Lessons in critical thinking: Reader feedback from last week's post

Last week's post on Nature magazine's Trump election meltdown provoked reader comments that provide useful instruction in critical thinking skills.

Last week's post, Academia and the new dark age: Part 11 – Nature’s Trump meltdown, generated some thought-provoking comments which are well worth your while to read (particularly the excerpts posted by

Freedom Fox

from Walter Berns' essay, 'Law and Behavioral Science', which "presciently speaks to what science applied as law might look like").

However, I received two pieces of negative feedback that might be construed as representing opposite ends of the spectrum of non-critical thought - somewhat ironic, in that the whole reason for me writing the article was to point out the dangers of falling in with groupthink, rather than considering issues and events objectively.

The first was an email sent by a subscriber whose anonymity I will maintain out of respect for his privacy, despite his rudeness to me:

"Robyn,
I love your articles on anything to do with bone health hence now on walnuts, but the antivax, anti climate change, pro conspiracy stuff is worthy of a special spot on sky after dark. Andrew Bolt and you would make a good team.

Cheers
W"

The second was a comment left on the podcast version of the post, which I will reproduce in full since the commenter shared it in a public venue:

Let's examine both of these comments to see what we can learn from them about critical thinking, and the impediments to it.

Logical fallacies

In my articles How to spot bullsh*t arguments, Part 1 and Part 2, I summarised the twenty most common and perilous logical fallacies. Logical fallacies are flaws in reasoning that render one's thinking incoherent, and leave one at risk being duped by psychological manipulation that is expressly designed to bypass reason.

As I wrote in How to spot bullsh*t arguments, Part 1,

"Logical fallacies are errors or gaps in the reasoning process that invalidate an argument. Everyday conversation abounds with logical fallacies, because very few people have been formally trained in logic, and therefore they don’t recognise the errors in their own reasoning processes...

In ancient Greece, a group of teachers who became known as Sophists taught the art of convincing rhetoric. The Sophists intentionally deployed logical fallacies in their elaborate arguments, in order to persuade others of the point of view they were espousing. The Sophists were frequently hired by those who were in, or wished to be in, positions of power because they would happily take any side of an argument – for a fee."

How to spot bullsh*t arguments, Part 1

Can you spot the logical fallacies in W's email? I identified three of them:

1. Ad hominem

2. The straw man

3. Association fallacy, also known as the appeal to spite.

I discussed the ad hominem in How to spot bullsh*t arguments – Part 1, and the straw man in Part 2:

"Ad hominem

Latin for ‘to the man’, an ad hominem argument attacks the arguer, instead of disputing the argument itself...

Ad hominem is used both to derail the person who is being attacked, by forcing them to defend themselves rather than pursue their argument; and to distract the audience’s attention from the substance of the argument so that they don’t ask the questions they really should be asking, in order to understand the substance of the argument."

How to spot bullsh*t arguments – Part 1

"Straw man

This logical fallacy consists of caricaturing a position to make it easier to attack. Those using the straw man fallacy wilfully avoid addressing important points made by their opponents; hence it is one of the favourite techniques of the inveterate bullsh*t artist."

How to spot bullsh*t arguments – Part 2

The association fallacy is quite similar to the ad hominem. That bastion of truthiness, Wikipedia, has a pretty decent explanation of the association fallacy, along with some examples of its use that parallel W's slur of me as someone who would "make a good team" with Sky News' divisive, controversy-courting commentator, Andrew Bolt:

"Association fallacy

The association fallacy is a formal logical fallacy that asserts that properties of one thing must also be properties of another thing if both things belong to the same group. For example, a fallacious arguer may claim that ‘bears are animals, and bears are dangerous; therefore your dog, which is also an animal, must be dangerous.’

When it is an attempt to win favor by exploiting the audience's preexisting spite or disdain for something else, it is called guilt by association or an appeal to spite (Latin: argumentum ad odium).^[1] Guilt by association is similar to ad hominem arguments which attack the speaker rather than addressing the claims, but in this case the ill feeling is not created by the argument; it already exists...

Guilt by association

This form of the argument is as follows:

• Group A makes a particular claim.

• Group B, which is currently viewed negatively by some, makes the same claim as Group A.

• Therefore, Group A is viewed as associated with Group B, and is now also viewed negatively.

An example of this fallacy would be 'My opponent for office just received an endorsement from the Puppy Haters Association. Is that the sort of person you would want to vote for?'"

Association fallacy

1. Ad hominem

W's critique - if I might glorify his tawdry little spray with such a highbrow word - is ad hominem from start to finish. There's no engagement with the information or ideas that I presented in the previous post (and I might add, presented with the same attention to factual, referenced claims that I employ in all my articles, including the one on phytate and bone health which he praised), just a series of irrelevant attacks. Ad hominem is the first resort of people who are neither interested in, nor capable of, debate that hinges on facts and their interpretation. Enough said.

2. Straw man

W employed the straw man fallacy in his dismissal of three carefully-worded and thoroughly-referenced points I made in my post on Nature's Trump election meltdown as "antivax, anti climate change, pro conspiracy stuff". I encourage you to read, or reread that post, with the following questions in mind:

Is it "antivax" to be interested in the safety of vaccines, and to be concerned that not a single childhood vaccine has ever been studied in a randomised, placebo-controlled trial with adequate follow-up to detect adverse effects on children's health and development, according to data obtained from the website of the FDA? If these were the qualifying criteria, how many people do you know who would have to acknowledge that they were, indeed, "antivax"? And if you're not concerned about the absence of randomised placebo-controlled trials demonstrating the safety of vaccines administered to children, why not? Do you believe that other pharmaceutical products should be released onto the market without being subjected to randomised placebo-controlled trials with adequate follow-up time to detect adverse effects? And if you don't believe this, why do you think that different standards should be applied to pharmaceuticals administered to sick people, than to vaccines administered to healthy people?

Is it "anti climate change" to be concerned that the Paris climate agreement, by its supporters' own admission, has no possibility of containing the rise in global temperatures to below 2°C, even if all member states fulfilled their pledged emission reduction targets (which they haven't)? Surely if one subscribed to the anthropogenic climate change narrative, one would be sceptical about an agreement which could not possibly hope to deliver its promised outcome.

Is it "pro conspiracy" to point out that the administrative state is an unelected fourth branch of government, which has become more powerful than the other three (the legislative, the executive and the judicial), and that its guiding organisational principle - technocracy, or rule by experts - is fundamentally incompatible with both the constitutional republican and democratic systems of government? That would be a huge shock to political theorists who have been conducting serious intellectual arguments about the proper role of, and delimitation of the power of, the administrative state since Dwight Waldo literally wrote the book on it in 1948. I mean, there they were, all that time, wearing tinfoil hats without even knowing it!

Thought-terminating clichés

Pejoratives such as "antivaxer", "climate change denier" and "conspiracy theorist" are also thought-terminating clichés, a concept quite closely related to logical fallacies. The American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton popularised this term in his 1961 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A study of "brainwashing" in China. Also known as semantic stop-signs, thought-stoppers and cliché thinking, the thought-terminating cliché is intended to end arguments rather than to engage in them honestly and productively, to arbitrarily dismiss dissent, or to justify fallacious logic. Here's how Lifton describes them:

"The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis. In thought reform, for instance, the phrase 'bourgeois mentality' is used to encompass and critically dismiss ordinarily troublesome concerns like the quest for individual expression, the exploration of alternative ideas, and the search for perspective and balance in political judgments. And in addition to their function as interpretive shortcuts, these clichés become what Richard Weaver has called 'ultimate terms': either 'god terms,' representative of ultimate good; or 'devil terms,' representative of ultimate evil... Totalist language, then, is repetitiously centered on all-encompassing jargon, prematurely abstract, highly categorical, relentlessly judging, and to anyone but its most devoted advocate, deadly dull: in Lionel Trilling’s phrase, 'the language of nonthought.'"

Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A study of "brainwashing" in China

3. Association fallacy

W's use of the association fallacy, or appeal to spite, trades on the polarising personality of Andrew Bolt, an individual with whom I have precisely zero association in any sense of that word. I don't know Andrew Bolt; I've never spoken to him; I don't subscribe to Sky News nor read Bolt's newspaper columns. However, from the little I've been able to glean about his political orientation from online discussion of him, I'm hard pressed to think of any common ground between us. W's claim that my meticulously-referenced and carefully-argued article merits "a special spot on sky after dark [with] Andrew Bolt" operates on the same level of silliness as the Wikipedia example of the "Puppy Haters Association".

Let's turn to the logical fallacies in Sandra Crocker's comment. Matching statements to the precise logical fallacies identified by logicians can be challenging, so I'm very open to your counter-arguments. Here's what I picked out:

1. Anecdotal evidence

2. Appeal to emotion

3. The bandwagon fallacy

4. The burden of proof fallacy

5. The false cause fallacy

6. Suppressed evidence, or half-truths

The helpful website YourLogicalFallacyIs.com describes the anecdotal evidence fallacy as "us[ing] personal experience or an isolated example instead of a sound argument or compelling evidence." Sandra acknowledges that her argument is based on personal experience in her opening statement: "I did have a horse in the race." Naturally, we all have personal experiences that shape our viewpoints - and I freely admit that I'm very sympathetic to Sandra's experiences - but we need to be aware of how those experiences may bias our perspective, and strive to 'try on' other perspectives before reaching firm conclusions.

The appeal to emotion is defined as follows:

"Appeals to emotion include appeals to fear, envy, hatred, pity, pride, and more. It's important to note that sometimes a logically coherent argument may inspire emotion or have an emotional aspect, but the problem and fallacy occurs when emotion is used instead of a logical argument, or to obscure the fact that no compelling rational reason exists for one's position. Everyone, bar sociopaths, is affected by emotion, and so appeals to emotion are a very common and effective argument tactic, but they're ultimately flawed, dishonest, and tend to make one's opponents justifiably emotional."

Appeal to emotion

Sandra's claim that "the entire US voted to survive" invokes fear - that is, the fear of the demise of the US constitutional republic - as a rationale for voting for Donald Trump. Likewise, the Democratic Party invoked the fear that Donald Trump was a "threat to democracy" as a rationale for voting for Kamala Harris. What's truly astonishing is that supporters of each of the contenders lived through the exact same events but adopted diametrically opposed interpretations of them, largely because the appeal to emotion was so effective at circumventing their ability to think rationally and consider their opponents' perspectives.

Please understand that I share Sandra's concern that the "blue team" has been steering the US in a direction that is fundamentally incompatible with its Constitution, and thus endangering the country as it currently stands, but it's important to remember that the "red team" hasn't demonstrated strict fidelity to that Constitution either. In case you've forgotten, or weren't aware, the Patriot Act that was signed into law in 2001 by Republican president George W. Bush suspended the writ of habeas corpus, allowing indefinite detention of US citizens without recourse to having their case heard by a judge. I can't think of a greater violation of the tenets of a Constitutional Republic, or any system of government founded on the principles of natural justice, than this. Sure, Donald Trump is not a 'traditional' Republican, but he can only effectively exercise his executive power with the support of the traditional Republicans of the legislative branch, few of whom raised any objections to the Patriot Act.

The bandwagon fallacy is an "appeal... to popularity or the fact that many people do something as an attempted form of validation". Sandra's claim that "the entire US voted to survive" could be interpreted as a bandwagon argument: Lots of other people voted for Donald Trump because they believed he would save the country, so it must be true that he is going to save the country. Bear in mind though, that just under half of voters (48.3 per cent, to be precise) cast their ballot for Kamala Harris, many of them presumably motivated by the belief that they were doing so to save the country from Donald Trump. The bandwagon fallacy applies to these voters too - surely if so many people voted for a candidate who was simply foisted onto the electorate with no primary process, and who is entirely lacking in charisma, media presence, and policy acumen, then Donald Trump must genuinely be a threat to democracy (or "our democracy", as the politicians and regime media are fond of framing it; I'll leave it to you to opine on whom the "our" refers to).

The burden of proof fallacy is "that the burden of proof lies not with the person making the claim, but with someone else to disprove". Sandra stated "I don't know of any promise Trump did not keep." There are plenty of websites with lists of campaign promises made by US presidents; this one is quite meticulous, with descriptions of each of Trump's promises and whether it was kept, broken, compromised upon or stalled. Only 23 per cent of Trump's 2016 campaign promises were kept. Some were not kept because Trump did not gain congressional support for them, or was overruled by the judicial branch. But in several key cases, Trump himself went back on his promises. For example, Trump made good on his pledge to institute a lifetime ban on White House officials lobbying for foreign governments via an executive order signed soon after he assumed office. However, he revoked that ban with another executive order signed on his final day as President, permitting the snouts to head back to the feeding trough once again. Now, it isn't up to me to provide the proof that Sandra's assertion that Trump broke no promises is wrong, but the fact is, it is very easy to do so. Does this mean that we shouldn't believe any of Trump’s 2024 campaign promises? Of course not. But we should keep in mind that all politicians make promises that they either can't, or won't keep.

I'll freely admit, I found it hard to identify the logical fallacy that matched Sandra's rhetorical question, "Had he not put Swamp creatures front and center in his first admin, would we understand what the Swamp was?" Considering that Trump initially ran on a promise to "drain the swamp", it seems valid to question why he appointed self-evident swamp creatures to all the roles that would have to cooperate in a swamp-draining exercise. Is it the false cause fallacy - the presumption "that a real or perceived relationship between things means that one is the cause of the other"? Or the suppressed evidence fallacy in which "someone focuses on evidence which supports their hypothesis while ignoring data which would tend to disconfirm it"? Neither of those seem like a perfect match. If you're well versed in logical fallacy discrimination, I'd love to know what you think.

I tend to agree with Sandra's assertion that "Many people now have highly developed bullshit detectors as unbelievable events unfolded". But I'm still wary that there's a bandwagon fallacy at work here. Whilst the COVID operation drove me to become disinclined to believe pretty much everything I've ever been told is true, without conducting further investigation into it, I see a lot of people glomming onto extremely arcane belief systems that smell suspiciously like psychological operations, including QAnon and Flat Earth. We should certainly all be developing the acuity of our bullshit detectors, but we also need to be aware of James Oberg's warning: "It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out."

The fallacy fallacy

It's always important to bear the fallacy fallacy in mind:

"It is entirely possible to make a claim that is false yet argue with logical coherency for that claim, just as it is possible to make a claim that is true and justify it with various fallacies and poor arguments."

The fallacy fallacy

Is W correct to disparage my previous post, even though he employed three logical fallacies and a logical fallacy-adjacent device (the thought-terminating cliché), and presented no rational argument whatsoever against the points I had made? He's free to do so, of course, and I'm equally free to dismiss his ill-informed and rudely-expressed opinions as those of a person with very limited capacity for rigorous thought.

Is Sandra Crocker correct that the election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency was crucial to the survival of the nation as it is currently constituted? I sympathise with her existential angst, given the rather terrifying prospect that a completely empty suit who speaks entirely in thought-terminating clichés (when she's not reading off a teleprompter) could otherwise have become president of the US. But I remain unconvinced at this point that Trump is going to save America; his cabinet and staff nominations so far hint that swamp creatures and war hawks will still be making their presence felt in his second administration.

The real moral of this story is that we all need to be aware of flaws in our reasoning process that derail critical thinking, cause us to dismiss information and perspectives that contradict our closely-held beliefs, and shut off our empathy for people who see the world differently. I read Edward de Bono's excellent book Teach Your Child How to Think when my kids were little, and I remember thinking, "Wouldn't the world be a much better place if all children were equipped with these skills?" As a libertarian, I'm ideologically opposed to the whole idea of being ruler for a day... but if I DID rule the world for just one day, I'd issue an edict that every adult must read this book, or something like it. Heck, maybe someone would like to shout W a copy. I think he could do with it. That, and a course in netiquette.

For information on my private practice, please visit Empower Total Health. I am a Certified Lifestyle Medicine Practitioner, with an ND, GDCouns, BHSc(Hons) and Fellowship of the Australasian Society of Lifestyle Medicine.