Anecdotes Are Not Evidence January 31, 20217,805 words (~39 minutes) Tags: fallacy 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 Fictions December 28, 20205,250 words (~26 minutes) Tags: worldview morality 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, 20202,989 words (~14 minutes) Tags: fallacy 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: worldview tribalism 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, 201812,854 words (~64 minutes) Tags: history abortion contraception 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 »
