Anything people say before the “but” 1) doesn’t count, 2) is a sign of weakness & should be avoided in straightforward prose.
Category: Fallacious Reasoning
2000 out of 1.3 million Moroccan Jews! They happen to mate, like other people, and have children.
Rohan, the NYT idiots (IYI) got it backward. Those who live longer necessarily have a longer functioning intellectual/visual ability
All the education in the world will not compensate for a logical fallacy, of the style: “All members of the Smith family are tall; he is tall *hence* he is a member of the Smith family”, the central error in Fooled by Randomness (and the main reason for underestimation of luck). — For, I am unhappy to report, many people make it in real life, along with its variations. Further, this is not just journalism: I saw it made just so frequently by PhDs (in the GMO and Pinker debates) that I am totally disgusted: better be a truck driver with logical abilities, than a PhD with such elementary defects. Indeed it is so prevalent in social science it is not even funny. — Finally, I find it horrifying that people make it here on this page (these people are now gone). Forget all the complicated stuff, focus on the elementary, the basic, for Baal’s sake. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent
BARBELL & LOGIC: A logical error in dealing with the notion of “average” is to think that, in a conflict in which we are outsiders, the middle ground is likely to be right, instead of considering that each side has a 50% probability of being 100% right, and the middle ground is the least likely to be correct. We make such mistakes in intellectual life but not in naturalistic settings. When you tell people that a woman has 50% percent probability of being pregnant, (50% of being not pregnant) but 0% probability of being half-pregnant, they get it. Replace “pregnant” with “right” and see that you are likely to make the error. This leads many to avoid barbells by having only “moderate” risks or “moderate” opinions. The only time I got angry with Robert Shiller was when, in 2006, he said that I was “sort of” right (about the risks in the system) but was too extreme and needed “moderation”. Actually philosophers know about fallacy in the “argument to moderation”:
