How to Scrutinize a Statistic January 18, 202216,397 words (~81 minutes) Tags: reasoning about evidence fallacies statistics second-person If you inquire into any issue you care about, you encounter statistics. This article is a primer for the practice of scrutinizing these statistics. It describes what sort of questions you should ask of a statistic, such as those pertaining to its provenance, its scope of inference, its practical significance, and when applicable, the estimation error associated with the statistic. Common fallacies in the presentation or interpretation of statistics are identified throughout the article, and no prerequisites are expected beyond mathematics at the secondary school level. Read more »
Category-Based Prejudice November 26, 20215,435 words (~27 minutes) Tags: reasoning about evidence fallacies third-person While prejudice can be criticized on moral grounds, this article criticizes prejudice as a form of reasoning. It begins by illustrating general principles of categorization by way of a visual and abstract example using geometric figures. These principles are that properties of a population are not properties of individuals and that categorization is arbitrary. The article goes on to criticize prejudice in the context of more concrete examples involving gender prejudice in hiring. Such criticism includes that prejudice is more costly, less accurate, and more ambiguous than direct measurement. Read more »
Anecdotes Are Not Evidence January 31, 20217,817 words (~39 minutes) Tags: reasoning about evidence fallacies statistics psychology third-person While alluding to valuable criticism, the maxim “anecdotes are not evidence” is insufficient to describe the evidentiary uses and misuses of anecdotes. This article elucidates the flaws of anecdotal evidence that preclude anecdotes from being informative regarding inferences about larger populations or about cause and effect. It goes on to explore valid uses of anecdotal evidence, such as in investigation of specific incidents, while advising – in light of the findings of psychology regarding the fallibility of memory – scrutiny of anecdotes even in cases in which they are useful. Read more »
Moral Skepticism December 28, 20205,249 words (~26 minutes) Tags: philosophy third-person Much of moral philosophy construes morality as a search for truths and moral knowledge, and much of everyday moralizing consists of handwringing over “justice,” “human rights,” etc. This article disabuses morality of these delusions by examining differences between descriptive and normative mental models, leading to the implication that truth and falsity apply to the former, but not the latter. This in turn implies practices for dealing with moral sentiments, including the rejection of moral constructs as fictitious. Read more »
Selection Bias and the Fallacy of Listing Examples December 7, 20203,328 words (~16 minutes) Tags: reasoning about evidence fallacies statistics third-person Advocating a belief by finding some number of supporting examples and listing them is fallacious. The reason this practice is a fallacy is that the examples are selected because they illustrate the belief and contradictory cases are ignored. In this article, this fallacy is explored by way of contingency tables used in a thought experiment in which two variables are claimed to be associated, illustrating the lack of information gleaned from such a practice in a straightforward and quantitative way. Read more »
Political Rhetoric as Shibboleths July 4, 20201,813 words (~9 minutes) Tags: opinion third-person Political rhetoric comprises some of the worst excuses for dialogue known to human civilization. In this article, the concept of a shibboleth, which comes from an example of sectarian conflict in the Hebrew Bible, is used to explain a function of slogans in the context of political rhetoric, and the characteristics of shibboleths that make them inimical to independent, critical thinking – namely conformity, superficiality, and exclusion of non-binary viewpoints – are examined. Read more »
Margaret Sanger on Abortion in Her Own Words November 11, 201812,852 words (~64 minutes) Tags: history birth control contraception abortion third-person Margaret Sanger, pioneer of birth control in the United States and founder of the organizations that became Planned Parenthood, felt that abortion is “taking life,” excluded abortion from her birth control movement, and had the explicit goal of ending the use of abortion as a method of family limitation. This causes her legacy to conflict with the false dichotomy surrounding abortion today, both with the so-called “pro-life” movement that vilifies her and with the so-called “pro-choice” movement that exalts her. Read more »
