ginandtacos.com

One anti-gay marriage opinion column, three arguments, three logical fallacies. That's efficiency!

1. It is not the business of judges to make public policy.

Red herring with a dose of false dilemma. The question is about the legality of gay marriage, not some tired talking point about activist judges greedily re-writing the law. Disputes over marriage laws end up in the legal system because that is where we resolve legal disputes. He attempts to bolster that argument by (subjectively and pejoritatively) characterizing legal decision-making as "mak(ing) public policy." That's one way to describe it. Alternatively, I'd characterize the courts' work as "fulfilling their vital and constitutionally mandated responsibility to our democratic system by providing a peaceful and impartial forum for the resolution of disputes over matters of law." But that's just me.

2. The radical transformation of marriage won't end with same-sex weddings.

Slippery slooooooooooooooooooope! Man on llama! Man on tree! Orgies! Pedophilia! Corpsefucking! Bigamy! Trigamy! Mormon Hold'em! Circle jerks! Cleveland steamers! Alabama hot pockets! Tennessee taco swaps! Daisy chains for satan! Where will it stop??!?!11!?!?!one?!?!!!!!!one!111!!???

3. Society has a vested interest in promoting only traditional marriage.

Which is why we have drive-thru Vegas weddings and no-questions-asked quickie divorces, right? Our legal and social respect for the sacred institution of Hetero Marriage is clearly deep and abiding. That is why two intelligent and committed gay people cannot get married but two mouthbreathing idiots can meet in a trailer park, bond over their shared struggle against rickets, and get married in 10 minutes at the courthouse before rushing home to tend to their meth labs. Their inevitable divorce, motivated by the realization that married people qualify for fewer food stamps, will be just as rapid. The author goes on to connect marriage and the production of children, apparently unaware that the latter can occur in the absence of the former. Sure, a solid marriage is a good environment for child-raising. But the author fails to support his implication that it is either the best or only one.

And, for the record, the lowest divorce rate in the nation? Liberal, elitist, homo-loving Massachusetts. The highest, discounting Nevada? Rednecked, god-fearing, homo-hating Arkansas.

(thanks, non-seq)

My research isn't exactly scintillating to the average person. It's an application of concepts from a physical science (geography) to a social one (political science) in an effort to expand what we know about things like partisanship and voter turnout. Oh, but the last sentence of my dissertation is really interesting: "In conclusion, fire up the gas chambers and start killing people."

According to some people, this is the inevitable conclusion of science. It's also one of the most bleedingly obvious examples of a slippery slope argument that you're likely to see.

Slippery slopes are technically a subset of non causa pro causa fallacies, but they're unique in their incremental approach. A standard NC argument asserts (wrongly) that A causes B. The slippery slope asserts that A causes B, which in turn causes C, D, and E, which ultimately causes F. The trick is to get the listener to accept the argument by presenting plausible arguments (banning assault rifles opens the door for other kinds of weapons to be banned) contained in an implausible larger argument (banning assault rifles inevitably leads to a ban on all gun ownership).

Cue Ben Stein. Is he ready? I know I just used him last week, but I think he's rested.

Stein: When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. Myers [biologist P.Z. Myers], talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed … that was horrifying beyond words, and that’s where science — in my opinion, this is just an opinion — that’s where science leads you.

Crouch: That’s right.

Stein: …Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.

Crouch: Good word, good word.

And there we have it. "Science" leads to killing people. We start with a harmless idea about the evolution of bacteria and, some indeterminate number of steps later, we're gassing people. The argument leaves many questions unanswered, most likely because Mr. Stein is not very good at making arguments. For instance, can we clarify what "science" is? Does geography count? Sociology? Library Science? Second, how many steps are between Librarianship and Genocide? Is there any possibility for intervention before we get to mass murder?

Anton Scalia, dissenting in Lawrence v Texas, approves.

State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers’ validation of laws based on moral choices. Every single one of these laws is called into question by today’s decision; the Court makes no effort to cabin the scope of its decision to exclude them from its holding.

There you have it; if a ridiculous, unenforceable "sodomy" law is repealed and we let teh gays butt-fuck with impunity, it's only a matter of time until incest and man-on-llama are legal.**

The implied undercurrent of every slippery slope argument is "Where will this madness end?" It disregards the human capacity to understand subtle differences (i.e., consenting adults having sex versus someone ass-plowing a barnyard animal) because the authors of such arguments likely lack it. In my experience, the best way to destroy a slippery slope is not by pointing out the illogic (too much effort expended on a dunce who probably won't accept your argument anyway) but simply by turning it around. The next time you hear "If gay marriage is OK, why not polygamy or man-on-dog?" feel free to respond with "OK, if you want to play the slippery slope game, if it's legal to ban gay marriage, why not interracial marriage? Or inter-religious marriage? WHERE DOES IT STOP?!?!?"

You'll feel dirty, but you did it for the greater good.

**Google image search failed me, but this is where I wanted to post a picture of a very worried-looking llama. Turns out they're relatively unflappable.

Reading reviews of the Ben Stein trainwreck Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (which is a funny title, but probably not in the way they intended) is good fun. I suppose there's no definitive way to determine if a film is good or bad, but here's a hint: it's not looking good when you make a piece of red meat for ultra-conservative nutcase Americans and Fox News calls it "sloppy, all-over-the-place, poorly made (and not just a little boring) 'exposé' of the scientific community" and calls its director "either completely nuts or so avaricious that he's abandoned all good sense to make a buck." Good times.

Rather than dignify the creationist nonsense that Stein regurgitates, let's talk about the amusing lengths to which creationism advocates go to turn their little fairy tale into a legitimate science. Specifically, the effort to sell this to the courts as Intelligent Design: All Scientific and Shit revolves around the idea of "irreducible complexity." It is, of course, based on a ridiculously transparent logical fallacy – the Argument from Incredulity.

This fallacy is basically the assertion that something cannot be true (or should be presumed false) because one personally finds it impossible, implausible, or incomprehensible. In other words, "I don't believe that, ergo it isn't true." If this sounds like a fairly silly thing upon which to base an entire belief system and sociopolitical movement, you're not alone in your skepticism.

Irreducible Complexity is the argument that certain biological processes are too complex to be explained by evolutionary theory. Of course "too complex to be explained by science" means that the correct explanation is provided by Genesis.** Here's the problem, though…there are plenty of explanations for every phenomenon purported to support this theory. Creationists simply respond that these explanations are not plausible (ginandtacos preferred whipping boy, Michael Behe, provides a great example of this logic in Kitzmiller v Dover). In other words, "I don't understand it / I don't believe it, therefore it is not true."

Try it out! It's fun. For example, a friend of mine once explained to me how the internet works. I did not understand a goddamn bit of it. It just went directly over my head. Therefore….there is no existing theory that can explain how the internet works except "God made it." Neither can I believe anyone would use an argument this stupid. Therefore it can't be happening. The copious evidence to the contrary that is created every time a creationist opens his or her mouth does not persuade me.

**Not the band

Sometimes the jokes write themselves. From today's student newspaper on my campus:

Second, they deny that life begins at conception. Every human whether alive or aborted, has been conceived. This first step in life’s process cannot be skipped, if it cannot be skipped and it’s the first step, then it must mean that it’s important and that it’s the beginning. Life begins at conception!

Welcome to the world of the post hoc fallacy. A biological process (sperm meeting egg) precedes another (fetus developing into a viable human life) therefore they are one and the same. Like how eating precedes shitting, and therefore eating is shitting.

Post hoc fallacies are among the oldest flaws in human reasoning, dating back to the days when cavemen banged on drums to make the sun come up. Every morning was a sign that it was working. A post hoc fallacy is any argument that looks at two events in a timeline and assumes that the earlier is either causal to or an integral part of the latter.

I hesitate to play the slippery slope game, but indulge me for a moment as I extend the reasoning used in the example above. We can't have life without conception, so conception is life. Well, we can't have conception without sex. Does life begin at sex? We can't have procreative sex without a male and female meeting one another. Does life begin when they meet? Men and women don't meet each other unless they make an effort to socialize. Does life begin when you decide to go to a party on the weekend?

I'm getting a little ridiculous here but not much more ridiculous than any other post hoc argument. Things that happen in a sequence are not necessarily causally related, and things that are causally related do not magically become the same thing. I wonder if it ever occured to the "Life begins at conception!" crowd that many people are not persuaded by the argument because it makes absolutely no sense. No, it's always that we liberals are misguided, uninformed, or wicked sodomites who hate Jesus. Demonizing one's opponents ("Anti-life!") because they refuse to be persuaded by fallacious arguments is…well, that's just the greatest recipe for political success I've ever heard. Good luck with that.

Individuals who spend any appreciable amount of time around me understand that I love reasoning via analogy. It has many advantages as a rhetorical tactic: it is powerful when done well, easily communicated, and full of potential for sarcastic humor. I'm sold.

Making a valid analogy, however, involves more than simply comparing two things that share a common characteristic. Comparing me to Michael Jordan works on some level. We're both male. We're both residents of the Chicago area. We both play basketball on occasion. We're both over 6'3". Nonetheless, subbing His Airness in place of Ed in an analogy isn't even remotely appropriate – unless the point being made specifically deals with one of the (few) things we share in common. And even then it's probably going to be a hell of a stretch.

To far too many of our Very Serious Professional Commentators, finding one superficial similarity is enough to mash the gas pedal on the Analogymobile. Take, for example, Michael Medved on Obama's pastor. Yes, Howie Kurtz at CNN apparently thought Michael "Slavery Wasn't So Bad" Medved was the best person to offer thought-provoking commentary on this racially-charged subject.

(The) truth is that people responded indignantly to Reverend Wright not because he’s black. It’s not about race, it’s not because of the racial outlook of the church, which very specifically defines itself as an afrocentric church and emphasizes blackness, blackness, blackness.

They didn’t respond to it that way. If a white pastor had made the comments that Jeremiah Wright had made, people would have been equally indignant (emphasis added).

Let's ignore for the moment how laden with non sequiturs this is. He's reading minds (claiming to know why "people" responded as "they" did), making unsupported conclusions ("It's not about race"), double-bagging hypotheticals (talking about how the public would hypothetically react to a hypothetical white pastor) and mischaracterizing his subject (I bet the church thinks of itself as being about, oh, maybe "Jesus" more than blackness). Let's let him slide on that. The underlying analogy is more ridiculous.

Black Pastor making these comments = White Pastor making same comments. The issue here, Medved insists, is the content of the speech. So who made the comments is irrelevant. Race is simply not an issue.

Unfortunately, black and white people are not interchangeable parts in the United States. When a black pastor makes comments specifically about race in a public forum it is beyond silly to claim that race simply isn't in the equation – especially when, as Medved just claimed, he preaches at the First Blacknited Blackptist Black Church of Blackness. So Medved's assertions that race is irrelevant are, on their face, ludicrous. Furthermore, the reaction to this speech is taking place in the context of a partisan political process. This is an event in the course of a competitive election. Medved is happy to wheedle on about why race is not a factor but he ignores partisanship. In the midst of a heated election, how is partisanship not a determinant of how "people" are reacting? Maybe his mind-reading powers ran out before he could divine the answer.

A good analogy would preserve the two crucial components of the equation: the speaker and his comments. Rather than shitting on the public's intelligence with this Red Herring discussion about whether or not this is "about race," a half-decent commentator might make a half-decent analogy that contributes to understanding the public and media response to the comments. Consider these two questions:

Would the reaction be the same if the pastor was white?

Would the reaction be the same if the pastor was supporting McCain?

Which one of those adds to a discussion of the dynamics of partisan competition and this election? Which one is a weak effort by a one-note commentator to grind his sole ax?

This isn't a proper or formal logical fallacy. I don't care. It's a flawed pattern of logic and it's important.

Do you ever wonder why every commercial you see on TV for a mutual fund is able to claim(accurately) that their Super Spazz Fund is one of the top 10 or 20 percent of all mutual funds in terms of performance? And it's not simply that they only advertise the winners. Do a little research online and you'll find that almost every fund from a major company carries with it some sort of performance superlative. Top ten, top quarter, top something. That's rather odd, don't you think?

In a statistical sense, this is called survivorship bias – you only see the funds that didn't fail. T. Rowe Price or Fidelity or Strong want you to think that they are responsible stewards of their investors' money. When they have a fund that performs like shit, they either close it or merge it into a successful fund that will hide its losses. So the reason that every fund you hear about claims to be one of the top 20% of all mutual funds is simple – the other 80% have failed and likely no longer exist. Not all industries have the benefit of this kind of sleight-of-hand. When US News and World Report creates its annual list of college rankings, academia cannot fluff its image by disbanding the Thomas Cooleys and Arizona States. I recommend Elton, Gruber, and Blake's excellent "Survivorship Bias and Mutual Fund Performance" for a more detailed look on how this skews the face the industry shows the public.

Lest we pile all of our scorn on the financial sector, survivorship bias is pervasive throughout much of the research and many of the statistics you see on a daily basis. The pharmaceutical industry is a noteworthy offender. Studies of the effectiveness of certain classes of drugs omit those that have been pulled from the market or failed to win approval. Trials of individual drugs judge effectiveness based on participants who complete the study, noting only in the fine print how many dropped out (possibly, of course, because the drug was having no effect).

And lastly, what amateur logician or statistician is not driven to fits of laughter by the car commercials that talk about sterling grades in "owner satisfaction" surveys? Call me crazy, but I think that a lot of people who are dissatisfied with a car voluntarily remove themselves from the "owners" category by selling it. An owner satisfaction survey is a survey of people who liked the car enough to keep it.

(Note: Be sure to check in tomorrow – big things on tap. So excited.)

As my friends over at Non-Sequitur point out, some logically flawed arguments are so bizarre, convoluted, and flat-out…wrong that they defy description. We've all been there, confronted by an argument so incoherent and stupid that we don't even know where to begin responding. Non-Seq and other logic-oriented writing dump these arguments into general categories with names like Unclassifiable, Uncategorizable, Inexplicable, Things that are False, or Plain Bad Argument. Ending up in this netherworld means that one or more of the following is true of an argument:

I usually prefer to space these out a bit but sometimes fate intervenes. In this case, by "fate" I mean Newt Gingrich. When you recover from the shock of the idea that Newt Gingrich could be the source of a logical fallacy, continue.

Non Causa fallacies are straightforward; they involve attributing causality where none exists. As Fallacy Files notes, however, not all such arguments are fallacies. It can be a simple mistake or something that turns out to be incorrect even when based on the best available evidence. A doctor in the 1500s who concluded that too much blood in the body caused illness was not using a Non Causa argument – he was simply making the wrong causal inference because he had limited knowledge and information. A true NC argument ignores or neglects evidence of the real causal relationship while asserting one for which no evidence exists. While the most popular Non Causa is the "correlation = causation" variety, that topic deserves to be covered separately and I'll focus on more straightforward matters here.

Causality is a tricky issue anywhere outside of the hard sciences. In the social sciences or economics, such arguments are inherently inductive and, to some degree, subjective. What really causes poverty? Crime? Unemployment? Voter turnout? Of course we cannot say with certainty. However, we can say with certainty what does not cause those things. The record of a city's football team does not cause poverty. Low voter turnout is not caused by the number of White Castle restaurants in one's area. Crime is not caused by solar flares. So while several things can be argued to cause those phenomena, thousands of other things can be ruled out.

I'm going to let Newt take it away at this point, from his appearance on ABC's This Week pimping his new book of fresh, radical solutions, Real Change.**

Michigan was in a recession when the rest of the country was growing. Other than the states hit by Katrina, Michigan which had been hit by a Democratic governor, Democratic legislature, raised taxes. Yet none of the candidates are willing to be radical enough. Real Change focuses a long section on Detroit. Detroit has gone from a 1,800,000 people in 1950 and highest per capita income in the United States to 950,000 people and it ranks today 62nd in per capita income. And yet nobody want to get up and say…tell the truth. The truth is large bureaucracies are destructive . High taxes are destructive. The system we built discourages any businesses from opening up in Detroit. The schools don't deliver. They uh they do deliver paychecks. They do take care of the union, but they don't deliver for the kids (…) So I think we need dramatically deeper and more fundamental change.

Got that? The decline of the Rust Belt (and the utter devastation of places like Cleveland and Detroit, for whom "decline" is far too prosaic a term) is the fault of electing Democrats, "high taxes" and "bureaucracy." This completely disregards the fact that Detroit has no more "bureaucracy" than any other large urban area, many of which are not declining, and that high-tax states like Illinois, New York, and California are the economic engines of America. And let's also ignore the number of Democrat-electing areas that aren't experiencing these problems. If we put our heads together and really thought about it, might we come up with some better causal explanations?

Maybe. Perhaps we could look at the the fact that Detroit has been hemmoraging high-paying manufacturing jobs for 40 years thanks to free trade agreements. We could note that Michigan's largest employers by far, the Big Three auto manufacturers, have been run into the ground by mismanagement, corner-cutting, and horseshit products. We could point out that the "failing" schools have been defunded to a degree that might make Trent Lott blush. You could question all of these explanations, but do you think they might be a little stronger or explain more of the problem than electing Democrats and having bureaucracy?

The sad thing about Gingrich is he can't even aspire to make a decent illogical causal inference in the form of a correlation = causation fallacy. The conditions he blames are so vague and all-encompassing ("bureaucracy," "high" taxes, and voting for Democrats) that to say they correlate with anything is an incomprehensible stretch. Spike Milligan said that money can't buy friends, but it can buy a higher class of enemy. Sadly, in Newt's case education, money, and experience have bought him neither a clue nor a higher class of bad argument.

**(In case you were wondering, his new, fresh, radical solution is to reduce spending and cut taxes)

(I'm doing a real post today because yesterday was substandard)

Someone trained in formal logic is going to point out that the use of anecdotal evidence is not a fallacy per se, and that is correct. However, it lends itself so readily to the construction of other fallacies (specifically of the post hoc, unwarranted generalization, or regressive variety) that I feel justified in pointing the spotlights at it.

Anecdotal evidence is simply using an example or anecdote – "I know a person who smoked 2 packs per day and lived to be 90" – to support an argument without acknowledging the extent to which it can be generalized. Often, as in the example I just used, anecdotal evidence is cited to contradict something supported by all available evidence. There's no logically sound way to argue that smoking isn't bad for you, so bring up an (unverifiable) anecdote of someone who beat the overwhelming odds. Like its friends heresay and conjecture, anecdotal evidence strikes at the heart of how good arguments are constructed and supported. If the evidence for an argument is unverifiable, unfalsifiable, or statistically improbable then the argument, regardless of whether or not it has merit, is invalid. I would be equally incorrect to argue "I know someone who smoked and died of lung cancer, so smoking is dangerous." Correct conclusion, but irrelevant to the "evidence" cited.

Talk radio and right-wing columnists are an excellent source of anecdotal evidence (not to mention heresay, conjecture, and sweeping generalizations). Deeply serious and respected NY Times columnist Bill Kristol, please step up and support my claim! (from "President Huckabee?"):

At a Friday night event at New England College in Henniker, (Huckabee) played bass with a local rock band, Mama Kicks. One secular New Hampshire Republican’s reaction: "Gee, he’s not some kind of crazy Christian. He’s an ordinary American."

Anecdotal, and totally unverifiable. How much of the population feels this way? Is it this person or millions of Republicans? To the deeply serious Bill Kristol, one guy's offhand comment is proof of Huckabee's "widespread appeal" to non-Bible thumping Arkansans. Another gem comes from Rush Limbaugh's reaction to the New Hampshire primary, which he blames on his pet theory of "Out of state buses" (i.e., candidates bus in voters from other states to illegally participate in the primary). Rush supports his theory based on callers (heresay) who "saw a lot more people than usual" at their town polling places (anecdotal) and concluded (conjecture) that this is because voters were imported from other states. That's the complete Trifecta of bullshit non-evidence categories in one argument. Thanks Rush!

Anecdotal evidence…isn't. That phrase is a misnomer. I should emphasize that evidence for valid arguments can be anecdotal; this fallacy doesn't mean that your argument is wrong, but rather that your evidence doesn't prove it one way or the other. Maybe hypnosis and miracle dietary supplements can cause weight loss. If that statement is true, it's not because you know someone who tried it and lost 30 pounds.