is constitutional.

How twisted is this? This form of argument could also prove the following:

• An EU law protects leprechauns.
• Leprechauns aren't members of the EU.
• Therefore, the EU law is constitutional.

Incredulous

Like most small-bore, pretentious men, he shows the tendency to strike an emotional attitude and then, using that prejudice as a base, draw vast, unreasonable, philosophical conclusions.

— John D. MacDonald

The more closed the mind, the more open the mouth.

I encountered this phenomenon on Facebook recently. 

A philosopher posted an op-ed he'd published in Newsweek that argued for adding philosophy to elementary school curriculums.

Philosophy will improve kids' ability to think critically, he promised. 

"Absolutely not," one comment said. "The ability to think critically is not philosophy. Philosophy is not meant for everyone and is totally not needed for most."

No evidence. No source. Just bluster.

An argument like the one offered in the comment is known among philosophers as an argument from incredulity. It holds:

I don't know a thing to be true;
therefore, it must be false.

Arguments from incredulity are moronic, but we hear them all the time:

• "Vaccines can't be safe. Nobody should get one."
  
  
• “Humans could not have evolved from a single cell. Darwin is bunk."
  
  
• "No one would work if the government paid him not to. Socialism is wrong."
  
  
• "Immigrants shouldn't be allowed here. They're not like Americans."
  
  
• "It's always cold here in North Dakota. Global warming is bullshit."

• "Philosophy is not meant for everyone and is totally not needed for most." 

People prone to arguments from incredulity can't imagine that many true things are unimaginable. (Take, for example, that brick walls aren't really solid; that we're moving through space at 1.3 million miles an hour; or that matter is essentially mental. 

Our convictions, however strong, don't make a statement false. 

Only buffoons believe they do.

Condemnant quo non intellegunt, as the Romans said.

"They condemn that which they do not understand."

Whigs One, Tories Nothing

Sapere aude (Dare to know).

— Horace

Yesterday marked a big win for the Whigs.

Virginia’s Supreme Court ruled that the governor can remove the Robert E. Lee Memorial from Richmond's Monument Avenue.

In a seven to zero decision, the court cited testimony from historians who said the statue memorializes nothing but the Jim Crow South, a time and place anathema to the majority of Americans today.

"Values change and public policy changes too," the court concluded.

The 60-foot high colossus will be removed from its pedestal and trucked to a warehouse, according to the governor's office.

Throughout English history, the Whigs have stood for dissent (even the Americans who rebelled against the crown in 1775 were called Whigs).

The Tories, on the other hand, have stood for the natural order (the monarchy and aristocracy).

Yesterday, the Whigs won.

I'm no Tory, but when I read the breaking news about the Virginia Supreme Court's decision (on Facebook), I was saddened—saddened to learn that this particular monument would disappear from its place in public.

I read a slew of the Facebookers' comments below the news story (more than 250 of them) and noticed that the overwhelming majority were gleeful about the court's decision and echoed the historians' testimony.

Silly me, I joined in, expressing my sadness about the decision and saying that the monument shouldn't be erased, but allowed to stand as a cultural reminder of America's troubled past.

My comments unleashed a barrage of repudiations. The sameness of the angry comments was striking. Almost all were misinformed. And almost all were circular arguments that sounded like this:

Everything Southerners ever did was a form of Black suppression. Southerners erected the memorial; therefore, the memorial is a form of Black suppression.

I tried to counter-argue—to no avail—that the Robert E. Lee Memorial was unique among all the Confederate monuments, and a special case worth preserving in situ:

The Lee Memorial was erected in 1890. Lumping it in with all the rest of the Confederate monuments built by White Supremacists in the 20th century disregards its unique nature. Confederate veterans paid for it—raising $52 thousand ($1.5 million in today's money)—not to intimidate Blacks, but because they idolized Lee for his self-sacrificing conduct during the war. At its dedication, the speaker said, "Let this monument, then, teach to generations yet unborn these lessons of his life! Let it stand, not as a record of civil strife, but as a perpetual protest against whatever is low and sordid in our public and private objects."

But—no more than you can fight city hall—you can't argue with an angry Whig mob (just ask George III). It will only respond with Whiggishness.

Whiggishness insists that history represents unfolding progress—progress toward perfect equality, the end of hierarchies, and the triumph of liberal democracy.

Whigs believed this in the 19th century, as did Hegel and Marx.

Whiggishness is also a form of presentism, a foolishness known to historians as the nunc pro tunc (now for then) fallacy.

Presentism projects our current values and ideas onto the past, condemning people who preceded us for not sharing those values and ideas.

Presentism, for example, condemns Union physicians for not knowing germs spread diseases (they thought gases did) and Confederate veterans for idolizing Robert E. Lee (they weren't woke to the fact that, in defending the Confederacy, he was defending slavery).

I'd love to believe Whiggishness were true; but I cannot. History is full of dead ends, mistaken beliefs, failed theories, and lost causes.

It's why I hate to see history—and this particular memorial—erased. 

Sapere aude.

UPDATE, SEPTEMBER 8, 2021: The statue of Lee was removed today.

Tired of Tu Quoque

If you want Black people to trust the vaccine,
don't blame them for distrusting it.

— Dr. Rueben Warren

I'm as empathetic as the next guy, but I'm tired of tu quoque. 

A logical fallacy, tu quoque (Latin for "you, too") turns a criticism back on the critic, instead of addressing it.

Example:

   Climate change threatens our species. We must end deforestation. 

   Sure, and you drive a car.

Tu quoque—also known as the "appeal to hypocrisy" or "whataboutism"—is a red herring used to take the heat off. 

As a reply to a criticism, it's weak, illogical, and blatantly self-serving. 

It lets you off the hook for anything and everything.

And it drives me bonkers.

Right now, tu quoque is being used by apologists to excuse Blacks from getting vaccinated (according to the CDC, as little as 15% of the Black population has received the vaccine).

Public health officials want everyone vaccinated. 

Unless they are, officials warn, Covid-19 will continue to kill. Over 500 Americans die every day from it.

If you criticize Blacks' vaccine-resistance—no matter your own color—you're immediately reminded of Tuskegee.

But in fact most Blacks have never heard of Tuskegee, you answer.

So you're reminded of things like poverty, pharmacy deserts, 1619 and systemic racism.

Tu quoque. Criticize my foolishness, I'll criticize yours. Never mind the substance of your criticism. 

Never mind the fact that spreading the virus encourages mutations. 

Never mind the fact that the virus can cause life-long medical problems. 

Never mind the fact that over 800 unvaccinated Americans die from the virus every day.

   You tell me I should get vaccinated. 

   Well, you're a racist.

That's tu quoque. 

I'm tired of it.

NOTE: Without doubt, White, Hispanic, Asian, and American Indian vaccine-resistors are just as illogical as Black resistors, if not more so. Fallacy is an EOE employer.

Best Explanation

In order to learn you must desire to learn, and not be satisfied with what you're already inclined to think.

― Charles S. Peirce

Victimhood and illogic drive many American tragedies, as they drove Nashville Bomber Anthony Quinn Warner to target AT&T on Christmas Day.

Films like "Silkwood," "Erin Brockovich" and "Radium Girls" teach us that all industrialists are avaricious and amoral victimizers, and that to stand up to them—as the Nashville Bomber did—is heroic. 

And conspiracy theorists, knowing illogic is our tragic flaw, teach us that to believe is to know, when it's not.

One conspiracy theory afflicting us now—the one that consumed the Nashville Bomber—holds that the industrialists behind 5G are killing us. Cigarette-makers killed their customers, after all, so why wouldn't AT&T?

Proponents of the theory claim that all wireless radiation is deadly, but that the research which proves it has been willfully ignored. 5G, proponents of the theory say, is the deadliest of all. Once deployed, it will expose people for the first time in history to a steady shower of super-fast millimeter waves, and cause hair-loss, memory-loss, sterility, cancer, neurological disorders, genetic damage, and even structural changes to the human body.

But physicists know a lot about wireless radiation, including millimeter waves. 

Millimeter waves—like all radio waves—carry little energy compared to other forms of radiation, and cannot damage genes or upset metabolisms. Millimeter waves are for all purposes inert, and will travel uninterrupted through human bodies—as well as the rest of the universe. If you want to worry about possible damage to yourself, you're better off worrying about your exposure to light: a single visible-light photon has a trillion times more energy than a millimeter-wave photon.

If the proponents of the 5G conspiracy theory don't strike you as paranoid, consider that some believe 5G, besides causing cancer, is a "Chinese plot" against America; that 5G is of a piece with vaccines, fluoridation, genetically engineered food, and fracking; and that 5G, designed by Bill Gates to reduce the world's population, transmits Covid-19.

The 5G conspiracy theory is an example of flouting what philosophers call inference to the best explanation. 

According to that principle, when faced with a question, you choose the theory that best explains the available data. You don't choose a theory that ignores the data, presupposes other data, adds a bunch of data, or invents data out of whole cloth.

If you're rational, when your kitchen appliances all stop working at once, you infer that a fuse blew in the basement. 

You don't infer—although it's possible—that a secret cabal of Chinese manufacturers has coordinated, to the precise second, the mass failure of your appliances; that the cabal seeks only to victimize American customers; that it's covering up its ability to plan mass, simultaneous product failures from the West; and that Bill Gates must be on the payroll.

Fishy

Holocaust deniers love a red herring.

A red herring is a statement meant to divert our attention from evidence. For example:

All Jews weren't exterminated. So there was no Holocaust.

The Holocaust-denier's favorite, this red herring ignores the fact that victims have survived genocides throughout history.

Right now, Rudi Giuliani is peddling red herrings. He employed one in a federal court this week:

Republicans weren't present for every ballot-count.
So Trump won the election in Pennsylvania.

Rudi's red herring ignores the fact that the election results in Pennsylvania were carefully audited by state and county election workers. Republican poll watchers, although they should have, failed to visit every election-return warehouse in the state. But Republicans' laziness doesn't reverse the outcome.

The noun phrase red herring dates to the early 13th century, when, to compensate for the lack of refrigeration, fish peddlers would salt and smoke fresh herring. A red herring was smoked so long—usually 10 days—it would turn from white to red. Poor people and British sailors lived on the tangy treats; so did Catholics throughout Lent. Red herrings were—and are—known as kippers, a favorite British breakfast food.

Two centuries later, writer Gerland Langbaine noted in The Hunter that you could train your hounds to follow the game's scent by trailing a kipper on the ground.

A century after Langbaine's handbook appeared, newspaper journalist William Cobbett related a fable about a boy who used a kipper to distract a pack of hounds from their prey. Cobbett compared the hounds to sloppy journalists who chased after "false leads."

Cobbett cemented the metaphor in English speakers' minds when he wrote that a false lead is a "red herring," because "its scent goes cold" in a day.

In Nonsense, grammarian Robert Gula defines a red herring as "a detail inserted into a discussion that sidetracks the discussion." It's purely and simply a logical fallacy.

Red herrings are bull—and bad for you. 

And, frankly, Rudi's are giving me a haddock.