Why Fallacies are False -- 22, where they fit together

Now I’m going to go back to some old information and give you a diagnostic.

When you talk about people you know, that’s gossip. The standard for gossip is that everybody in the chain changes the story a little bit. When you receive gossip, NEVER believe it unless you can get back to the first person who said it. You will be astonished at the difference between what they said and what you heard. 

1/ Gossip, like oral narratives, begins with reality and changes to suit the culture that transmits it.

2/ If it survives long enough, examples of Olrik’s Epic Laws begin to populate it.

3/ People will shape their behavior in accordance with gossip, sometimes with extreme results like the Beilis blood libel trial. Beilis was chosen as the scapegoat due to gossip, not evidence; the government manufactured all the evidence they used via forgeries, suborned perjury, and planting objects.

Urban legends have a different set of features.

1/ they spread person to person like gossip, although often the medium is email.

2/ they name a vague or false authority, if any. If the urban legend is detailed enough, you can check with the supposed authority and, 100% of the time, they debunk the legend. Either they never said anything on the subject, or they never said anything like what’s in the urban legend, or it distorts something they said, which would be our strawman argument again.

3/ an urban legend is always about some group to which the person spreading it does NOT belong. So an urban legend about people flashing their car lights, saying that they are gang members, does NOT spread among gang members but only among outsiders.

4/ all urban legends are false because their data is false or their logic is false.

The authority issue /2/ in urban legends, has an analog in oral traditions; Olrik states it specifically. He says an oral tradition is defined as a narrative or set of narratives for which you can’t turn to the originator for verification, due to the passage of time. This is not, however, a fallacious appeal to misleading authority, it is inability to validate with the originator.

So the broad characteristics of an oral tradition are these:

1/ They transmit person to person until they are put into writing. Some of them continue to transmit orally in the originating culture after being recorded.

2/ It is impossible to appeal to the originator for authentication.

3/ And this is a big difference between an urban legend and an oral tradition: an oral tradition transmits inside the culture that it expresses, and the behavior of which it shapes. When outsiders get hold of it, not being part of the transmitting culture, they always distort it.

4/ An oral tradition always contains truths, but they are disguised by changes that mold the original narrative to conform to the Epic Laws and Olrik’s other principles, or to keep the tradition relevant to the culture as it changes from within, or because details drop out over the passage of time.

The problem of translating and commenting on oral narratives from outside the culture, /3/, underlies why Jews and Muslims do not trust translations they don’t have control over, and why commentaries and interpretations of Judaism from outsiders are failures. Yes, I said it: failures.

And it’s also a problem with Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed. Maimonides didn’t get to teach Maaseh Breshit or Maaseh Merkavah to his student Joseph, so he wrote it down. That was problematic anyway, given what the rabbis say about teaching these subjects. What’s worse is that Maimonides told Joseph, “You’ll never get this because you won’t let me explain it face to face, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that you have to use Aristotelian teachings to understand it.”

What? Wait, what?

Aristotle didn’t know anything about Judaism. How could he explain two subjects so drenched in Jewish philosophy?

Well, the answer is that Maimonides was arguing against a group called the Mutakallim. They differed from Aristotle on fundamental points, including atomism and whether a vacuum can exist. But kalam is also inappropriate because it derives from Islamic philosophy.

My pet whipping boy, DH, has the same problem. Not only was it invented by non-Jews (don’t cite Spinoza to me, he stopped his Jewish education at age 18), it was invented by anti-Semites. It relies on translations. It incorporates fallacies. It deliberately divorces itself from Jewish culture.

You cannot “read while running” the record of any oral tradition, and hope to write anything useful about it. You have to study it in its cultural context. You can’t say anything worthwhile about it unless your claims fit back into that cultural context; this is the analog of fitting your limited clinical trial into the big picture of medical science and the world demographic. But academe has divorced oral traditions from their cultures for millennia now, as well as failing to realize they may be dealing with fallacies. I found one paper on Talmud that committed four different fallacies – and the writer now teaches at a university. I discuss it on my blog. It's an extreme example of why my view of academe is so jaundiced.

If you start by agreeing that Jewish scripture is a record of an oral tradition, you can say “Linda is X” instead of “Linda is X and Y”. When you say “oral tradition”, it means that Jewish scripture was shaped by Jewish culture to express its customs and history, as well as by the human brain being all but hard-wired to transmit material using the Epic Laws. It doesn’t matter if the original source was my proposed NE Anatolian mother culture, or the Semitic cultural subset that developed into Judaism, or the original source was Gd. The human brains, transmitting the material over the millennia, would have shaped it into what we have now. Every culture does that with its oral tradition.

Olrik’s principles mirror SWLT and expand on it. They coordinate with the 21^st century description of Biblical Hebrew in Dr. Cook’s dissertation, which blew my mind when I realized it. Dr. Cook, whose work was pipelined by academe, got his first information about Olrik from an email I sent.

Modern results in archaeology and its cross-fertilization with the Human Genome Project and Oxford Project radiocarbon studies, coordinate with what Jewish scripture says – Shem WAS Yefet’s older brother.

When disparate subjects that develop in different environments, among researchers who knew nothing of each other’s work, reinforce each other like this, you have a dose of reality.

At the end of Olrik’s book, there’s an appendix that applies his principles to the Bible. It has several problems. It’s based on a translation. It’s the work of a proponent of DH. He’s trying to preserve DH (“save the phaenomena”) and express Olrik in those terms. That fails the simplicity canon of the Test of Occam’s Razor.

As long as you use all the data that fits your dataset description, and you represent the material accurately, the simplest explanation is likely to be the correct one.

And that explanation is Olrik’s principles, not DH. I’ve done the work. Part of it is on my blog. Contact me if you’re interested in the rest of the analysis.

Why Fallacies Are False -- 21, oral "grammar"

So I’m talking about Axel Olrik’s Principles for Oral Narrative Research because it describes the structure for information that transmits well in a non-literate culture. I said that it starts from an analog of the first rule in SWLT. His work is the basis for my Rule 4, the divide between orally transmitted material and what originates in writing. And I said that the “grammar” rule in SWLT has an analog in Olrik’s work. These are Olrik’s “Epic Laws”.

You probably never heard of the Epic Laws. They are a collection of 20 features common to oral narratives; they can appear in any narrative while it transmits orally within its culture.

https://pajheil.blogspot.com/2018/07/fact-checking-torah-olriks-epic-laws.html

While written material may have some of these features, it does not rely on them the way oral narratives do. But if you discover them, dig into the history of the written work; its roots may go back to a time when the culture transmitted its history by word of mouth. I think this is true for the Chinese Romance of Three Kingdoms, particularly the opening with several versions of Olrik’s Law of Three.

The Epic Laws show up in the African Mwindo Epic; in Sumerian and Greek myth; in the Mayan Popol Vuh; in the Mahabharata. And they are all over Torah. Every single narrative in Torah has examples of the Epic Laws, and some of the narratives are related to each other according to other principles identified by Olrik, a sort of syntax.

Olrik died in 1921, decades before we knew that humans originated in Africa. Olrik’s principles reflect something that developed with the rise of speech among humans in Africa, and spread with humanity as it migrated around the world. For as much as 500,000 years, writing did not exist. People had to teach their children about their culture orally. And the “grammar” they used in their teaching has not varied. What’s more, that grammar persisted after writing developed.

That sounds like a pretty rash statement, right? But in 2013, when I translated the transcript of the Mendel Beilis trial of 1913, I found that one of the titillating details discussed at trial used Olrik’s Law of Three. It was not an oral narrative in Olrik’s sense; it was gossip that developed in the two years between the murder and the trial. I know that, because it was not just your generic gossip about who was sleeping with whom, it precisely related to the murder case that was being tried, and it existed only among people in the part of Kiev where the murder occurred.

Do you remember back to when I said that the Beilis prosecutors had trouble with their witnesses because the witnesses could not testify to actual dates and times? Most of the witnesses called by the prosecution were either completely illiterate or preferred to get information by word of mouth. They had better things to do with their money than buy newspapers. This is a breeding ground for transmission of oral narratives, as gossip, and for information to morph in transmission, taking on the features of Olrik’s Epic Laws, which eventually showed up in trial testimony.

Showing that gossip, being orally transmitted, will have similar features to ancient oral traditions.

Showing that the Epic Laws are all but hard-wired into the human brain.

If your kids memorized some of the books you read to them, analyze them with the Epic Laws and let me know what you find. Then run a testing program. Have your kid tell the story to some other kid. The more examples of the Epic Laws you found in the book, the more accurately your child should relay the story. After multiple retellings to the second child, have that child repeat it to a third. Record all the retellings: you’ll find increasing divergence from the original text. If the Epic Laws really are hard-wired into the human brain, they should emerge more strongly as your test proceeds.

Go through the films you liked best. One of the reasons films are usually different from the book, is that film uses the Epic Laws. Unconsciously, of course, since nobody in Hollywood could read Olrik’s book until 1992. But scriptwriters have usually been voluminous readers, and would have copied the features of the books they liked best. I know that Burt Lancaster who, as I said, read thousands of books in his life, had a knack for picking scripts that had examples of Olrik’s principles, case in point being Lawman. I wrote up an appreciation of his work in which I talk about this.

Until about 1800 CE, the vast majority of the world’s population did not read, even if their culture had a system of writing. Every culture has a subset of population that doesn’t read or prefers to get their information by word of mouth. In those subsets, information morphs according to Olrik’s laws, especially the part about transmission BECAUSE of exciting or titillating content. That’s how you get eyeballs and eardrums. That’s why MSM is morphing into infotainment.

And Fox got there first. The fact that MAGA lives and breathes Fox, shows you that its style suits their preference for oral transmission. They prefer exciting oral communications to boring written facts. And as part of a cultural subset, they reject external narratives. You can’t change their minds without one-on-one discussions that get them out of their subculture – at least while you’re talking to them. This resistance to change is a fact of human nature, and results in cult deprogramming reversing itself – meaning that when a MAGA exits a discussion with you and goes back to their comfort zone, they’ll forget everything about which you convinced them to agree with you.

Now I will make an even more outrageous statement. Political change happens because even if the government tries to put across a true message, there is a mass among the body politic who do not get the message because it doesn’t have the features of the oral transmissions in their subset of the culture. The information content differs, or the format does not use the Epic Laws. String together enough of these subsets who prefer oral to written transmissions, and you lose elections or have a revolution. If there’s chaos going on in the world right now, it’s because people resist information that doesn’t match their preferences for content and format.

And so one Danish professor, about whose work hardly anybody knows, can diagnose and explain some of the biggest events in history.

Why Fallacies are False -- 20, the subculture divide

It's not enough to talk about MAGA in terms of people who can't tell when they're dealing with misleading authority. Now a bunch of things come together that I talked about before, including MAGA as a subculture. This post talks about traditions of a cultural subset, using a field of study you probably know nothing about. This is my fourth issue for SWLT which I mentioned a long time ago.

The fourth issue is the larger context of communication: whether it originated in oral transmission or in writing. At the start of the 20th century a Danish researcher teased out the structure of ancient oral traditions, and it turns out to apply worldwide, including the Jewish Bible, Mahabharata, Popol Vuh, Mwindo Epic, and folk tales. (I can’t speak for its applicability to Christian scripture because I haven’t studied it. One of y’all now has a project – that requires you to learn koine Greek so you’re not working with strawman arguments like translations.)

Axel Olrik’s Principles for Oral Narrative Research identifies:

a/ that the structure of orally transmitted material is so different from what originates in writing, you can tell it at a glance.

b/ People who invent material in writing, never use this structure. Before Olrik, nobody knew of the difference, because they didn’t study things like Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Those were for the nursery and nobody who wanted to be taken seriously studied them.

c/ Oral narratives may be recorded in writing but on the contrary, written works do not survive intact as oral transmissions. You’re going to say what about kids’ books, but wait a couple of posts.

Olrik begins from an analog of the first rule of SWLT: oral narratives, like words, arise as an expression of a culture. They document its customs or history as narratives.

It’s like gossip arising in a group of people who are all acquainted, but it’s more: oral narratives do not transmit between groups, even if both primarily communicate orally. A narrative that is meaningful in one culture is meaningless in another. You have to be separated from your culture and immersed in another, to start caring about its narratives. That’s why “we’d all love to see the plan” for changing MAGA and why it means separating families – to get the kids out of the cultural subset that teaches them to be MAGA.

Oral narratives arose and spread in ancient cultures before writing existed (I’ll say more on this later). But ancient cultures did not swap stories. The Semitic and Indo-European cultures did not transmit material to each other. That’s not why some of their stories sound similar.

The fact that the Semites and Indo-Europeans originated in the same part of the world, and the similarity of some of their narratives, suggests that they are descendants of a common ancestral culture. This also appears in their languages; for example, Hebrew yada, "know", is cognate to Classical Greek oida, which you will find in the Iliad. The split happened after wine grapes were domesticated, around 4000 BCE; that’s why their words for “wine” are cognates. There are other cognates, most notably words for “three”. (Remember that number.)

The same is true for Jewish Torah and Samaritan Pentateuch. They’re both available free online, as I found in 2014. I already did the heavy lifting for you by studying both.

1/ SP, as I call it, has 100% of the same narratives as JT. That tells you they are descended from a common ancestor.

2/ They have 90% of the same wording, a diagnostic of the split.

3/ 80% of Dr. John Cook’s specialized Biblical Hebrew grammar, that is in JT, is also in SP. The differences reflect developments since at least 600 CE. (See my thread on 21st century Biblical Hebrew.)

I have a detailed book about SP which I have boiled down to about 40 pages if you’re interested.

The stories that Semites and Indo-Europeans both have versions of, did not arise in Lola’s hunter/gatherer culture, nor would Lola pick up those stories and transmit them in her own culture. She might tell one around the campfire, and people might say “uh-huh” and then curl up for the night, but it’s hardly likely they would ask Lola to tell it again. They had their own oral narratives expressing their own culture; they weren’t interested in stories people were telling ten thousand miles away dealing with wine, which was a complete mystery to them.

Lola would tell stories that her ancestors brought with them. And Olrik says they would have morphed over the thousands of years between that migration and Lola’s lifetime. All oral narratives morph, the same as gossip morphs. Oral narratives start out expressing some cultural or historical reality, they survive as long as the culture still values the history or observes the cultural traits, and when that changes, people stop telling those stories.

What’s the key that a narrative originated orally? The “grammar”, which I will talk about next week.

If you don’t care about the “grammar”, you can skip a week.

21st Century Classical Greek -- some days you eat the bear

It's amazing what you find on the internet, especially Internet Archive, and how a little digging can reinforce a hypothesis that may seem somewhat gaga.

I was rewriting a summary of my book The Real Difference, comparing Jewish Torah and Samaritan Pentateuch and slamming ben Hayyim's self-contradictory and often senseless "grammar" of Samaritan Hebrew. I had a sentence about how northeast Anatolian languages have gutturals -- Semitic, Indo-European, and Indo-Iranian -- except for Latin, which seems to have more of a relationship to Tocharian than to the other languages.

And I referred to the Chechen language. Later in the paper, I got into verb morphology and the similarities between the Anatolian language families. And I thought, what about Chechen, a language of the true Caucasus.

Internet Archive has this.

https://archive.org/details/370682499-chechen-grammar-original

When I got to the verb morphology, I found -- how exciting! -- that it tracked closely with my verb paradigms for Classical Greek that threw out the old tense structure entirely in favor of aspect. 

Also, Chechen is an ergative language, and I showed on this blog how the "aor.2" verbs show up in ergative structures in Classical Greek. What's more, Chechen has a morphology with the same function as the certainty epistemic in Biblical Hebrew, and another that has the same function as my Classical Greek oblique.

The Semites and Chechens share the J1 and J2 Neolithic Y-chromosome haplogroups but the Semites belong to an older clade, suggesting that the Chechens have a relationship to the Minoans while the Greeks have that Siberian influence found in the Mycenaeans. 

So it's time to shred the old grammars and dig back into the Anatolian languages. I don't support the Nostratic macrofamily concept, I'm sticking to Anatolia and the Caucasus. But I feel my Greek studies sit on firmer ground.

Summary:

1. Verbs

2. More on verbs

3. Verb definitions

4.  Gerundives

5.  Imperatives

6.  Negatives

7.  Conditionals

8.  Syntax particles

9.  The particle an

10. Nouns

11. Adverbial equative

12. Syntax 1

13. Syntax 2

14. Ergatives

15. Concepts that are dead or ought to be

DIY -- GREAT eggless recipes

WE NEED OUR COMFORT FOOD, even though eggs are almost worth their weight in gold (even at $3,000 per troy ounce).  I've been posting these one at a time but here's a whole set. Some are also gluten free or dairy free.

1. WWII eggless cakes were developed for rationing. Use these recipes for muffins. Change out the raisins for other smallfruit or chopped cherries, figs or dates.

1 cup brown sugar

1 cup water

1 cup raisins

2 tablespoons oil or 2 tablespoons margarine

1 teaspoon cinnamon, ground

1⁄2 teaspoon clove, ground

1 1⁄2 cups flour

1⁄2 teaspoon salt

1⁄2 teaspoon baking powder

1⁄2 teaspoon baking soda

1⁄2 cup walnuts, chopped

1.               Place the brown sugar, water, raisins, oil, cinnamon, and cloves in a heavy-bottomed saucepan and bring to a boil.

2.               Cook gently for 5 minutes, then remove from the heat and let cool until the mixture is comfortably warm to your finger.

3.               While the mixture is cooling, preheat the oven to 350F.

4.               Grease and flour an 8x4-inch baking pan.

5.               Sift together the flour, salt, baking powder, and baking soda.

6.               Add them to the cooled sugar mixture, beating until no drifts of flour are visible and the batter is smooth.

7.               Stir in the walnuts.

8.               Spread evenly in the baking pan and bake for 25-30 minutes, or until a broomstraw inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean.

9.               Let cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then turn onto a rack to cool completely.

Notes: For a good glaze, even if it is a 90's addition, save back a bit of the hot spiced water.

Mix with confectioner's sugar, a drop of vanilla, and a pinch salt. Glaze the cake while hot.

 Chocolate World War II Cake

 1 1/2 cups (225g) flour

1 cup (240mL) water

3/4 cup (150g) sugar

1/3 cup (80mL) oil

1/4 cup (20g) cocoa powder

1 tbs (15mL) vinegar

1 tsp (6g) baking soda

1 tsp (5mL) vanilla (optional)

1/2 tsp (2.5g) salt

 

For the Glaze

1 cup (125g) powdered sugar

1 tbs (5g) cocoa powder

1 – 3 tbs (15-45mL) water

 

1.               Preheat oven to 350F (180C.)

2.               Grease and line the bottom of a 9" (23cm) round cake pan and set aside.

3.               Combine flour, sugar cocoa, baking soda and salt in a small bowl. Sit aside.

4.               In a large bowl, combine water, oil, vanilla and vinegar. Add flour mixture, stirring until there are no lumps, about 30 seconds. Pour immediately into cake pan.

5.               Bake 25 – 30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Center should read between 200F (93C) and 210F (99C.)

6.               Cool completely in pan before icing.

7.               For the Glaze

8.               In a small bowl, combine powdered sugar and cocoa. Mix in water, one teaspoon at a time, until you get a thin glaze. Pour over the still warm cake slowly and allow it to seep into the crumb.

9.               Let icing harden 10 – 15 minutes before serving.

 NOTES

You can substitute self-rising flour.  If you do, use equal amounts flour and omit both the baking soda.  It will change the final texture slightly.

If you do not have vinegar, lemon juice can be used or it can be left out.  The rise will be less if left out, more like a thin brownie.

The water can be replaced with coffee to bring out the flavor of the chocolate.

Flour rationing cake

3/4 c. molasses

1/4 c. oil

1 1/4 c. flour

1 c. corn flour (process in blender until fine)

1 c. milk

4 tsp. baking powder

2 tsp. cinnamon

1/4 tsp. cloves

1 c. raisins

Beat molasses and oil. Add flours and milk, baking powder, cinnamon, salt, and cloves, stirring just until smooth. Add raisins. Pour into loaf pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 60 minutes.

Eggless date cake; uses milk.

https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/228297/eggless-date-cake/

A collection of cakes with the eggs taken out:

https://www.allrecipes.com/egg-free-cake-recipes-8681357

2. Pasta and noodles for soup. Somebody on Bluesky said they have been doing this for a while.

https://oldworldgardenfarms.com/2023/01/24/homemade-egg-free-noodles/

3. Kugel traditionally uses noodles. Here's a potato kugel that is also gluten and dairy free and you can add smallfruit or grated apples or pears or chopped nuts to it.

Eggless Potato Kugel: just leave the eggs out of this recipe. 

https://toriavey.com/wprm_print/passover-potato-kugel

4. Fried chicken usually uses a buttermilk batter. That's not kosher. For that and chicken nuggets, I used spiced egg to hold the matzo meal coating. Instead of that, use the batter for the fish in a fish and chips recipe, but use a fancy spice mix like chili powder, curry powder, garam masala, Montreal, Caribbean jerk, or "KFC" 11 spices. To make this gluten free, use rice or potato flour instead of wheat flour. You can also substitute potato STARCH for the flour.

https://www.allrecipes.com/article/what-are-kfcs-11-herbs-and-spices/

5. I love cauliflower in a spiced crust. Use a pakora batter, which you make thick for cauliflower or zucchini, and thin for spinach. It's already gluten-free because it uses chickpea flour, and it's dairy-free.

6. Cookies. Swap out butter and use yogurt, which you can make chain batches of with a dehydrator to cure it overnight.

https://www.allrecipes.com/gallery/eggless-cookie-recipes/

6. In other posts, I pointed out that you can't make challah without eggs. You can use one less egg per batch. 

7. Eggplant parmigiana. You can just layer the raw eggplant, cheese and sauce in your baking pan; you can also use zucchini this way. You can also drizzle the vegetable with oil and roast at 425 F for 15 minutes, then layer and bake. MUCH easier, much less fat because you don't fry the vegetables first, and still delicious. Gluten free.

8. Stuffed vegetables, aka farcis. I made stuffed green peppers the other day and the recipe wanted you to bind the filling with egg. I left out the egg and it tasted great, plus it was gluten free and dairy free. Here's a stuffed eggplant recipe that doesn't call for egg in the first place. If you can find a nice BIG zucchini, this works for that, too.

https://www.recipetineats.com/moroccan-baked-eggplant-with-beef/

9. Breakfast. Pancakes -- replace the egg(s) with 1/4 cup banana or apple, or with 1 tablespoon each of oil and water. Also replace any milk with yogurt. Otherwise -- fruit salad, oatmeal (get the old fashioned because you can't make cookies with the instant) and other hot cereals, scrapple as a side for your ham or corned beef, yogurt with granola and chopped nuts that you aren't allergic to.

We will get through this. In the meantime, we deserve good food.

Why Fallacies are False -- 19, Appeal to Misleading Authority

We have had a bellyfull of appeals to misleading authority over the last ten years. This post starts a "story arc" that will lead to some surprising results, because it will get into a subject almost nobody knows about, as far as I can tell.

One area of my expertise is with urban legends; most of my blog attacks them. Urban legends arise in subsets of a culture, some of which are echo chambers. Urban legends are related to gossip, something we all do, I guess, but the definitions of gossip and urban legend are different, so I’m going to go through the progression. This will come up again in a later post.

When you talk about people you know, that’s gossip. The standard for gossip is that everybody in the chain changes the story a little bit. When you receive gossip, NEVER believe it unless you can get back to the first person who said it. You will be astonished at the difference between what they said and what you heard. Accepting gossip always involves a fallacy called Appeal to misleading authority, the “authority” being whoever told you the gossip.

Urban legends have four key features.

1/ they spread person to person like gossip, although often the medium is email.

2/ they name a vague authority, if any. If the urban legend is detailed enough, you can check with the supposed authority and 100% of the time they debunk the legend. Either they never said anything on the subject, or they never said anything like what’s in the urban legend, or it distorts something they said. Again, this is the fallacy of misleading authority, with the person who sends the urban legend as the misleading authority. Also, any claim that fails to list any sources is probably an urban legend. ALWAYS CHALLENGE CLAIMS THAT DON'T HAVE SOURCES. (Just went through this on Bluesky)

3/ an urban legend is always about some group to which the person spreading it does NOT belong. So an urban legend about people flashing their car lights, saying that they are gang members, does NOT spread among gang members but only among outsiders. This will be important for a definition in a later post.

4/ all urban legends are false because their data is false or their logic is false.

Reporters almost never have worked for the organizations they report on, and they can fail on /2/ because they are part of /3/. They are at risk of creating an urban legend every time they speak on camera or publish an article. Since MSM has fired the experts who know who to talk to at various organizations, reporters have to develop sources – and may pick unreliable ones. And if MSM is publishing articles based on Google results, they are counting on their writers to know which results came from reliable sources. What I’m seeing from MSM suggests that their writers don’t know that at all.

It’s also true that the more sensational the report is, the more you have to doubt vague “sources”.

a/ It could be somebody with a grudge on.

b/ It could be somebody far down in the chain of command who has no idea what is going on above their pay grade but likes the attention they get, or who gets quoted on overall issues they have no clue about because the reporter doesn’t have the brains or experience to know better.

c/ When it’s somebody who “used to work there”, you have to suspect that things have moved on and their information is out of date. Also these people might have been fired, or might have resigned, and have a grudge on.

Why would MSM destroy its reputation by spreading obvious urban legends?

Well, do they know how to tell when they are spreading urban legends?

Second, are they willing to fire writers that create urban legends?

And last and most shameful – both gossip and urban legends attract attention or they wouldn’t spread. MSM can’t survive if it doesn’t attract readers or listeners – what I call eyeballs and eardrums. So when they’re barely surviving anyway, do they stop attracting people (the basis of their advertising revenues), in the interests of having a good reputation?

Before you judge them, look back and think about how many times you refused to pass along gossip. It gets you attention, it’s exciting, and if you answer “Yeah but I’m not asking for money” remember, there are all kinds of compensation. Yours was emotional. MSM has stock holders.

Why Fallacies are False -- 18, the search for causes

I ran a little test on social media and got exactly what I expected. So here it is.

I told a true story about a large estate that got split equally among the children. One of them spent every penny within a year.

And as I expected, somebody tried to come up with a cause for that, including education.

The person who spent all that money has worked for over 30 years as a CPA/CFP, getting all the CEUs after getting a college degree in the field. The idea that education was involved in the spending spree is part of that Enlightenment Era myth that if you educate people, they will base their choices on that education.

I know of another example. Somebody I worked with at one time in federal procurement, had all the same training as I had, all the CEUs and whatnot. But seemingly "that was just stuff I gotta do for work". They procured the same kind of product twice for home use, each with different bells and whistles, instead of writing out a requirements list and sticking to it as they would have to do at work. Even if they could return the first item, it was a waste of time and money out of their own pocket.

The fallacy here is supposedly called the “just world” fallacy, which tries to find a reason for everything.

MAGA does it with conspiracy theories.            

Other people do it by trying to be intellectual or scientific or blaming it on education, or they show wishful thinking and the cognitive bias of exaggerated expectations.

If you watch enough talk shows or news series like 60 Minutes, you get exposed to discussions of criminals with “experts” who may have lots of letters after their names, but don’t understand the fundamental reality about criminals: they are mentally adolescent. History going back ten thousand years at least, has billions of examples of people who got caught in criminal behavior, even if it required circumstantial evidence, but every criminal believes s/he will not get caught. What’s more, every single one of them who does get caught, believes they won’t get sanctioned. But the “expert” cognitive bias exaggerates their confidence in their ability to diagnose.

You also saw TV discussions that tried to assign scientific reasons for insane behavior. Do you realize how nuts that is? It’s called insane behavior because there’s no logic behind it, not even a criminal’s warped logic. We’re still nowhere close to saying that insanity runs in your genes, let alone what genes are sure to cause the problem. But yadda yadda yadda.

We shouldn’t stop asking questions. We shouldn’t stop investigating. We should take a moment to figure out what to do with the answer when we get it. If we identify genes that let people remain mental adolescents, or cause insanity, what are we going to do with them? Are we going to force universal identical thought and behavior? What do we give up?

And of course, the answer comes back: we give up individuality, we give up creativity, we give up invention. Pope Urban VIII would gladly have given up Galileo: would you say the same thing?

Now let’s reason from minor to major (called a fortiori in logic), from that estate breakup to breaking up even larger fortunes. It’s a dead cert that breaking up a huge fortune will distribute the money, and that some of the recipients will dissipate what they get. That money will wind up in the pockets of other people. People who are spending themselves broke now, would have to change their behavior to keep from going broke.

And people don’t change their habits quickly. There was a big news story many years ago about a guy who won a huge Powerball prize or something like that – and lost it all. He got cheated out of some of it. He left a huge amount of it stored in his car in cash, and it got stolen. When I heard the rest of the story, it turned out he did the same thing at least once before: got a windfall and fooled it away or it got stolen.

It's time to look at human history. There is no oligarchy of the past which remains an oligarchy today, unless you count the Royal Family in the UK, and their oligarchy dates back 200 years, not the whole way back to the Norman Conquest. Starting in 1993, they voluntarily paid taxes. All the other famous oligarchs of history have left no heirs, or their wealth was confiscated by socialists and communists. And the commoners of socialist and communist nations were never a penny the richer for the confiscation.

Do what you will about modern oligarchs, you may never be a penny the richer, and if you are, your behavior may put you right back where you are now. Any other conclusion is wishful thinking.

Information about spending behavior has been publicized by consumer reporters for decades – but it also exists in the proverbs and aphorisms of world cultures. It hasn’t changed due to the Space Age, or computers, or the Internet, or the odometer rollover to the 21^st century. There will always be some economic unevenness. Because human nature hasn’t changed in thousands of years, let alone the 200 years since nations began aiming at universal education. 

And that’s why the answers to my example were false.

Knitting -- the colorways jumper

So to use up some Comfy fingering, I did a jumper and sweater in reversed colorways. The red is hollyberry, the beige is called parchment. The yarn is a cotton blend.

There are two rows of motifs, one a star and the other from Mary McGregor's edition of Robert Williamson's collection of his 1920s customers' motifs that they used in their original Fair Isle knitting.

Between each row of motifs is what I call a "rick-rack", two rows of white with a color row between them. The colors showed up better with the parchment background and I liked how the parchment made it look sort of antique while being new.

So then I got ambitious to re-do the right hand sweater as a jumper using the classic Jamieson and Smith 2-ply Shetland wool. I bought it from Woolly Thistle although Fairlight Fibers also carries it.

If you never worked with this yarn before, it feels a little rough to the fingers and it is ALWAYS trying to hackle. Just work firmly but not with high tension.

The motifs are 10 stitches wide and 7 rows high apiece. There are three rounds of base color between every band with color, whether it's a band of motifs or rick-rack.

You need 12 skeins 3 (a light brown mix), 8 skeins 9113 (Maroon), 2 skeins 01A (Optic white), one skein each 77 (dyed black), 75 (Sea foam), 80 (Dark brown), 79 (Emerald), 21 (Navy), 95 (Pink), 118 (Moss), 73 (Orange), and 123 (a purple mix). I tried 002 (Stone) for a base color, but it was too light and the white didn’t show up well. I also tried 78, a medium shade of brown, but the maroon didn’t pop.

Use size 3 or 4 needles on 24 inch circular tethers for the body, 16 inch for the neck and the start of the sleeves, and DPs for the end of the sleeves.  

So.

Cast on 308 and work 8 rounds of k2/p2 rib. The 308 stitches allow for the fact that color work is less flexible than one-color work, and let you put 2 or 3 layers under the jumper.

Knit 1 round, then knit another increasing one stitch at each underarm, then knit a third round. You need that extra stitch because while the rib uses a 4-count, you need a 10-count for the body.

Work a rick-rack band. The rick-rack bands alternate like this: 77 then 75: 80 then 79: 21 then 95: 118 then 73: 80 again then 123. Start over with the black rick-rack if you run short before you get to the shoulders.

After the black rick-rack band, work a star band.

After the seafoam rick-rack band, work the Fair Isle motif.

Work the dark brown band, then the star.

Work the emerald band and then the Fair Isle.

Work the navy band and then the star.

Work the pink band and then the Fair Isle.

Work the moss band and then the star.

Work the orange band and then the Fair Isle.

Work a brown band and then the star.

Work a purple mix band and then the Fair Isle.

If you need a longer body, start over with the black rick rack.

When the jumper is long enough under your armpits, put 14 stitches on a holder , turn your work and cable on 15 for steeking. Turn it back, bring the first stitch on the body to your right needle, pass the last stitch over, and put it back on the needle. Remember to alternate your base and pattern color on the steeking, with two stitches of base color in the middle to mark where you will cut the steeking. 

Keep knitting in alternating bands until you get to the shoulders.

Knit together 40 stitches for each shoulder. Remember, when you finish each shoulder, slip one stitch from the left needle to the right, pass the last stitch from the right needle over that, put the stitch back and knit it. Do this at both shoulders. This is one of our gap-closing techniques.

Knit one round to stabilize the neck. At each shoulder, put the needle under the long stitch and add one, knitting it, then do the same thing in the stitch after that (but not in the knit stitch that has the PSSO under it), to prevent large gaps at the neck. 

Knit 8 rounds k2/p2 rib for the neck and bind off in rib.

Now cut your steeking and pick up around it for the sleeve as usual for Fair Isle.

Knit the underarm stitches off of the holder. When you get to the end, slip the last stitch on the left needle onto the right needle and pass the last stitch from the right needle over, then knit it. This is our gap-closing technique again. Knit one round in base color and use this technique again when you get back to the underarm.

Now start knitting in pattern, with the first rick-rack band being the same color as the last one before you knitted off at the shoulders, and the first motif band being the same one as the last one before the shoulders. 

Don't forget your decreases at the underarm. Do these in the first of 3 base color rounds, in the middle round of a rick-rack band, and in the last of the next 3 base color rounds. Stop decreasing when you get to the stitch count that you want for your cuff.

When you get down to the black rick-rack band that matches the bottom of the body, do your 3 rounds in base color. Then if, like me, you need some extra length, work one band in the Fair Isle motif (the body ends with the star motif) and 3 rounds in base color. For the cuff, do 8 rounds of k2/p2 rib and bind off in rib.

Wash with a soap specialized for wool. I have one with tea tree and lavender oils to protect against moth. The wool feels softer after washing.

You can customize this with any Fair Isle motif you want, or use a Fair Isle motif instead of the star. I recommend using motifs no more than 8 rows high. 

You can also customize this by using different colors than what I chose, or doing light rick-rack bands before dark ones, or... well, you know.

And then you can knit matching socks with the banding on just the leg portion. That ought to get you one of each motif band, plus three rick-rack bands, with 3 rounds in base color above and below the banding.

For another cozy layer, make a sweater or wool jacket in Jamieson and Smith Aran Shetland Fawn to wear over the jumper.

These same amounts of yarn would also make a nice scarf with matching hat, gloves, and socks. The body of the jumper is 18 inches long, so work one repeat, then 24 rows of base color, and then another repeat in reverse order of all the bands, for a 39 inch scarf.

You probably only want to work a single motif band across the back of the gloves with a rick-rack band on each side. 

Above the ribbing of a cap, you would work the same as the leg of a sock and then decrease to a round peak.

I would wear these with a jumper in a solid color (no color work), so that the color work really stands out, in Jamieson and Smith Aran (worsted weight) in Shetland Fawn. That ought to be nice and snuggly. 

If you want a different base color, buy one skein of every color you plan to use and see how it looks next to the base color. You might have leftovers, but if you search this blog for "leftover" you will find plenty of ways to work them up. I bought lots of stone and I'll use it to make a Dovrekofta with turquoise.

Why Fallacies are False -- 17, Wishful Thinking

So in light of what happened in the 2024 election, two streams of thought are coming out.

Somebody on social media recently advocated qualification testing to let people vote. Qualification testing for the franchise has a terrible precedent. In the Jim Crow period, it was used to disenfranchise blacks. The recent proposal included IQ tests; IQ tests are known to have a cultural component. Giving multiple IQ tests throughout schooling tries to validate the results by pretending that the test evaluates a person’s educational history.

But there’s a problem with the concept of educational history, which I saw discussions of starting in 2016. People involved in science point out that up until about 6^th grade, kids love science. Then their interest crashes. “We need to educate people better in science.”

That’s an extension of the Enlightenment Era myth that all you have to do is expose people to information to educate them. Anybody who thinks that if you educate kids they’ll all turn out “intelligent”, is ignoring two things.

First: It’s the false dilemma of nature vs. nurture. It’s not genetics versus the school system. Those are not the only two influences on children. They also have their family structure and their neighborhood social structure. And about age 12, the structure radically changes its influence.

When a kid gets to age 12, the family starts pushing them to stop being a kid, to be practical, to ditch everything that isn’t necessary for their future. And we all know that some families actively discourage their kids from getting higher education, as well as some families pushing the false dilemma that you have to go to college or you won’t get a good job. I talked about that a long time ago. Knowing this, means that IQ as qualification testing is actually testing for acculturation, not for education.

Families tell their kids “You’re no good in math, you can’t be a scientist/engineer/whatever.” It's a false dilemma between brilliance and non-brilliance.

a/ I’m no good at calculations, but I understood enough math to teach you to calculate whether a logical argument also has a probability of being true. I also helped a niece, who is very good at math, understand the use of reciprocals when her high school textbook was too oriented toward verbal people.

b/ I know a CPA/CFP whose classmates complained about failing tests. He said, “Did you do all the problems in the book?” The answer was always “No.”

c/ I learned from an online course in matrix math, don’t get upset if you look at the problem and the answer doesn’t leap out at you. Go methodically through the steps to get the answer. (I was glad I used this site because, years later, it helped me follow Leonard Susskind’s physics lectures.)

It takes study to understand the concepts. It takes practice to be able to get the calculations right. It takes work to come up with the answer. It’s not brilliance vs. non-brilliance or nature vs. nurture. It’s encouragement and effort.

And then there are the natural human failings of memory, which may be responsible for people not recognizing a Conjunction Fallacy even if they’ve seen it before. Somebody I know once proposed that people should have to solve a quadratic equation to get to vote. Well, I studied quadratic equations, but that was in high school. Am I supposed to not be allowed to vote because I don’t remember how to do them 50 years later? But some kids’ families discourage them from taking the higher mathematics: “You’ll never use it in real life.” That’s a matter of encouragement, not of qualification.

If you can figure out a way to deal with a discouraging family environment without separating families, “we’d all love to see the plan.” Meanwhile, the stage is set for the next round of human culture. Not human development; we are not about to purify the human race as we get through the fallout of the MAGA period. History is not a progression – that’s another Enlightenment Era myth; it’s just change, the one true constant in the universe.

And now that I’ve dealt with MAGA I’ll point out the other misunderstanding people have about education. The Internet. If you have the Internet, you have access to everything you need for a good education in languages, science, literature, art, philosophy, even history.

And with the Internet, you no longer have to find a bunch of people interested in the same thing you are, pay for a class and books, and drive to the classroom or schedule time with an instructor in Zoom or Facetime. All you have to do is find a free book and make yourself read it.

And that’s how I got access to the material I used to write most of my blog posts. It includes The Fallacy Files which helped me distinguish useful information from bullshit.

But I went after that information myself. From what I see on social media, I’m in the minority. The way deep minority. I have a blog post about that.

There has been zero noticeable increase in educated people since the start of Project Gutenberg and, later, Internet Archive or Openstax or LiveLingua or any of the hundreds of other educational websites. I said in my very first post in this thread, that the majority of people who have the internet, refuse to make the effort of using it for self-education. If you know of a study with statistics on educational levels in this period, tell us all about it.

Why Fallacies are False -- 16, popularity

We just had an election for president. It was a close-run thing. While MAGA is claiming a victory by holding both branches of elected leadership, the margins in Congress are razor thin. Three seats in the House of Representatives face elections this spring. Disruptive elements in the controlling party may push leadership into sore straits. So winning a majority of votes is not a recipe for control.

Put it another way. Those of us who were on the other platform during the first Trump administration know that behind his popularity on that platform, lay the fact that 2/3 of his followers were Russian or Chinese bots or trolls. They live on every platform. If you don’t curate your followers, the raw number may not be meaningful.

Or to put it still another way, Gd told the Israelites specifically, “It was not because of your numbers being more than all the nations that the Lord chose you…” (Deuteronomy 7:7)

Assuming that raw numbers are meaningful is the Appeal to Popularity fallacy, AKA Authority of the Many.

We know that popularity is not a recipe for success. James Buchanan got us into the Civil War. Herbert Hoover got us into the Depression. Then there was the S&L crisis in the 1980s, the debt collapse in 2008, and covid.

Popularity is related to the Base Rate Fallacy, and this relates to polls. Pollsters inundated us in the run-up to the election, but the problem was, every single one of those polls was skewed in one way or another.

1/ The methods for contacting participants skewed them right.

2/ The questions skewed things in the poll-takers’ preferred direction.

3/ We found out later that pollsters manipulated the data to produce right-leaning results.

Or, as I constantly replied to posts, POLLS ARE NOTHING, VOTES ARE EVERYTHING.

Some pollsters used only material from members of specific associations. However, more than half of all registered voters belong to no party; more than a quarter of all Americans belong to no religious denomination, including those who are religious but not members of any defined group. When a pollster limits their contacts to specific associations, that creates sampling bias.

So when CNN published a poll that says “most Americans favor Trump” but they only polled CNN viewers, it’s important to know that CNN has a less than 30% viewer share of cable news – and that increasingly, people DON’T get their news from MSM. MSM has poisoned the well against itself in this election cycle and is losing eyeballs and eardrums. As with any other data, you have to know if your source is reliable.

The Base Rate Fallacy operates in somewhat the same way. It claims that membership in X means you’re Y times as likely to have a given consequence compared to membership in Z. If somebody has that consequence, this would make you think they are part of X. In fact, the raw numbers of members of X and Z who have that consequence might be equal, but if X is a smaller set than Z, the likelihood is higher in X than Z. You have to know the raw numbers and the sizes of X and Z, before you can draw an accurate conclusion.

Base Rate edges into the “apples and oranges” false equivalence fallacy. There’s a difference between a voter who is registered “independent” (to NO party) and an “undecided voter”. The “undecided voter” was held out as a problem because supposedly a candidate should be able to come up with a way to make them decide. This might work with an independent voter, but somebody who stubbornly tells pollsters they are undecided could be trying to avoid an argument – or they could be hiding that they have a preference and that no candidate could make a reasonable argument that would change their minds.

All of this should make you realize that any time somebody tells you “the numbers speak for themselves,” you should get ready for a flim-flam. As with sources, it takes a lot of work to be sure you’re getting a true picture of the situation. The same is true for economic data. Never agree with anybody who throws you a single price quote for stocks, bonds, or money markets. Always go to a reputable market site like MarketWatch or Trading Economics and call up a multi-week or multi-month graphic of price variations. The Russian ruble is going through some contortions. On the day in 2024 that it was quoted at 113, it was possible to look at five-year data and see that in February 2022, it hit a price of 125 to the dollar.

And the same for “pictures don’t lie”. I saw a post that said this, made by an elected legislator, and I said, this is the 21^st century: we have photoshopping, laptop video editing, and deep fakes that don’t require hiring Industrial Light and Magic. Pictures, like numbers, do lie.

Somebody throws out an exciting piece of data and everybody jumps on it like a duck on a June bug, without checking the source for reliability, or studying the history of the field. Nothing means anything in isolation, that’s why Cartesian method forces practitioners to fit their results into the big picture. Nothing means anything in isolation from its environment as part of human culture, which includes historical data and contributing factors. You can’t pipeline or cherry-pick your data and hope to say anything useful. And that includes pretending that numbers are meaningful in and of themselves.

Why Fallacies are False -- 15 the two-fer

This time I’m talking about two fallacies that you have probably seen, but either it wasn’t important or you didn’t know the difference between them. They are very similar but it’s not hard to explain them.

Historian Fallacy and Presentism Fallacy both involve the present and the past. The first assumes that people, at a selected point in the past, knew things that weren’t discovered until decades or centuries later. The second projects present ideas or attitudes into the past.

If you read historical novels you have likely seen examples of Historian Fallacy, like packing a womb with moldy bread to prevent infection, but it didn’t matter because that’s fiction. It matters when somebody is trying to write historical fact. My favorite example is pretending that, in the Bible, tahor/tameh mean hygienic and non-hygienic, respectively. I have blog posts about that.

Gibbon commits Historian’s Fallacy constantly. I have a thread showing why you shouldn’t read Gibbon, or why you should not sit still for it if a teacher presents Gibbon as fact in a history class.

Gibbon pretends that the Roman Republic was run by free and fair elections, and that Augustus and the emperors up to the Antonines deprived the Romans of “liberty”. Then he turns around and commits the Presentism Fallacy by pretending that liberty, as understood by the British constitution in the 1700s CE, had a role in the Roman Republic nearly 2000 years earlier.

And then a website touting its postings as documents of liberty, confuses what Gibbon was talking about, with liberty as understood in the US in the 21^st century. That’s another example of the Presentism fallacy.

DH got its start due to Presentism Fallacy. It got its start among people who pieced together information they collected from discrete documents invented in writing by individuals, creating pastiches of information that supported a given conclusion. It assumed that what it perceived in its translations of the Jewish Bible, resulted from Jews between 600 and 400 BCE also creating a pastiche from existing documents. To support this concept, DH had to propose one or more editors, some of them creating expanded editions as somebody authored new material.

The idea of editors creating ever larger pastiches implies, and the description of the DH dataset stated, that each of the documents has a different historical context. That’s all over. The Dean of Yale Divinity School has declared that DH has nothing to do with historicity; it is strictly literary. If he has published the new dataset description that eliminates historicity, I haven’t found it online. If you know what it is, you would help out fans of DH by publishing it.

Since we know on other grounds that DH has no possibility of being true, I for one don’t care about it. But you may care, because if historicity is now irrelevant, it doesn’t matter if archaeologists ever turn up the hard evidence of DH. DH will ignore it. Or at least the Dean will.

Look, historical novels are one thing, nobody is saying you should study them for fallacies. People who want their writing about history to be taken seriously, have to watch out for fallacies in their work. My experience is that they don’t do it.

DIY -- health

So of course you'd like to save money on meds but what you probably don't realize is that you might be able to save if you would do the hard stuff.

1. Eat right. Medicine has clinical studies since 2012 that show supplements are a waste of money. I've posted about that before. Get your veggies and fruits, your whole grains, ditch the processed foods and their chemicals, buy a bread maker and make your own. Oh, and by the way, supplements never were regulated by the FDA. Unless they made medical claims. Without the FDA, you're even farther up shit's creek. 

2. Exercise any way you can. Yoga will help. Cooking from scratch will help, especially things like kneading your own bread. Between this and eating right, you can reduce your dependence on cholesterol and blood pressure meds, and exercise has a positive effect on depression. I've done it.

3. GET YOUR SLEEP. Set a schedule, set a routine (brushing your teeth, cooling shower in hot weather), ventilation and air movement (closing your door will interfere with this), cut back on tech at bedtime, exercise stopping an hour before bedtime. Obesity and heart problems can arise from lack of sleep. I have a history of insomnia, and I know half a dozen tricks that fixed it without using meds.

4. Clean house. Not only is this a great form of exercise, but you can detect and eradicate mold and mildew, both of which can cause illness. Those of us with dust mite allergies need to clean regularly. This includes clearing food from the fridge when it's going over. If you buy vegetables in bulk because it's cheaper, you may be able to freeze them. Some need to be blanched before freezing. There are websites about that.

5. Herbal remedies. There's a lot of bullshit out there about herbals. Clinical studies show that echinacea and black cohosh aren't what they're cracked up to be. White willow bark, on the other hand, is what aspirin was developed out of. Some herbals you can grow for yourself with a full-spectrum LED lamp: feverfew, horehound, arnica, chamomile (but don't use this if you have a goldenrod allergy), comfrey (natural source of allantoin for your skin). Mullein, plantain and calendula are others. If you have a yard, you can plant things like elderberry and juniper.

6. Environment. A number of plants will make your yard inhospitable to mosquitoes, including bright-colored Mexican marigold, classic lavender, bee balm, lemon basil or verbena, and any kind of mints. Dill grown in the yard will attract beneficial insects and you can use it in cooking. Don't dig up or poison your dandelions; most of the plant is edible. Grow mint in the house; mice hate the smell. Grow aloe vera indoors under your LEDs; not only can you make an excellent skin care product doped with comfrey infusion, but it also purifies the air. A lot of classic herbs like parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme, tarragon, and oregano will grow in many US agricultural zones. You can grow your own coriander/cilantro and cumin. And don't forget the birds. Insect-eating birds love fruit. My holly and mulberry trees support lots of them for part of the year and I put out mealworm and things in the winter.

7. Outside the box. US agricultural zones 6a and above can grow tea, a form of camellia. Every winter you need a frame wrapped in burlap and stuffed with raked up leaves, to protect the plant. You can avoid the high prices coming on coffee and still get your caffeine. There are websites showing you how to process the leaves. You don't have to buy Celestial Seasonings: you can grow roses and use the hips, as well as your herb leaves, to make tisanes. 

8. Mental health. Along with exercise to combat depression, you are faced with increasing prices for drugs that combat dementia and Alzheimer's. If you have no symptoms yet, get started on prevention. Exercise and eating right are key to staving them off. But you also have to take care of the connections in your brain as well as the chemicals. Studies show keeping your brain active will do that. Whatever it is you think you're not good at, take it as a challenge. The object is not to get good, it's to use the experience to keep your brain ticking over. Math, art and music, learning a foreign language, getting into crafts, will all help. Sitting in front of the boob tube or doomscrolling will not. It doesn't take finding a class somewhere. Youtube has videos on just about everything you could want to do. I've used it to help me learn the techniques I use in my knitting. I've seen videos on flint-knapping and processing animal skins. I've found websites that taught matrix math, which helped me understand Dr. Susskind's physics lectures -- the videos of which are on Youtube. I recently posted a laundry list of resources.

Don't ever go off a medication without your doctor's assistance. OTOH, we know that drug companies bribe doctors, one way or another, into using their products or recommending them for things that there are no clinical studies for. Check with the Mayo Clinic website or the Merck website. For example, the Merck website specifically says that Ozempic for diabetes works WITH DIET AND EXERCISE. The entry also warns about adverse effects. WORK WITH YOUR DOCTOR. But get yourself set to do the hard stuff, and when you can't afford the Ozempic any more, you'll be ready to go it alone.

Why Fallacies are False -- 014, Labels

One of the things that results in fallacies is labeling. You just saw that labeling conjugations as going by tense, instead of aspect, created strawman arguments in translations from Biblical Hebrew and Classical Greek.

A number of fallacies involve labels.

One is the loaded label. You use a word with a large emotional load to turn people for or against something, and the label might not fit what you hang it on. But it can also be a false dilemma. Currently 10% of the US population is multi-racial; they don’t fit labels like black or white.

But more than that, I have replied to people time and again showing them that “black” or “white” is bullshit. I had the most fun with this on the anti-Semitic posts that said Jews were or were not white. It ignored the DNA reality, and issues of conversion.

The Semites originated in NE Anatolia between Lake Van and the Caucasus by 4000 BCE. Men descended from them in the direct male line have Y-chromosome subclades of J1 or J2. This includes Muslim Palestinians as well as Jews, Arabs, and Canaanites.

The Indo-European people originated in the same region and became distinct from other groups by 2500 BCE. Men descended from them in the direct male line have Y-chromosome subclades of R1a and R1b.

Jews descended from Indo-European converts, then, have Indo-European genes. And yes, these Jews can be targets of anti-Semitism, a label invented in the 1800s by a French political party for their own anti-Jewish policies.

Before the Semites, a people lived in the same region of NE Anatolia. One of their descendants turned up in Denmark. Her ancestors left Anatolia about 8000 BCE, at the time of development of a wheat strain which could not sow itself and required human intervention.

That is, on the cusp of domestication and agriculture.

Descendants of these emigrants washed up all over Europe. They were the Basques, and the people who built Stonehenge. (The Celts are Indo-Europeans.)

Our lady got the nickname Lola. She lived about 3700 BCE, before the Indo-Europeans existed. She had blue eyes. And she had dark skin.

1/ Most of you would say she was Caucasian because her people came from near the Caucasus.

2/ Others would say she wasn’t white because her skin was dark.

3/ But she had blue eyes, and some of you probably think that blue eyes go with white skin.

So now you see that all the “white” “black” “brown” stuff is bullshit. You need to look at the DNA.

Lola had K1e mitochondrial DNA, meaning that her foremothers were hunter-gatherers, not farmers like the Semites and Indo-Europeans. The mothers of the Neolithic early agricultural period had mtDNA haplogroup subclade T2b, although K subclades hung around because the migrants did not take all their women to Europe.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13549-9

You can say a lot of meaningless things with labels. You can use a word for an abstract concept and treat it as if it were concrete. This is reification, the problem with talking about evolutionary selection. Evolution is a concept. What really makes the selection is whatever events wipe out a population. Whatever population remains then has the opportunity to leave descendants that occupy the new blank spot in the ecology. They may evolve as they take advantage of it. That’s the lesson of Darwin’s Galapagos finches.

You can assume that everybody means the same thing by certain words. Any dictionary can show that this is false. Sometimes it’s a case of the referential fallacy, which assumes that a word says something inherent about an object or situation (its essence) when actually it’s a matter of perception or happenstance (accidence). That goes back to my vicious dogs discussion.

You could also be using a word in the wrong setting (context). When you talk about “intent” in a courtroom, you mean that no responsible person would do whatever was done, unless they desired the given outcome which is covered by the legal code. When your lawyer then goes out in front of news cameras and says you didn’t intend to do it, she’s trying to confuse the public into thinking you couldn’t possibly be found guilty. The name for this fallacy is ambiguity.

You can also have the redefinition fallacy. When somebody says “If we define X as [whatever]”, watch out because they’re getting into redefinition. Make them get out the OED and prove that some group of people really define it that way in the context of which you are speaking. The OED only adds an entry based on multiple uses by multiple people over some period of time in multiple environments. A discussion does not stand or fall by just one person’s definition of a word.

One sign of a cult is to have special connotations for certain words; knowing those connotations is how you show you are part of the cult. This partakes of the redefinition fallacy, but it’s also part of that litmus test to see if you’re part of the cultural subset.

And if people start calling you names for not agreeing with them, that’s the ad hominem fallacy and they automatically lose.

Why Fallacies are False -- BONUS ROUND

There was just a fray over on Bluesky that I created because somebody posted a false opinion based on a false translation of a word from a foreign language. 

The poster claimed that Greek ἰδιότης means the same thing as modern English idiot. It does not. Here is the LSJ entry.

https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Di)dio%2Fths

If anything, the word means individual. There is no pejorative sense to it. The poster committed the redefinition fallacy.

This is the same sort of thing as pretending that the medieval word villein has the same pejorative connotation as the modern word villain.

Or that a churl in the medieval sense of the word was a gloomy nasty person. The medieval churl was unlettered and uncultured, and the word derives from German kerl which today means "guy". 

Anybody with the Internet, and the will to make sure you're not being lied to, could have done the research that just took me 5 minutes. So now if you saw the original post, you know that the poster is somebody you can't trust to tell the truth.

Knitting -- ribs three ways -- fisherman's and shaker's

I have been using up leftovers in throws, like this one in Victorian double stitch using Palette.

I did another with Wool of the Andes in Eye of Partridge.  

Then I used up Comfy Worsted in brioche. 

Brioche is a ribbed stitch that doesn't need a ribbed hem to keep the edge from curling up. Some websites confuse it with fisherman's rib. The two are not at all alike. 

One of the issues with fisherman's rib is you can't use your normal round counts. I would normally do 130 rounds below the armpits for fingering weight yarn. The knit-belows and purl-belows compress the rows or rounds. You must measure. 

OTOH the number of stitches does work, so 280 stitches in the body and 56 in the sleeve, increasing up to 92, did work.

You can do steeking above the armpits so as to keep working in the round.

What you cannot do is pick up around the steeking so as to knit the sleeves top down. You will end up with the ribs going around your arm, not along it, and in a bulky yarn you will look like you're wearing a Cuban music hall dance costume. So you have to knit the sleeves separately, making sure they are the right length for your arm, and then sew them in at the steeking.

That said, fisherman's rib is better done in worsted or bulky yarn than fingering.

For fisherman's rib, use a 24-inch circular needle and cast on an even number of stitches. Join and start a marker so you know when to switch between steps 1 and 2. 

Work 1 knit round and one of K1/P1. 

Step 1: knit into the bottom of the knit stitches. This means, don't put your needle through the knit stitch, but under it, knit and pull off. Purl the purl stitches.

Step 2: knit the knit stitches. For the purl stitches, you have two loops that look like the purl stitches in a brioche. This is probably part of the confusion. Bring your yarn to the front. Put your needle back to front between these two loops. Wrap the yarn counterclockwise around the needle and pull to the back, then pull the joined stitches off. BE VERY CAREFUL to do this right, or you will find you have a dropped stitch.

You do NOT want to drop stitches. Recovery is a...OK pain.

Repeat steps 1 and two until you get to the armpits. Put an even number of stitches on each side of the "seam" on a holder. Then do steeking and finish above the armpit with 10 rounds of K2/P2 rib, and bind off in rib.

Do the sleeves the same only start with 56 stitches. Join and do your knit round. Then K2, K1/P1 around, K2. Put your marker between the two K2s; these will be your "seam" and you will do increases on the second knit stitch.  I did 220 rounds in the sleeves to get the right length.

When you get to the right length, bind off. Turn the body inside out, match the armpits and knit those stitches off, ease the body around the top of the sleeve and sew together.

I used Cascade 220 super-wash merino in fingering weight. It comes in hanks of 219 yards and a hank does 45 rounds (3.5 inches) in the body and half a sleeve in the arm. 

Now the problem child, Shaker Rib. I've seen three different videos on it, and one of them clearly shows brioche. So here's the apparent winner.

Cast on an even number of stitches.

Knit one round.

P1, K1BELOW, repeat.

Knit one round. 

Repeat the last two steps all the way up the body or sleeve. 

Notice that you are not purling below, so this won’t be as compressed as Fisherman’s rib. I had hanks of 494 yards of fingering yarn and worked 42 rounds at 280 stitches per round.

Here is a side-by-side comparison.

So now you have some new stitches to try out with your stitch count although, sadly, you also have an example of how the experts don't always present all the information you need.

Now. Fisherman's rib is the stitch in a sweater I saw James Steward wearing in Dear Brigitte. Yesterday I searched all over the internet for something that also has this shawl collar, and mostly what I got back were Aran patterns. The exception was a discontinued pattern by Purl Soho. I emailed them and they were kind enough to give me a link to the pattern for free. I am sending them a link to this post. and here is a link to their discontinued pattern. Contact them if, like me, you are into classic styling.

https://www.purlsoho.com/create/2016/02/04/top-down-shawl-collar-cardigan/?srsltid=AfmBOor2_UkghmU97mlqfYIjwytvXgCU7cK4bwvSQZRzXrAGGos0awQa

And that's why I love knitting. The feeling of community.