An Autodidact's Bible, #21
Reclaiming Your Mind, Part 2, Chapter 7
This is the twenty-first installment of the serial of my forthcoming book Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact’s Bible. As with other installments, part of it is behind the paywall. Become one of my supporters to get the whole thing.
Catch up on earlier installments here:
#1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12, #13, #14, #15, #16, #17, #18, #19, #20
If your email client chokes on this post, find the whole thing at http://jdanielsawyer.substack.com
Chapter 7
Errors of Reasoning
Problems with Informal Reasoning
Sometimes, reasoning goes wrong. If you are to master informal reasoning, you must understand how it goes wrong. So, let’s take a quick tour through some1 of the classic informal fallacies and their remedies. All of the fallacies share something in common: irrelevance. That is to say; even if your interlocutor (or you) are correct in every single assertion advanced with the help of the fallacy, that would not impact the validity or truthfulness of the issue at hand.
The Bandwagon Fallacy (Argumentum ad populum). This one says “Proposition X is true because people say it’s true.” You’ve heard this over and over in advertising.
Coke is the most popular drink in the world—six billion people can’t be wrong.
Nine out of ten dentists recommend Listerine.
If Jesus isn’t the way, the truth, and the life, are you saying that all these Christians are wasting their lives?
97% of climate scientists believe in anthropogenic global warming.
Everybody knows that smoking causes lung cancer.
Humans are a tribal species. We instinctively want to divide into teams and identify with our own group because, in an ancestral environment, being without a group was a good way to die without leaving any offspring. The personality traits that led people to die that way didn’t get passed down to us.
There is physical safety in numbers, and emotional safety in belonging to a group. Because of this, we are always and forever tempted to assume that what our friends/acquaintances/fandoms/church members/countrymen/fellow humans believe, is true—not because we know or can show it to be true, but because we want to belong.
The argumentum ad populum appeals to our need to belong, and in so doing it does an end run around every rational faculty we have.
As happens so often, the remedy for this particular vulnerability comes to us from comedy. In this case, comedy’s most basic tool: ridicule. Satire and parody have always existed to make fun of popular “wisdom” and ask dangerous questions. From Aristophanes to Lucretius to Lenny Bruce to George Carlin, good comedians and satirists all, in one way or another, puncture the bubble of safety that comes from this tribal epistemology. All you have to do is to remind yourself of how utterly foolish most people are—imagine the level of wisdom present in the average person and then remind yourself that an average is the middle point of an aggregated distribution. By definition, half of everyone is dumber than the average Joe.2 A healthy (though hopefully affectionate) contempt for the good sense of the human animal (including oneself) is an excellent antidote to the tribal thinking that besets us all.
Being ruthless about subjecting your dearly held beliefs to the discipline of reality also ain’t a bad idea.
The Genetic Fallacy (a.k.a. The Fallacy of Virtue). When you advocate a position because it’s the position of your tradition or culture (implying, without further argument, that it must therefore be correct or noble)—or when you attack a position because it originated from a group or ideology you hate (implying, without further argument, that it therefore must be wrong or evil), you are committing the Genetic Fallacy. As with the Bandwagon Fallacy, the Genetic Fallacy trades heavily on our tribal instincts, but it also folds simplistic causality and morality into the mix.
For veterans of the Internet, this fallacy is perhaps most accessible as the “Nazi fallacy.” Godwin’s Law is a very straightforward formulation of the Genetic Fallacy, which states:
“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the origin of an idea doesn’t have any bearing on its moral or veridical correctness.
Free speech is not good because the Nazis hated it
Health and fitness are not bad because Hitler fetishized them
Occult artifacts are not delusional fetishes because Goebells was obsessed with them
Tanks are not ineffective weapons of war because Rommel loved them
Rockets are not a hopeless technology because they were key to the Third Reich’s strategy
These things are good, or bad, or true, or false, in different contexts, because of their nature in those contexts. The Nazi’s affinity or antipathy for a particular piece of science, technology, fashion, moral idea, or political program has no bearing whatsoever on the merits of that particular thing.
“Hold on a minute!” I hear you say, “The Nazis were evil scumbags who poisoned everything they touched and if we can’t trust that, how can we trust anything?!? After all, haven’t you been talking up the virtue of learning from the past?”
Yes. Yes, I have. But history is a complex beast. The past is not a simple set of fables. Moral progress doesn’t flow in a straight line.
Most importantly, it’s very rare for people to know that they’re evil even when they’re in the midst of acting evil out. Strange though it sounds, while many of the great despotic regimes of history were headed by people who were unabashed in their monstrosity (Tamerlane, Mao, Pol Pot, Caligula, Tiberius, Ivan the Terrible, etc.) the regimes themselves, and the paths to those apotheoses of evil, were frequently paved with intentions that seemed noble at the time.
But it gets worse. In most cases, the ideologies of these cretins were poisonous not because of any one falsehood that they believed. Instead, the poison emerged (remember emergence?) from the particular way they combined truths and half-truths with a moral framework made up mostly of genuine moral concerns prioritized and contextualized in a particular way.
It is possible—even common—for a monstrous or benighted person to be right about something, maybe even a lot of things, and yet to still be monstrous or benighted or short-sighted or stupid or downright despicable. As the old saw goes, “Great men are seldom good men.”
It is also possible—and even more common—for deeply decent people to believe fanciful garbage or even to be swept into monstrous and dangerous ways of thinking simply by virtue of the fact that they are good people. The things that make someone good (honesty, decency, fairness, kindness, care for one’s family and one’s community, paying one’s debts) often makes that same someone vulnerable to all the fallacies in this chapter, and many others besides.
The world is a complex and dangerous place. Sometimes terrible people think great thoughts or produce great advances—and sometimes good people cause great calamities and suffering. A proposition is not true because of where it came from—its truth or falsehood rises and falls in accord with the discipline of reality. Nothing more, nothing less.
Attacking Your Opponent (Argumentum ad Hominem). This one is closely related to the Genetic Fallacy, but rather than evaluating an idea according to where the idea came from, it evaluates that idea based on who is currently advancing it. Ad Hominem is a rhetorical dirty trick that’s surprisingly effective whether it’s deployed openly, or in the privacy of your own head to protect you from an argument you’d rather not countenance. The basic structure goes something like this:
“Are you going to believe him?!? He’s an idiot, an asshole, and he’s from the wrong political party! He’s an unchristian, racist, sexist, Islamophobic, homophobic, patriarchal mama’s boy! He kicks puppies! He gropes women! He’s a vegan! He buys lunch at a restaurant owned by someone who gives money to the wrong charities and candidates! And he’s ugly, too!”
In other words, instead of engaging the substance of your opponent’s argument, you impugn his character. But, as with the genetic fallacy, it simply doesn’t matter whether your opponent is the world’s biggest jerk or the world’s most decent human being. If Ghandi said that 2+2=5 that wouldn’t make it true—and if you found out that Ghandi was a sexual predator (which he might have been, depending on how you look at the evidence in his letters) that wouldn’t make non-violent civil disobedience any less effective a way to promote the British withdrawal from India.
So how do you remedy the ad hominem fallacy?
Assume that you’re going to commit it. And if you’re talking to someone who you don’t like, who you feel threatened by, who you feel superior to, or who just doesn’t look like your kind of person, then go the extra mile to assume they might have a point. Make it a matter of policy.