Steve Pinker (2021) Rationality: What it Is, Why it Seems Scarce, Why it Matters

I fail the rationality test with unfailing regularity. Remember Spock (Leonard Nimoy) from Star Trek? He was always mucking up and being too logical. James T. Kirk (William Shatner) was always cutting through the bullshit and getting to the heart of the matter. Intuitive knowledge trumped rationality every time. We like to think of ourselves as one or the other, but most people are bits and bobs. Easily taken.  When was America American? A nation based on hatred and hindrance and protection of the super-rich’s assets. Ask the American Indians, victims of genocide. Black Americans victims of slavery and Jim Crow laws. Ask the almost 50% of the population that lives in permanent poverty.

Remember the moron’s moron and 42^nd American President (Donald Trump)? The dim-witted, narcissistic, psychopathic sociopath is up for trial. But he still commands a respectable core vote of around 40% of the American public. He’s running for re-election.

‘Trump told around 30 000 lies.

He disdained public health measure.

He predicted in 2020 that Covid-19 would disappear like a miracle.

He endorsed malarial drugs, bleach injections and light probes.

He repeatedly claimed that Hilary Clinton was part of a Satan-worshiping cabal, part of a ‘deep state’ that ordered up children from a Pizzeria in Washington, had sex with them, milked their fear to make them all powerful and then killed them. Nobody knew about this apart from—just about everyone.

He claimed climate change was a Chinese hoax.

He refused to acknowledge defeat in the 2020 election. The moron’s moron’s followers stormed Congress. He waged a legal battle to overturn the result based on whimsy. Among others, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News is being sued for helping to spread lies about the electronic polling machines used to count votes.

Rationality matters because Boris Johnson followed the same tactics. Lied, lied and lied again. The former British Prime Minister relationship with the truth is Trump-like. Both demagogues claim to represent ‘the people’. Certainly not me or mine. Most people in Scotland, despite the Braveheart rhetoric—you will never take out freedom, sold it for a handful of pennies—but rejected Boris Johnston and Tory government’s and Thatcher’s doctrine ‘there’s no such thing as society’. I despise them and there mythology. To me that is a rational response. We live among the ruins. That’s why rationality matters. And it has never mattered so much. No individualism, no nation can defeat global warming. Only as a collective can we triumph. Steve Pinker believes mankind can triumph. I don’t. We’re too divided by irrationalities. I’ll be dead anyway. So it shouldn’t really matter to me. But if you’ve children, they’re completely fucked.  Rationally, we’ll only find out when it’s too late. And we’re already at too late.  

       

Notes.

P21 [informal fallacies]

1) The straw man.

The effigy of a real thing is easier to knock down than the real thing.

Examples: Noam Chomsky claims children are born talking.

Kahnerman and Tversky claim humans are imbeciles.

Or

Practiced by interviewers being aggressive: what-you-are-saying-is tactic [while saying something completely different]

Example: Dominance hierarchies are common in the animal kingdom even in creatures as simple as lobsters

So what you are saying is we should organize our societies along the line of lobsters?

2) Arguers can = stealthily replace an opponent’s proposition by one easier to attack>

They can (also) replace their own propositions by one easier to defend.

Example: SPECIAL PLEADING.

Example: ESP experiments failed because of the negative vibes of the sceptics.

Example: Democracies never start wars except for Ancient Greek, but it had slaves.

3) MOVE THE GOALPOSTS

{motte-and bailey fallacy} after the medieval castle with its cramped but impregnable tower into which you can retreat, when invaders attack the more desirable but less defensible courtyard.

EXAMPLE: No Scotsman put sugar in his porridge, but when presented with Angus, who puts sugar in his porridge claims Angus is not a true Scotsman.

EXAMPLE: No Trump supporter advocates violence.

4) BEGGING THE QUESTION or raising the question [cf replacing the question]

Informal fallacy [malapropisms] reserved for those that already know the answer

EXAMPLE: When did you stop beating your wife?

5) BURDEN OF PROOF

One can always maintain a belief, not matter what is being said, by saying (or stating) the burden of proof is on those who disagree.

EXAMPLES: Bertrand Russell responded to the fallacy when he was asked to explain why he was an atheist rather than an agnostic, since he could not prove that God did not exist.

He replied: Nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot in an elliptical orbit.

Sometimes both sides purse the fallacy, leading to the style of debate called BURDEN TENNIS.

[Adopting the high ground, the burden of proof is on you]

In reality, since we start out ignorant about everything the burden of prove is on anyone who wants to show anything.

6)L>QUOQUE> ‘you too’> what-aboutery

EXAMPLE: apologists for the Soviet Union, What about the way the US treats its Negroes?

Joke: a woman comes home to find her husband in bed with her best friend.

The startled man says: What are you doing home so early?

She replies: What are you doing in bed with my best friend?

He snaps: Don’t  change the subject.

7)ARGUMENTS FROM AUTHORITY

Deference to often religious groups.

EXAMPLES: It’s in the Bible: God said it.

EXAMPLES: Marx said it, [sorry I meant Mark] or Freud or Chomsky, a Nobel laureate

Scott Lilenfeld et al The Nobel Disease When Intelligence Fails to Protect against Irrationality.

Einstein was not the only brilliant physicist to have flaky ideas outside his area of expertise.

8) BANDWAGON FALLACY exploits the facts we are social, hierarchical primates.

EXAMPLE: Most people I know think astrology is scientific, so there must be something to it.

[You’re not going to win the lottery. Somebody’s got to]

9) ad hominem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

 "Personal attack" redirects here. For the Wikipedia policy, see Wikipedia:No personal attacks.

Ad hominem (Latin for 'to the person'), short for argumentum ad hominem, is a term that refers to several types of arguments, most of which are fallacious. Typically this term refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself. This avoids genuine debate by creating a diversion to some irrelevant but often highly charged issue. The most common form of this fallacy is "A makes a claim x, B asserts that A holds a property that is unwelcome, and hence B concludes that argument x is wrong".

 

The valid types of ad hominem arguments are generally only encountered in specialized philosophical usage. These typically refer to the dialectical strategy of using the target's own beliefs and arguments against them, while not agreeing with the validity of those beliefs and arguments. Ad hominem arguments were first studied in ancient Greece; John Locke revived the examination of ad hominem arguments in the 17th century. Many contemporary politicians routinely use ad hominem attacks, which can be encapsulated to a derogatory nickname for a political opponent.

talian polymath Galileo Galilei and British philosopher John Locke also examined the argument from commitment, a form of the ad hominem argument, meaning examining an argument on the basis of whether it stands true to the principles of the person carrying the argument. In the mid-19th century, the modern understanding of the term ad hominem started to take shape, with the broad definition given by English logician Richard Whately. According to Whately, ad hominem arguments were "addressed to the peculiar circumstances, character, avowed opinions, or past conduct of the individual".[4]

 

Over time, the term acquired a different meaning; by the beginning of the 20th century, it was linked to a logical fallacy, in which a debater, instead of disproving an argument, attacked their opponent. This approach was also popularized in philosophical textbooks of the mid-20th century, and it was challenged by Australian philosopher Charles Leonard Hamblin in the second half of the 20th century. In a detailed work, he suggested that the inclusion of a statement against a person in an argument does not necessarily make it a fallacious argument since that particular phrase is not a premise that leads to a conclusion. While Hablin's criticism was not widely accepted, Canadian philosopher Douglas N. Walton examined the fallaciousness of the ad hominem argument even further.[5] Nowadays, except within specialized philosophical usages, the usage of the term ad hominem signifies a straight attack at the character and ethos of a person, in an attempt to refute their argument.[6]

[a person cannot be divorced from what he says what he means or means what he says unless he is Donald J Trump]

 

Rebut an idea by insulting a person’s character or motives, talents, values, politics.

Smart people and those that spread fake news.

9) GUILT BY ASSOCIATION.

The link between smoking and cancer rejected because it was Nazi science.

Global warming is a hoax because those against it used cars and airplanes and they heat their houses using fossil fuels (I forgot how to spell fuel there).

10) APPEAL TO EMOTION. (affective fallacy)

EXAMPLE: How can anyone look at that photo of grieving parents and say that war deaths have declined.

EXAMPLE: Look how many boats are arriving on our beaches.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem