"They," "Them," "Those People," and the Fallacy of Partisan Demagoguery June 14, 20223,228 words (~16 minutes) Tags: fallacies first-person Characterizations of partisan factions lead to the straw man fallacy and to a kind of no true Scotsman fallacy, and they empower polarized viewpoints at the expense of independent thinkers.
Discussion about Disagreement on the Rationally Speaking Podcast June 3, 20225,226 words (~26 minutes) Tags: book, article, or podcast review first-person Two interviews from Rationally Speaking about disagreement are reviewed: John Nerst’s discussion of low resolution abstraction, and Buster Benson’s learnings from arguments with friends and family.
Use of Contraception in the United States Reported in the 2017-2019 National Survey of Family Growth April 28, 202216,057 words (~80 minutes) Tags: original research birth control contraception NSFG third-person Original research on the number of persons using and not using contraception in the United States, the contraceptive methods being used, and motives for using or discontinuing contraceptive methods.
The Fallacy of Generic Thinking March 4, 20225,531 words (~27 minutes) Tags: fallacies statistics psychology philosophy third-person Generic thinking is unquantified belief about large populations of individuals, a profound and terribly mistaken fallacy that has little use other than prejudice.
Kwame Anthony Appiah's Criticism of “Cultural Appropriation” Criticism January 26, 20222,490 words (~12 minutes) Tags: book, article, or podcast review philosophy third-person Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah argues that “cultural appropriation” is based on a mistaken mental model of what “culture” denotes and that there are other, better criticisms.
How to Scrutinize a Statistic January 18, 202216,214 words (~81 minutes) Tags: fallacies statistics second-person When encountering a statistic, you should inquire about its provenance, its scope of inference, its practical significance, and the estimation error associated with it.
Category-Based Prejudice November 26, 20215,322 words (~26 minutes) Tags: fallacies third-person Properties of a population are not properties of individuals, and categorization is arbitrary. Therefore, category-based prejudice is more costly, less accurate, and more ambiguous than direct measurement.
Anecdotes Are Not Evidence January 31, 20217,817 words (~39 minutes) Tags: fallacies statistics psychology third-person Anecdotal evidence has flaws that make it useless for inferences about populations or about cause and effect. Valid uses of anecdotes exist, but anecdotes should be scrutinized even in such cases.
Moral Skepticism December 28, 20204,869 words (~24 minutes) Tags: philosophy third-person Searching for moral knowledge is delusional. Differences between descriptive and normative mental models imply that truth and falsity do not apply to morality and that moral constructs are fictions.
Selection Bias and the Fallacy of Listing Examples December 7, 20203,320 words (~16 minutes) Tags: fallacies statistics third-person Advocating a belief by finding supporting examples and listing them is fallacious because of selection bias; examples are selected because they illustrate the belief and contradictory cases are ignored.
Political Rhetoric as Shibboleths July 4, 20201,830 words (~9 minutes) Tags: opinion third-person Slogans of political rhetoric function as shibboleths – markers of tribal allegiance devoid of content – and so promote conformity, superficiality, and exclusion of non-binary viewpoints.
Margaret Sanger on Abortion in Her Own Words November 11, 201812,830 words (~64 minutes) Tags: history birth control contraception abortion third-person Birth control pioneer and Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger felt that abortion was “taking life” and had the explicit goal of ending the use of abortion for family limitation.
