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Comment on Carl Sagan's 9 timeless lessons for detecting baloney

Carl! There’s a dead human in our house! …sorry, wrong Carl.

Okay, serious now. (The above is a reference to Llamas with Hats.) I think Sagan covered a lot of bases with this, and I heavily recommend everyone here to read The Demon-Haunted World, it’s an amazing book. So I’ll focus on something related: fallacies.

A lot of people think fallacies are just a “DEBATELORD REEEEEE!!!1” thing. They are not; fallacies are better understood as reasoning flaws. If your reasoning is fallacious, even if you start off with accurate information, sometimes the conclusion will be bullshit. So I think it’s important to identify at least the most common types of fallacy out there; you don’t need to remember the names (they’re just fluff), but if you’re able to smell the fallacy you’ll be way less likely to fall for bullshit.

Wikipedia has a surprisingly good list of fallacies. In special, I’d recommend people to check the following:

begging the question: when the conclusion is assumed to be true, and this is used to build an argument proving the conclusion is true
false dichotomy: if bananas aren’t red, then they must be blue~
genetic fallacy: invalidating an argument not by its own merits, but based on its origin. It encompasses #3 in Sagan’s list (appeal to authority), but also the opposite (argumentum ad hominem - and no, ad hominem is not a fancy way to convey “insult”, you can be insulting without ad hominem and vice versa).
straw man: when the person euthanising a 12yo cancerous dog becomes the “puppy killer”.
red herring: might as well call it by its social media names: “ackshyually”, “whataboutism”, etc.

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damnedfurry@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
It’s also important to keep in mind that a fallacious argument leading to a conclusion does not actually disprove the conclusion; identifying the fallacy just means that if the conclusion is correct, that argument is not the path to it. And if the fallacious argument is the only path to conclusion X, then there is simply no basis for presuming X to be correct at all.

red herring: might as well call it by its social media names: “ackshyually”, “whataboutism”, etc.

Well, “ackshyually” is actually (:P) rooted in mocking people who pedantically and pointlessly correct others, to the point of being more irritating than informative. The ‘Jimmy Neutron salt’ meme is a pretty good example of this:

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Red herrings as a type of fallacy, on the other hand are about using something to support an argument that doesn’t actually have anything to do with it. The Wikipedia page itself gives a solid example of this:

For example, “I think we should make the academic requirements stricter for students. I recommend you support this because we are in a budget crisis, and we do not want our salaries affected.” The second sentence, though used to support the first sentence, does not address that topic.

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- lvxferre@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Ah, the “fallacy fallacy”? Got a nice example of that:
  
  Alice: "Experts say junk food harms your health. Experts can’t be wrong, so stop eating junk food."
  
  Bob: “This is appeal to authority! It’s fine to eat only junk food.”
  
  On “ackshyually”. I was trying to be succinct so I got sloppy, and the Wiki does have a good explanation of the fallacy, but basically: if you see an “ackshyually” in social media, it’s usually used for the sake of a red herring.
  
  That’s because the ackshually isn’t just pedantic and irritating, it’s also distracting. It sounds like someone is contradicting you, without addressing the core argument, you know?
  
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Malgas@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

Carl! There’s a dead human in our house!

Don’t worry, it’s just Zombie Feynman.

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