- Joined
- May 14, 2019
There is a notion I heard one of you express once that many "logical fallacies" aren't really fallacies, or at best are misused to the point that the concept is of little use. It's something I've got to thinking of.
In general I think that what a lot of your Fucking Love Science types get wrong is that they're just so autistic and uptight that they won't recognize the value of heuristics, because that would require them to admit the limitations of human knowledge. Something that flies in the face of their whole worldview.
I'm going to address two common ones here through the lens of economics.
SLIPPERY SLOPE
This is the big one. A logical fallacy where someone argues that allowing X (reasonable thing) will lead to Y (unreasonable thing) without drawing any explicit line of logic as to why X will cause Y. It is also the weakest fallacy today as just about everything Angry Church Men said in the past has come true. The very basis for the Overton Window is an assumption that there is a window of normalcy that moves with the policy people are used to.
In it's strictest form, it's a fallacy when things really are unrelated, but that's almost never the case when people invoke it. What really got me thinking about this is Timur Kuran's Private Truths, Public Lies. In it, he wrote a political economy model of "preference falsification" (people tactically self-censoring to avoid public pressure) and used his model to analyze real-world events like the switch from Jim Crow to affirmative action (Kuran hates AA), the fall of the Eastern Bloc and other events. Kuran had a few major points:
1) Before revolutions, change often seems impossible, the regime seems extremely stable and genuinely widely supported
2) Revolutions snowball extremely fast, often starting from absolute nonsense (like a vendor being beaten by cops)
3) After revolutions, change seems inevitable, people bleat about how it was a miracle the regime survived as long as it did and how everyone hated it
What Kuran demonstrated was that you can have a stable social equilibrium where everyone professes to support some awful thing because active participation in punishing dissidents is the only valid survival strategy. Everyone hates it, everyone can even know everyone else hates it, but if it is too costly to not police your fellow man cowards will still support the status quo. But every now and then along comes some big dick fearless Chad who refuses to play along, and in doing so makes a few other people flip, at the margin, to resistance, and it starts a snowball effect that can, in the aftermath, actually switch to a different equilibrium of lying.
Well, you could imagine a case where the private desire is bad, enforcing punishment is costly (instead of not enforcing it being costly), play around with it to get something where it's talking about people wanting to take dick in the ass or sacrifice babies to Moloch instead of wanting to have equal political rights. You relax the standards, more people are emboldened to reveal their degeneracy, it becomes more costly to stand against them and for less benefit, everyone wants their own particular degeneracy embraced, reform is a self-perpetuating machine that ends in the destruction of civil society.
I think the slippery slope is, at this point, more of a law of society than a fucking "fallacy."
AD HOMINEM
"X says Y. X is a bad person, so Y must be bad."
This one is a stronger fallacy, it is definitely true. But where this goes astray is that it denies the role that "rational ignorance" plays in people's decisionmaking.
Information is costly to acquire and the benefits of acting upon it are finite. You may not know the exact costs or benefits, but you do have some set of reasonable expectations about what the world normally looks like. All human behavior depends in some fashion on this concept. Nobody searches forever for the cheapest version of something on Amazon. Nobody searches forever for the best job. People go until they find something good enough.
A person's own understanding of reality works in no less the same way. Nobody digs down to the Ultimate Truth. Most of your scientists out there don't know how to recreate every experiment that their body of theory is based on; they take for granted, on some kind of evidence, that it is probably true for some sufficiently high level of "probably." Non-scientists don't have as high a standard and normalfaggots don't have one at all besides social convention.
Where personal character comes into this is if personal character correlates with correctness. In natural sciences I don't think it does at all. But in social sciences, is that really that unlikely? Is it that unlikely that a person who is a shithead will view society with warped eyes and draw warped conclusions? Is it that unlikely that someone who is a narcissist will find that ideas that revolve around subjugating everyone to some sort of human-designed law won't find that those ideas speak to their soul? That a sick pervert won't want to promote a culture that shames them less and gives them more access to their perversions?
And while this does get outside of strict scientific logic, I think it is common sense that good people yield better fruits, socially if not for themselves, than bad people.
An ad hominem attack might be illogical, when there is actual proof before you. But much of the time, when it's being used in some social sciences, philosophical, theological, political or artistic context, it is one of the very best heuristics a person has when the world is too complex to run like a science experiment.
The reason I think about this one a lot is that I have noticed in my time that most shitty ideas came from shitty people, and vice versa. For me this came from learning what an asshole Karl Marx was in his personal life compared to what a saint Adam Smith was (dude was described as being very happy and kind).
In general I think that what a lot of your Fucking Love Science types get wrong is that they're just so autistic and uptight that they won't recognize the value of heuristics, because that would require them to admit the limitations of human knowledge. Something that flies in the face of their whole worldview.
I'm going to address two common ones here through the lens of economics.
SLIPPERY SLOPE
This is the big one. A logical fallacy where someone argues that allowing X (reasonable thing) will lead to Y (unreasonable thing) without drawing any explicit line of logic as to why X will cause Y. It is also the weakest fallacy today as just about everything Angry Church Men said in the past has come true. The very basis for the Overton Window is an assumption that there is a window of normalcy that moves with the policy people are used to.
In it's strictest form, it's a fallacy when things really are unrelated, but that's almost never the case when people invoke it. What really got me thinking about this is Timur Kuran's Private Truths, Public Lies. In it, he wrote a political economy model of "preference falsification" (people tactically self-censoring to avoid public pressure) and used his model to analyze real-world events like the switch from Jim Crow to affirmative action (Kuran hates AA), the fall of the Eastern Bloc and other events. Kuran had a few major points:
1) Before revolutions, change often seems impossible, the regime seems extremely stable and genuinely widely supported
2) Revolutions snowball extremely fast, often starting from absolute nonsense (like a vendor being beaten by cops)
3) After revolutions, change seems inevitable, people bleat about how it was a miracle the regime survived as long as it did and how everyone hated it
What Kuran demonstrated was that you can have a stable social equilibrium where everyone professes to support some awful thing because active participation in punishing dissidents is the only valid survival strategy. Everyone hates it, everyone can even know everyone else hates it, but if it is too costly to not police your fellow man cowards will still support the status quo. But every now and then along comes some big dick fearless Chad who refuses to play along, and in doing so makes a few other people flip, at the margin, to resistance, and it starts a snowball effect that can, in the aftermath, actually switch to a different equilibrium of lying.
Well, you could imagine a case where the private desire is bad, enforcing punishment is costly (instead of not enforcing it being costly), play around with it to get something where it's talking about people wanting to take dick in the ass or sacrifice babies to Moloch instead of wanting to have equal political rights. You relax the standards, more people are emboldened to reveal their degeneracy, it becomes more costly to stand against them and for less benefit, everyone wants their own particular degeneracy embraced, reform is a self-perpetuating machine that ends in the destruction of civil society.
I think the slippery slope is, at this point, more of a law of society than a fucking "fallacy."
AD HOMINEM
"X says Y. X is a bad person, so Y must be bad."
This one is a stronger fallacy, it is definitely true. But where this goes astray is that it denies the role that "rational ignorance" plays in people's decisionmaking.
Information is costly to acquire and the benefits of acting upon it are finite. You may not know the exact costs or benefits, but you do have some set of reasonable expectations about what the world normally looks like. All human behavior depends in some fashion on this concept. Nobody searches forever for the cheapest version of something on Amazon. Nobody searches forever for the best job. People go until they find something good enough.
A person's own understanding of reality works in no less the same way. Nobody digs down to the Ultimate Truth. Most of your scientists out there don't know how to recreate every experiment that their body of theory is based on; they take for granted, on some kind of evidence, that it is probably true for some sufficiently high level of "probably." Non-scientists don't have as high a standard and normalfaggots don't have one at all besides social convention.
Where personal character comes into this is if personal character correlates with correctness. In natural sciences I don't think it does at all. But in social sciences, is that really that unlikely? Is it that unlikely that a person who is a shithead will view society with warped eyes and draw warped conclusions? Is it that unlikely that someone who is a narcissist will find that ideas that revolve around subjugating everyone to some sort of human-designed law won't find that those ideas speak to their soul? That a sick pervert won't want to promote a culture that shames them less and gives them more access to their perversions?
And while this does get outside of strict scientific logic, I think it is common sense that good people yield better fruits, socially if not for themselves, than bad people.
An ad hominem attack might be illogical, when there is actual proof before you. But much of the time, when it's being used in some social sciences, philosophical, theological, political or artistic context, it is one of the very best heuristics a person has when the world is too complex to run like a science experiment.
The reason I think about this one a lot is that I have noticed in my time that most shitty ideas came from shitty people, and vice versa. For me this came from learning what an asshole Karl Marx was in his personal life compared to what a saint Adam Smith was (dude was described as being very happy and kind).
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