0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

0:00:10
Pascual Romero: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. This is episode 37. That number does not get assigned to much, does it?

0:00:32
BR: No, I mean, you know, 3 plus 7 is 10. We can do the numerology on it.

0:00:51
CW: Let’s not.

0:00:52
PR: Let’s not. That’s incidentally what age I am for the next three weeks. Oh. But then by the time people may have been catching up to this episode or something, maybe I’ll already be 38 and then it’s irrelevant anyway. So anyway, as you just heard, our beloved producer, Celestia, is here with us today.

0:01:16
CW: Hey everybody.

0:01:17
PR: As we teased last week, we are getting into one of the most exciting topics in skepticism. If you are like me, maybe a little too much of a fan of debating people, because these are the most important things to identify in all of debate and discourse in not only skepticism but science at large. Anytime people try to make claims or refute a position or make a position, those are logical fallacies and we’re going to be getting into that pretty quick here. But first, Ben, you’ve been scratching your head at something this week and I can sense it, because you said you had something special to bring up. So what are you skeptical of this week, Ben?

BR: Something weird happened to me. Now a lot of weird things happen to me, as I’m sure both you know and our listeners know. I’m sort of an odd person and I do odd things. I just, you know, just weird things.

0:02:19
CW: More weird things happen to you than anybody I know.

0:02:22
BR: You need to expand your horizons. But I so you know some mysteries I’m I’m asked to do so I would say probably a third or half the time if I’m investigating something it’s because somebody specifically said you know can you investigate this either Discovery News or a TV show or the Center for Inquiry or somebody else. Other times it’s something that I’m just curious about for example with the Pokemon episode, you know, the Pokemon seizure panic, where I just, nobody asked me, I was just like, hey, that’s pretty weird. Let me look into that. Let me see if I can investigate that. But every now and then, a mystery just sort of plops in my lap, as it were. And that happened to me today, literally today. Here’s what happened. I was I was online about a week ago looking over books on demonic possession So I I bought a used book Celestia chuckles have having seen my living room – I bought a used book titled How About Demons? Possession and exorcism in the modern world by Felicitas D. Goodman on occasion having bought used books from different places, sometimes you’ll find traces of the previous owner. For example, you know, it would be travel tickets, right? You know, airline ticket from 1993 going from Stuttgart to Paris or whatever. Or just sort of random stuff. But today I opened up the book and there was only one item and I’m holding it in my hand here.

0:04:05
CW: Was it a recipe for pea soup?

0:04:08
BR: It was not. Oddly enough. Oddly enough. It is a, I’m guessing, what’s this, maybe like four inches by five inches, give or take. It’s sort of a, it’s a glossy postcard, but we’ll post the photo on the Facebook page, people can see it. And there’s nothing on the back, but on the front is a group of about 10 or 12 people that says, Big Break 2012, Panama City Beach, Florida. And it’s just a bunch of sort of random college kids looking like they’re having a good time, sort of a typical cutesy spring break pose.

PR: Okay, looks like one of those, kind of like those souvenir photos you get like at Times Square or something. Where they take a picture and put a border around it. So yeah, and it’s got a whole bunch of kids in there. I’d say all probably college age.

BR: So my first thought was, well probably, I’m guessing the previous owner is one of these people depicted in the photograph. I mean, not necessarily, but just thinking, you know, just most likely.

PR: Seems likely.

0:05:17
BR: Seems likely.

0:05:18
CW: So far, not really mysterious.

BR: So far, not that really odd. Just whatever. I was sort of curious, like, which one of these people is interested in demonic possession, exorcism. That right there is sort of a curious, you know, curious thing. So, I didn’t really think much about it. You know, it’s kind of interesting to see some traces of the previous owner and you know, whatever. Didn’t think much about it until I looked in the top left-hand corner. Pascual, would you read what’s printed in the top left-hand corner?

0:05:50
PR: Up in the top left-hand corner, it says Radford. And yeah, literally is your last name right there. So that’s pretty, that’s pretty interesting.

0:06:03
BR: Very odd. Yeah, and I have to admit, I had a slight chill. I don’t want to say it was a paranormal chill, but I was like.

0:06:10
CW: And it’s not handwritten just so everybody understands. It’s printed on there. It’s like it’s part of the photograph’s branding.

0:06:18
BR: It is part of the photograph’s branding. You can expect that if it were a receipt, then it’d have my name on it. But this was not a receipt. This was almost certainly printed in 2012. I wouldn’t call it paranormal, but it’s certainly coincident. So I’ll just give you a couple of my theories on it my first thought is that that these are students from Radford University there is a Radford University I’ve forgotten exactly where I think it’s over towards the the the East Coast my my best guess is that again these are students from Radford University. I was trying to look on their clothing to see if there’s any school logos. I didn’t see any there. But my guess is that maybe it was from Radford University and these are students and that’s where that came from.

CW: Yeah, I just looked it up. It is located in Virginia. It’s a public university in Radford, Virginia. There’s also a Radford, Utah. I’ve driven through there myself.

0:07:15
BR: So now, Celestia, you have seen this. After I saw this, I texted you a photo. I’m like, what do you think of this? What’s your hypothesis?

0:07:22
CW: Well, I don’t think that they would put the name of the university on the branding like that. What I do think, having worked with companies that do photo booths and other types of souvenir items. I would expect that Radford is an indicator of perhaps the salesperson who sold that photo to the kids because you want to market, but you want to market in a very nondescript way that doesn’t interfere with the enjoyment of the souvenir photo. And your name, or Radford, regardless of whose name it is, is kind of tucked away on the top left-hand corner kind of nondescriptly, it’s kind of hidden in the border And it just looks like it’s stuck there almost like like let’s say these these kids came back and said we hate this photograph. We want to return it the photographer was really rude, and then the boss would be able to say well, who was it? Oh, is that Radford bastard? Well? Yeah, we’re gonna fire him. I think it’s a tracking method.

0:08:27
BR: Okay, now you could be right now you keep in mind that in the top top right-hand corner it does have a website www I think is campus photo dotnet or something. Yeah campus Or a photo. Yeah, no camp row photo. It’s actually really poorly done I can’t exactly read it anyway, so it does have it on the web, so it’s so in theory one way to to investigate this would be to go on their website, campusphoto.net or whatever it is, and see if there is a photographer named Radford. Another option is that one of these people is the previous owner of the book and his or her name is Radford. And that’s because I can see how the person that bought it, their name would be on there. What’s your guess, Pascual?

0:09:26
PR: I did try to look up that website, and it is very dated, to say the least.

0:09:29
CW: I’m on it right now, too. This is definitely 2012 level web design.

0:09:34
BR: Yeah, it was cutting edge back then. So there is like you know an indication that it is you know as current as this picture at least in that you know there’s some links to somewhat you know recent as of the time of this photo stuff but it’s a very it’s like it’s got login you have to log into it and stuff so with which is kind of confusing I you know I’m not too sure if that just means that, like I know some of these souvenir photos, like they’ll say, they’ll take your picture and then they’ll give you a card that sends you to the website and they’re like, use this info to find your picture. Or, you know.

0:10:15
BR: I did that with John Edward. Oh yeah. I could imagine, I’m sure they had all manner of things that you could buy, like pictures of you at John Edwards. But, no, so it’s a little tricky. I mean just a quick Google and go into the website does not yield a lot of results. So there is a contact form on that site so that might be fun to kind of dig up. But yeah, it’s a tough call. I feel like, you know, the fact that it’s so, that Radford is in such a kind of nondescript kind of place on it. Spot where you, I mean I didn’t even see it until you pointed it out.

0:10:52
CW: And it’s not an uncommon name. So you got that. If this was the odds must be crazy. I’m sure the statistician would have a field day with how common your last name is. And the part of the country that it’s in and you know any number of things would get your name on this postcard.

0:11:09
BR: Well why don’t we open it up to our listeners? We have a surprisingly bright and generous audience. And I’d be curious, we’ll post a photo of this and I’ll be curious to see if our listeners have any hypotheses or guesses or ideas and maybe they can solve the mystery.

0:11:28
PR: Wow, that would be amazing.

(MUSIC)

PR: Alright, so I get in a lot of debates on the internet. So much so that probably most of the white hair that I’ve been increasingly developing in the last couple of years are probably because of just…

BR: Thanks Facebook.

0:11:58
PR: Well, yeah, anyway.

0:12:06
CW: Your white hair is not necessarily caused, even though it’s correlated with.

0:12:11
BR: Oh, that’s true. Wah, wah, busted!

PR: Good eye, good eye. Yeah, so, but to bring it around to that, today we’re talking about logical fallacies, which is a really great topic. Every skeptic should be should be familiar with this stuff because this is really at the core of our toolbox. These are the the Phillips screwdrivers of breaking down arguments you know and and we need to be aware of when people are doing this because number one it’s something that either can shut down your your argument without actually doing anything to disprove you or even worse, it leads you into a rabbit hole of arguing that will never get you out to a result you’re looking for. We think it would be a lot of fun to discuss the various logical fallacies and how they come into play in our daily lives and debating people and reasoning with people. Ben, do you want to give us a quick overview?

BR: Yeah, I’ll just touch on a couple of them. You know, logical fallacies are, you know, they’re things that I have routinely come across and studied. And I think it’s useful, it’s interesting, I mean, I’m sort of two minds about it, because on one hand, it is It is clearly useful to be able to recognize and identify logical fallacies just because the whole point is that there are certain errors that are common enough in human discourse and human thought, in human language in some cases, that there’s a name for them. And you’re not the first person who’s made this mistake, and we’ve figured this out, here’s the mistake, and by identifying it, you’re like, okay, I can, it sort of helps to crystallize and label that so we can sort of more readily identify them. And, of course, there’s no golden rule set of fallacies. There isn’t, you know, this is the set of fallacies. There are many different sets of fallacies. There are different versions, different types. There’s, you know, there are logical fallacies, there are formal logic, informal logic, I mean there are lots of different ones out there. So it’s one of those things where it is undeniably useful to at least have a passing knowledge of them. And usually I found for my own good, it’s not so much, oh, I know these fallacies so I can call you on it. It’s more, I know these fallacies so I can stop myself from doing it. But before I say this or type this, you know, I think I might be wrong. Let me check myself. So at least in my case and many skeptics I know, they serve as a useful sort of second guessing or checking yourself for that.

0:15:09
CW: Yeah. There’s so many of them that there’s… We decided to call this kind of a fallacy roundtable where all three of us bring a few things to the reader… not the readers, the listeners. You guys aren’t reading this. I don’t think so anyway. All of us can bring some of our feelings and thoughts on fallacies, but there’s no way we can cover all of them. One of the things that we could cover later is whether or not fallacies are useful. Beyond, as Ben said, checking your own logic, your own self, when you’re potentially arguing in a completely wrong-headed direction you are, you know, you are down a pathway that is not the reasonable way. You’re acting on instinct or emotion or heuristics. And I freaking love, I’m one of those pedants that loves learning about logical fallacies and heuristics because I love the way the mind works. It’s a fascinating thing to see all the traps that many people before me and many people after me have fallen into when it comes to reasoning. But there’s still a question out there, and there was an article in Skeptical Inquirer. Ben, I think, did you edit this one? It’s by Martin Boudry?

BR: Yes, I did, yes.

CW: The Fallacy Fork? And so stay tuned. We’re going to talk about that later on, after we talk about our favorites. We’re going to possibly skewer those very same favorites and find out whether or not it’s a screwdriver that should be… There are some people that think that as a tool we should just retire logical fallacies. I don’t necessarily agree with that, but do either of you have a particular favorite fallacy?

0:17:07
PR: Yeah, I’ll just start with a very well-known one in the skeptic world, and that’s the straw man. That one is a very easy to spot one usually, but there is a form of it that I really like to point out, which is that a person will, you know, so a straw man is basically creating sort of a false, he sort of paints the person in a in a bad light or misrepresents someone’s argument in order to make it easier to to break down.

0:17:43
BR: Or not to break down, to criticize or debunk.

0:17:45
PR: Yeah, and my favorite version of that is the one that happens a lot, especially in political arguments. You see it a lot, and it’s where you’ll say something like, a great example is the war on Christmas. You know, the war on Christmas is a giant straw man. I mean, the whole thing is just one big straw man.

0:18:09
BR: Blood’s running in the streets. Have you not seen the war on Christmas?

0:18:13
PR: Right.

0:18:14
BR: And Santa’s and their elves are being strung up left and right.

0:18:18
CW: That’s right. Well, Trump won the war. He slayed the straw man and he announced a couple times just recently that thanks to the Trump administration we will be saying Merry Christmas again.

0:18:30
PR: Yeah, exactly. And to throw another straw man under the pile. But that’s one that I see a lot and it’s the best example in the war on Christmas is the idea that if you say happy holidays, well why do you hate Christmas? It’s like, well, I didn’t say that. I said happy holidays. I’m including some people. And you jump to the conclusion that I hate Christmas, and then Fox News jumps on that conclusion and decides that these people are out to get Christmas. And what it does is instead of asking, well, why are we saying happy holidays instead of Merry Christmas, they’re just saying these people hate Christmas, and they just create divisiveness over it. And that’s a great way of doing the pigeon knocking over the chest pieces kind of move where it’s like you just run in and just mess up the argument so that nobody can continue. That whole war on Christmas is a great example of that because nobody’s declaring war on Christmas. People have just decided to be more inclusive and whether you agree with that or not, you can’t jump to the conclusion that anyone hates anything just because they aren’t picking your specific belief system, you know –

BR: Or they don’t phrase it in the way that you specifically want them to say it.

0:19:45
PR: Exactly.

0:19:46
CW: Yeah. Well, there are some straw men that are not done purposefully for, you know, for airtime or political points, but there are some straw men that come from genuine misunderstandings. I’ve had a number of people over the years, you know, tell me, oh, I don’t believe in evolution because there’s no way. I came from a monkey. And I have to sort of say, well, tell me what is your understanding of evolution? And they had this straw man notion of evolution being like a ladder instead of a bush or a tree. And if you can kind of just not so much slay the straw man, but dismantle it bit by bit so that they see what they were thinking was evolution is not at all evolution.

0:20:31
BR: It’s a common ancestor instead of…

0:20:33
CW: Yeah, it gives them a chance to sort of see, oh, I, well, okay, yeah, because, yeah, if evolution was what you’re saying it is, then I wouldn’t believe in that either. That’s crazy talk. But here’s the actual thing. Now you can make a judgment about it.

0:20:50
PR: Totally, totally. Celestia, how about you? What’s a good fallacy on your board? What do you like?

0:20:55
CW: Well, I like a lot of them, but there’s one that has become a media darling recently, and you don’t get to see many logical fallacies become media darlings, but oh bless him, John Oliver, I love that man. For the season finale of Last Week Tonight in November, and it was on November 12th, he laid out three tactics used by Trump. One was delegitimizing the media, another one was trolling, and the third one was whataboutism. And it’s a logical fallacy. Whataboutism is another way of putting the tu quoque fallacy. Well, you as well. You know, like, oh, you’re corrupt and you’re embezzling funds. Oh, well this other guy is embezzling more than me, you know that and I I took a look at I took a look at what happened after John Oliver mentioned it. It went pretty viral suddenly Everybody was running stories. I saw stories on slate and what do you call it, Slate and HuffPo and Rolling Stone and a lot of the viral, you know, a lot of the online publications were suddenly explaining what a logical fallacy was and specifically whataboutism. And it harkened back to some Russian tactics as so many things about Trump do. And I went down the rabbit hole a little bit here. Huffington Post, before John Oliver mentioned it, this is a couple months before that episode ran, the HuffPo had an August 15th story called, What is Whataboutism and Why is it Suddenly Everywhere? And they quote linguist Ben Zimmer, who wrote about it for the Wall Street Journal back in June of 2017, and he quotes Russian journalist Alex Kovalev who wrote about it in January of 2017 and that was for a post on Medium that went viral and it was titled A Message to My Doomed Colleagues in the American Media and it was advising American journalists how they were going to have to deal with Trump the way that Russian journalists have been forced to deal with Putin and it’s not a very uplifting story. It’s pretty much welcome to the era of bullshit. And a good quote from that article was, this man owns you. He understands perfectly well that he is the news. You won’t get camaraderie, you won’t get cooperation, and you’ll be silenced. You’re not going to be let into the room for the press conferences unless you throw softballs, essentially the way that Putin is running his show there. And he, the Russian journalist Alexei Kovalev, he cites a Moscow Times article, also from January, titled, You Thought This Was Rock Bottom America But The Russians Are Knocking From Below. And reading into that article, I did not find specifics about whataboutism, but there’s, you know, some general observations about how American journalism is headed the way of the Russian journalism and it’s depressing, but it was interesting to see them track the the use of the tu quoque fallacy in a lot of Russian propaganda and Soviet-era propaganda and and if anybody wants to go down that rabbit hole Soviet-era propaganda. And if anybody wants to go down that rabbit hole, it’s a, I won’t say delightful journey, but it’s an enlightening journey.

0:24:33
BR: It’s interesting. I, the time when I remember writing about that, in fact, you were one of the contributors, I think about maybe nine months or a year ago. I wrote a blog for the Center for Inquiry and it was titled, it was about hypocrisy and the nature of hypocrisy. Because that’s that’s one of the elements of whataboutism, right? It’s the the the two cocaillogical fallacies, you know, like you said you’re another and the idea that well, yeah Maybe Trump did this but you know Clinton did that, you know, okay. Yeah, maybe maybe Trump did this but look at Obama, right? and and and there are other cases as well including talked about people being accused of different things, and Milo Yiannopoulos and George Takei and others. Anyway, it was an interesting sort of look at the nature of hypocrisy and when is it actually hypocrisy, and in fact, I think you did a really good comic that was very popular.

0:25:34
CW: We can throw a link up on the Facebook page, because I think that might be an interesting thing to show everybody. I sort of took the tack with my comic as hypocrisy in and of itself is a red herring, it’s a logical fallacy in and of itself because it’s a distraction, well, one of your favorite terms is a distraction tactic. Hypocrisy anchors people because nobody likes hypocrisy. It’s one of those things that gets everybody’s goat up and then suddenly you’re not dealing with the issue at hand, you’re dealing with whether or not other people are doing the issue at hand. It’s a look over there.

0:26:11
PR: Yeah, absolutely. So Ben, what about you? What about Ben? What about the fallacy Ben is going to talk about?

0:26:22
BR: There’s a couple. I think one of the, and let me just say, I think the straw man is, I’m glad that was brought up because that’s one of my pet peeves. I mean, I see that literally daily. And oftentimes, somewhat to my dismay, by people that I like and support and friends of mine. Where I’ll be like, I’ll be reading a post, I’m like, yeah, yeah. Like, oh man, you’re just not, that’s not, I mean, I agree with you most of it, that thing you said, that’s not right. It’s just, you know, it’s a straw man, and it’s like, but the problem is, I know that if I call them out on it, then I’m gonna get piled on, because they’re like, oh, but you were saying, like, no, no, no, no. I’m just saying that this one thing you said is a straw man. I agree with most of what you’re saying, but it’s not worth it. I would say you know one of the one of the things that I often come across is sometimes I consider myself to be a non sequitur detector or non sequitur meaning you know does not follow. And what I find a lot of times is that’s that’s sort of at the heart of a lot of a skeptical investigation is identifying arguments either formally or informally that just do not follow. X therefore Y. No, no, hold on. You just made this leap and you know most people on your social media are liking and sharing it. I’m looking at it and saying hold on. Your statement does not follow from what you just said. And so that’s a big part of what I do is testing the link between the claim and the evidence. And a lot of times, links seem plausible, but they aren’t upon a closer look. And it’s so common. It’s so easy to have some statement and have sort of a hidden causative link that’s implicit, that everyone just sort of, it just glossed over. And it’s so frustrating from a skeptical, critical thinking perspective, because you’re like, no, hold on, you’re, you’re, you know, you, you, you, you sent out this phrase that if unpacked is like three different things, two of which are wrong, one of which is maybe provisionally right. So I think that that’s, that’s one of the things I often see. And in terms of getting people to be educated about logical fallacies, I always encourage skeptics to take a class in argumentation and debate. I took a class as an undergraduate at UNM and it wasn’t an argumentation sort of, like, oh, you like to argue? No, I don’t. Who said that? Straw man argument. No, it’s argumentation. It’s not arguing. It’s technically arguing. It’s analyzing arguments and the claims for them. It’s not confrontational necessarily. It’s what lawyers do. It’s what scientists do. There’s lots of applications there. Understanding how an argument is put together can be really useful. It was certainly useful to me personally and again for debate and trying to understand you know what techniques are used to try and get me to believe something either you know an advertisement for example or a claim or something like that and and the other thing that I want to touch on is warrants and we’re not talking, no, cherry pie. She’s my cherry pie. Although I saw them. They’re actually pretty good in concert. But for those who know about argumentation, there’s a philosopher named Stephen Toulmin, T-O-U-L-M-I-N. And he had this – I think it was a British philosopher. And he had this method of basically deconstructing an argument. And he parsed it out and there’s a couple different forms, but basically there’s the claim, the evidence, and the warrant. And I used to give workshops and seminars on doing scientific investigation. I did that at Dragon Con for a couple different years and I think I did one at one of the skeptic conferences where I had like a five or six hours just like in-depth workshop how to investigate. And I always made sure to touch on warrants because they’re not widely recognized. It’s easy to sort of, it’s easier to see what someone’s claiming and it’s easy to see what evidence they’re offering. Those are the two more obvious parts of an argument. The much more insidious, the harder to identify one is the warrant. And the warrant is the part of the argument that links the evidence in the claim. And I think it’s crucial for people to understand the role of warrants in the claims that are made. Political claims, advertising claims, skeptical claims, whatever else. So the problem is that oftentimes, as I mentioned, the warrant is implied or implicit or assumed. It’s not explicitly stated. It’s just sort of no one’s saying and my warrants is X it’s – here’s my claim and unless you’re sort of looking for it you won’t I’ll give you a couple quick examples so for example there’s one obvious one is the the notion that you know well acupuncture has been used for thousands of years. Now the warrant there is that if something has been used for thousands of years, it must work. That is what’s linking the claim with the evidence. Now, in fact, it hasn’t been, but let’s just assume that it had been. But again, therein lies the assumption, and that’s not necessarily true. In fact, we should do a show on that. Because, yeah, more work for you. But I mean, the fact is that people do things that don’t work all the time. The idea that people wouldn’t do it unless it worked is entirely fallacious. There’s no truth to it.

PR: There would be no such thing as a casino.

0:32:38
CW: It sounds like the warrants is sort of the nuts and bolts of what makes a lot of logical fallacies because I mean that’s the argument from antiquity, which is in itself labeled a logical fallacy. And so warrants, it sounds like a very important thing to recognize, just because, especially for people who are potentially looking at things as conspiracy theories because they see a thing and they’re like, I’m seeing trails of white fog in the sky, therefore we’re being poisoned by the government who is spraying chemtrails everywhere. It seems to follow for them, but it doesn’t.

0:33:19
BR: It doesn’t. For example, the idea that EMF detectors can be used to find ghosts. I’ve come across this for years. I write about it in my upcoming book. The warrant in that assumption, the warrant in that argument is that there is a connection between electromagnetic fields and ghosts. If you take that linchpin out, the whole thing falls apart. And of course, there is no proven link between EMF fields and ghosts. There’s lots of theorized, lots of speculation and ideas, but there’s no proven link. Or just as a final example, and I see this all the time, this particular brand is used by more doctors than the leading brand. Now the warrant in there is that the reason it’s used by more doctors is because it’s better. Now let’s just assume it is used by more doctors. Well this is where a good skeptic entertains alternative hypotheses, right? It could be that the reason it’s used more often is because it’s free. Doctors are sent free samples. And so they’re like, or let’s say greatly reduced samples. So it could be that, you know, if they had to pay for it, they would use either of two cold remedies. But they happened to, as a doctor, as a physician, they happen to get one for 10 cents on the dollar. Like, I’ll use that. Sure. And then then they can say, well, used by more doctors. Well, it is. But the warrant there is what’s missing. So I would really encourage people who are looking at ways to really closely analyze claims across the board to understand warrants and understand their role in the claims that we see all the time.

0:35:07
CW: I have a logical fallacy I recently discovered that I kind of already developed a soft spot for. I can already see how the warrants ties into that. I saw one called Morton’s Fork. Have you guys heard of that fallacy?

0:35:25
BR: No.

PR: No.

0:35:26
CW: Morton’s Fork, it’s supposedly named after the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Morton, and he was collecting taxes and his reasoning was if you see somebody and they’re living high on the hog, they really seem rich, they’re spending their money left and right, that means they certainly have enough money to pay their taxes. On the other hand, if you see somebody who’s living very modestly under their means, clearly not spending a lot of cash, that means they’re saving their money so they certainly have the to pay their taxes.

BR: There you go.

CW: And so what it is, is if you’re looking at something and you can find a way to have two completely opposite observations lead to the same conclusion, then there’s a problem with your reasoning.

0:36:18
BR: Right. If no matter what the outcome is, it supports your idea, you’ve got a problem.

0:36:23
CW: And I see this one of the way one of the ways it popped up in my radar is I’m looking at all the reaction to various scandals going on it’s like oh well you know so-and-so was accused of this that and the other by female staffers And they immediately stepped down and they’re issuing they’re issuing a statement and everything and that means they’re obviously guilty. And then you got other people saying well no that means they’re obviously innocent and they want to get to the bottom of it. So you could take, you could take one, well I suppose I’m sort of inverting the fork there. You’re looking at a thing and saying well that could mean X and it could also mean Y.

0:37:02
BR: Yeah, you’re looking at it, depending on what constellation of facts you accept, it can lead to two opposite conclusions.

0:37:09
CW: Yeah and it just that kind of exposes a bias on the part of the observer. In the case of Morton, his bias was he wanted to see everybody as rich enough to pay their taxes. So he found a way to make completely opposite observations lead to the same conclusion.

0:37:31
PR: Yeah, that’s a really interesting fallacy. I, you know, I’m familiar with the content of it, but the actual framing of it I’ve actually not experienced. So it’s really interesting to kind of be exposed to this new angle to that.

BR: I imagine it probably got lots of people to pay their taxes and pay the church, right?

PR: So my next one is one that I think of quite often, especially in the climate change debate. It is personal incredulity. It’s the fallacy that because someone can’t understand something, then it’s not true. And this is very, very well displayed by the famous congressperson walking in with a snowball and throwing it and being like, see there’s no climate change. It’s like global warming, there’s snow.

BR: I don’t see what you mean, therefore you’re wrong.

PR: Yeah, and that one just, you know, it kind of follows with some other examples like not understanding how evolution works and things like that because it’s just the idea that you can’t understand something somehow meaning anything really. It’s become such a common kind of fallacy, like I said, especially with the climate, any kind of scientific debate really, because there are a lot of people who at best have a lay person’s understanding of it and it’s very tricky to you know walk them into that sort of thing especially when they go into it with a bias against it to begin with and that one you know again it’s like oh how can there be global warming if it’s so cold and how can you know how can we be here if monkeys are here if evolution is you know and it’s how can –

CW: How can vaccines possibly be safe did you see how many you get you know? Yeah? Like they can’t imagine that something that that that many Antigens going into a child could possibly be safe exactly therefore therefore it must not be safe.

0:39:48
BR: Well what I find fascinating about that particular our argument a fallacy is It’s so arrogant. I mean yeah at its heart. It is the the the let’s just break that. The assumption is, I’m so smart. I am so knowledgeable. I know so much about this subject that if I don’t understand this, then nobody does. Let’s just be clear. There’s no one in the world smarter than me. I know more about this than anybody else, and if I’m stumped, hey, them egghead scientists don’t have a prayer because I’m stumped. Yeah. I’m like, really? This is your argument because you personally can’t figure it out. No one else can figure it out. All right.

0:40:38
PR: Totally, totally.

0:40:39
CW: And that’s really tricky to call somebody out on that because you might get absolutely nowhere. Dunning-Kruger means a lot of people think they’re a lot smarter than they actually are.

0:40:50
PR: Sure, at least half of them.

0:40:52
CW: Yeah, well I mean when we come back you guys want to talk about some of the pitfalls of using logical fallacies, specifically with this article by Martin Boudry, the fallacy fork, and he brought up some really interesting points, some of which certainly have merit about whether or not logical fallacies are a tool we should be leaving in the shed more often and not really using when we’re trying to persuade people.

0:41:20
BR: Let’s do it on the flip side.

0:41:21
PR: Let’s do it.

0:41:22
CW: All right.

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0:41:23
Ian Harris: This is comedian Ian Harris and you’re listening to Squaring the Strange. Check out my new comedy special Extraordinary dropping December 12th on iTunes, Amazon, Amazon Prime, Google Play and virtually every video on demand site.

(MUSIC)

0:41:40
PR: Let’s get into how we avoid these pitfalls and what those pitfalls really are.

BR: I’ll just briefly talk. I think it’s important that it’s all well and good to understand and identify the logical fallacies when you see them, but I know a couple people who, they’re fairly smart people but they just throw out fallacies like, oh yeah, Ad Hominin. They just throw these things out like, oh, look at me, I’m familiar with the fallacies, boom, mic drop, moving on.

0:42:21
CW: Stop talking about me, Ben. I’m right here. God.

0:42:28
BR: But, I mean, so it’s, number one, it’s not always accurate. In fact, there’s been a couple times where I’m like, that’s actually not that fallacy. I’m not going to get into it. But oftentimes, you’ll just come off as an ass. You’ll be like, you’ll just come across as a know-it-all, and if you’re not quite around the fallacy, then you just have to double down. As I said, I think it’s important to understand them primarily for your own good, if for no other reason to call other people out on them. I’m a big believer in get your own house in order before you spend your time telling everyone else is wrong. I think you just be judicious about it and just understand that not everybody is as familiar with logical fallacies as the average skeptic is. And there’s nothing wrong with that. As I said before, critical thinking is an acquired talent. It’s a skill. We are not born thinking critically. Thinking skeptically and critically and scientifically is a process. It doesn’t come natural to us. This is why we have to learn the scientific method. We have to understand the value of a control group Yeah, and and and you know what what makes science science? And so you know we should we should you know try and be sympathetic To people who are sincere in their beliefs, and they’re they’re generally generally trying to understand but they just don’t happen to have the background that you or I do in in identifying fallacies.

0:44:02
PR: Yeah, that’s kind of interesting. You brought up people who point out fallacies kind of as a way of arguing, because there is another fallacy that that kind of plays into, and it’s called the fallacy fallacy.

0:44:15
CW: Oh, I love that one.

0:44:16
PR: Yeah, right? And so that’s where a person takes, they point out fallacies, and then they use that to discredit the entire argument, which is, you know, it’s like for instance if someone was talking about the benefits of exercise, you know, and you could be making a bunch of points about exercise and then he could say like, and you know, and yoga really aligns you in your exercise or something, and then, you know, they point out like, no, that’s, you know, that’s just, that’s a fallacy. You can’t you know, this is just you’re using it in so-called ancient belief And but it’s like yeah, but they are still talking about the benefits of exercise, which is not altogether wrong They just included maybe a faulty argument with with what they’re saying But getting too hung up on little things like that and using that as a way to break them down is a fallacy in and if itself.

0:45:09
CW: Well, yeah, it gets messy. And yeah, I love the fallacy fallacy. If I ever put together a Duran Duran cover band, I’m going to call it fallacy fallacy. But Baudry goes into that in his article and he points out that fallacies are not very fit for practical use because in a lot of ways, we as skeptics rely things that are fallacious. You could argue that the scientific consensus and believing in what is produced out of the scientific method by the consensus of scientists is simply an argument from authority. You could call out a lot of things that are valid as a fallacy if you dissect them in a certain way. And symbolic logic can get real weird. I took symbolic logic. It was really interesting and fun as a college student, but it reduces language to this algebra that can be really interesting in an abstract way, but in real life it’s very difficult to apply cleanly to any sort of concept or certainly persuading everybody. Now Boudry says he no longer teaches fallacies because his students began to become paranoid and they started to see fallacies everywhere. And it just didn’t really work. He said the fallacy fork that he describes is he said fallacy theorists, I’m quoting from him here, fallacy theorists are forced to choose between two options, neither of which is appealing. And number one, we characterize our fallacy by means of a deductive argumentation schema, which means you just go with the algebra. If B follows A, then A is the cause of B. Well, that’s post hoc ergo proctor hoc. It’s a fallacy, therefore, nah, don’t worry about it. Or we can characterize our fallacy in a way that captures real life arguments. And he breaks down a couple of very popular fallacies, the post hoc ergo proctor hoc, proctor hoc, correlation does not imply causation. But in real life, it certainly does imply causation. So in in, in as I love that he quotes a cartoonist. Thank you, Mr. Boudry, for quoting a cartoonist. As Randall Munroe, the creator of the webcomic XKCD, once put it, correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing, look over there! And we have we have I think one of the points he brings up is these fallacies can be weaponized by quote-unquote the other side you’ve got people proponents of UFOs or some sort of woo saying well the absence of evidence doesn’t you know is not equal to the the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So they’re saying just because we don’t have an alien spaceship doesn’t mean they aren’t out there, man. We have people, conspiracy theorists, refusing to believe just about anybody because, oh, argument from authority, man, you know. So whenever you apply a logical fallacy, you have to temper it with common sense.

0:48:56
PR: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. I think you have to always be prepared to, you know, use a certain amount of, you know, reason or reasonable doubt almost, I guess. In a way that you have to, you know, you look at the third, not reasonable doubt, but like giving them the benefit of the doubt in that, you know, kind of like with the fallacy fallacy, it’s like, okay, they made a fallacy. Yes. Does that negate everything they’re saying? No. And so, and, and, uh, you know, in the same way that works with anything, you know, I mean, certainly, um, you know, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t allow an ad hominem to go, uh, uh, you know, un, unresponded, but I would definitely, uh, understand that the, that type of arguing doesn’t necessarily preclude everything else they’re doing. Just because maybe they took a jab at me doesn’t mean that the points they’re making aren’t worth considering. Or at the very least there’s no point in making the fight about that. It’s very tricky to navigate that minefield and I think that it sort of shows where the application of cold and rational logic does have its pitfalls when you’re trying to deal with human interaction and the idea of trying to persuade people. Yeah, go ahead.

BR: I think one of the big problems is that much in the same way that scientists speak a different language and have a different world view than the general public in terms of just understanding the scientific methods and causation and control groups and just sort of there’s a whole scientific mindset that the average person doesn’t necessarily share.

0:50:40
CW: Just look at the differences in the definition of the word theory when you talk from scientists versus the lay public.

BR: Or energy.

CW: Yeah, theory and energy.

0:50:51
BR: Yeah, Deepak Chopra and your local holistic energy healer will use the term energy in a very different way than a physicist at your local national laboratory. But I think that in the same way, I think that, and I’ve certainly found this in my personal experiences and you two probably have as well, a lot of times if I’m addressing someone’s argument, particularly on social media, I’m approaching it from a perspective that they’re not necessarily sharing. I will often correct somebody and it’s not meant as a personal attack or criticism on them. It’s just this one particular thing you said is wrong. I may agree with the other 99% of it. But to me, and this may go back to our previous episode on being pedantic, but I think that’s one of the problems I often see is we have a general public and particularly people on They’re not using, they’re being much more careless about their use of language and words and what they mean than, for example, I would. Now, I’m a writer, an editor, and a skeptic, so I recognize that my use of language is maybe more precise than other people. Not that that is good or bad, I can sometimes contribute to the problem. You have people who have different, they’re approaching the issue of argumentation and debate and claims differently. As I said, a lot of times if I’m looking at someone’s claims, I’m looking at their claims. Does this make sense to me? Is there a non sequitur there? And if I find one, it doesn’t mean that I’m criticizing the person, it doesn’t mean that I think they’re full of it, it just means that this one particular thing they said is not quite right. And it’s frustrating to have them come back very defensively and angrily as if I’m, you know, the enemy because I’ve dared to point out that this one particular thing was poorly phrased or something else.

0:53:20
CW: Yeah, feelings is a whole other story. People are prone to seeing ad hominems where there might not be ad hominems. One of the things that Boudry mentioned in his article that struck me was he said we all use ad hominems in a certain way, meaning that we measure what somebody says right off the bat from where, where, who it’s coming from. If, if, and, and that’s a necessity, that’s an absolute necessity due to the practical fact that we only have so many minutes in our day. If, Ben, I’m sure you get a ton of emails where you’re like, should I spend 15 minutes telling this guy that there’s really not an alien living in his snot? Or should I not? Is this coming to me from a legitimate scientist who has studied snot and aliens for years and years? Or is it coming to me from a guy who just likes to use all caps? And despite your dedication to not using fallacies and relying on them, we do kind of rely on them. And I don’t think that’s a reason to abandon identifying them, because they’re like Pokemon for us skeptics. We like to try and catch them all. We like figuring out which ones we’re relying on, which ones are sneaking into our thinking, and if we can educate the public a little bit more about them. That’s why I’m so excited about Whataboutism. The general public is understanding a logical fallacy. They’ve given it a catchy name, Whataboutism, and people are going to understand that from here on out.

0:55:10
PR: That’s amazing and it really is a great step forward in one respect at least that everyone’s grabbing onto a logical fallacy and understanding it and at least now maybe even just a fraction of the people who have been exposed to this idea start picking that up. I think maybe they’ll open the door to some other ideas where they’ll start looking into, okay, well, what else are they doing and what else, you know, should I be paying attention to?

0:55:42
CW: Yeah, and one last thing about Boudry’s article that I thought, I kind of have a bone to pick with it, is he, a lot of what he’s saying is we should abandon fallacies because they don’t work on people because, you know, because people are prone to, they need a different that the fallacies are so ingrained in the human nature and thinking that pointing out a fallacy won’t really change anybody’s mind and that strikes me as okay we really need fallacies then that’s a reason for us to have to identify fallacies and heuristics and and blind spots that we have in our reasoning ability and that’s cut to it struck me as like okay retiring the idea of fallacies is kind of like saying, okay, well, you don’t have to ever worry about the blind spot in your vision or understanding that you have a blind spot in your vision because you’re never gonna see anything there.

0:56:39
BR: Yeah, I agree. I think that I had some similar problems with Boudry’s piece. I did think it was a useful analysis and critique of logical fallacies because I have seen them sort of being being sort of like, well there you go, just you know, put up, you know, go buy a logical fallacy poster, put it in the classroom, it’s all there, done. Yeah. And I think that Boudry makes some good points that it’s much more nuanced than that and there are gaps between the theory and the practice and the sort of pristine fallacies that we see on lists and the ones that we encounter in everyday and social media. And so it’s good to sort of try and reconcile the two.

0:57:27
PR: Yeah, and I think a really great takeaway and what you brought up right at the top of the episode was that we should be able to turn that scope back on ourselves. That’s something that even in walking into this episode, I was kind of looking at it from the external and how to see it in other people. It is really important to see it in how you’re arguing and how you’re coming to your conclusions because it’s so easy to, the whole glass house is throwing stones thing, you don’t want to leave yourself open to what you think you’re you’re you know

0:58:06
CW: And if you identify a logical fallacy. It’s not a mic drop no

0:58:17
PR: You just come off like an asshole yeah, and and you’re you’re seldom correct in the broad sense.

CW: Right. I really view a lot of what skeptic communicators do and what I try to do. What I tried to do in that hypocrisy comic I did for your thing on hypocrisy, Ben, is I try to take the language of skepticism, the language of out reasonableness from complete disarray. I try to take that language and turn it into something that the general public can absorb, can get something out of. So, don’t just call it a logical fallacy. Put some frosting on it, you know. Kind of make it palatable for the general public and, yeah, John Oliver is phenomenal at this. Watch John Oliver. He’ll show you how. You gotta give the medicine to them with a little bit of sugar and an explanation. You can’t just say, logical fallacy, buzz. Yeah.

0:59:24
BR: There you go. Good advice for all of us.

0:59:27
PR: Alright.

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0:59:28
PR: So that about does it for us this week and that was a lot of fun. I think that this is a great topic that I think we may eventually come back around to in the future and hopefully we can do that with you Celestia. It’s always a lot of fun to have you on.

CW: A pleasure talking to you guys.

1:00:03
PR: : A pleasure talking outside of angry emails especially.

1:00:06
BR: There you go. So thanks to all listeners for joining us once again. And what do we have up on the big glowing upcoming schedule?

PR: So next week is going to be a really interesting one and we have a special guest.

BR: Santa?

1:00:26
PR: No, no, no. He may or may not exist. I’m agnostic at this point, but I’m a parent, man. What are you going to do? But no, we’re going to be talking about Gym Woo. So Gym as in fitness and health Woo. And we are going to have on a really exciting guest for this and it is the Credible Hulk.

1:00:52
BR: The Credible Hulk!

1:00:53
PR: The Credible Hulk.

1:00:54
BR: Awesome!

1:00:56
CW: Does he exist?

1:00:57
PR: Yeah, we’re going to find out. The door will be open in the studio next week and we’ll see if a large green man of reason comes lumbering through. But yeah, it’s going to be really exciting. Those of you who are familiar with the name, you’ve probably seen him on Facebook or Twitter or something like that. And we are more than excited to have him as a guest to kind of walk us through the whole fitness woo because he is also in his personal life quite a bit of an expert on the topic.

1:01:31
CW: Anybody who has seen photos of the Credible Hulk, he spends some time in the gym.

PR: Yeah, yeah.

CW: And everybody’s got, even skeptical atheists make New Year’s resolutions. That’s not a religious activity, it’s a personal growth thing. And so I’m sure a lot of us are going to be spending a lot of time in the gym when January comes.

PR: Oh, I’m sure I will, that’s for sure, especially after having my ego bashed down by him.

CW: Hulk smash!

BR: Yeah, so we’ll be doing a two-part series. The first one is on Gym Woo and sort of some of the woo and silliness involved in exercise and nutrition and bodybuilding and martial arts and whatever else we can come across.

1:02:17
PR: Yeah, yeah. And then the next one will be kind of focused more on weight loss and dieting and that one is going to kind of have some personal stuff in it with, you know, especially I’ve battled with my weight for many years and I still continue to.

1:02:32
BR: You carry a lot of it in your beard. I can tell.

1:02:34
PR: Yeah, you know, they keep saying if you just shave it off you’ll lose 100 pounds, but you know, I can’t, man. There’s an ecosystem in there at this point. I mean, that would be horrible. But anyway, so until then, we’ll see you next time. Bye. Bye. Bye. Merry Christmas Swearing strange is a production of Cronus creative LLC copyright 2017 The music by shriek back additional music by memory guitar and feathered and husk wall room content producer Celeste award audio engineering producing and editing provided by Pascual Romero, and of course, our listeners and patrons. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of Squaring Strange and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Cronus Creative, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers, or any reflect the views and opinions of Cronus Creative, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers, or any affiliated organizations and employers.

Transcribed with Cockatoo