Why Fallacies are False -- 09, Epistemology

As I said, selecting your information sources to fit very stringent conditions (staying in your echo chamber) risks eliminating important data when you make your claims. It results in sampling bias, a fallacy that fails the Test of Occam’s Razor and makes your claims easy to debunk.

But there’s another problem with source selection, and it gets into formal epistemology.

Who do you trust?

I know somebody who regularly trusts people who provide false information and even commit fraud. This same person thinks op/eds are fact, including those printed by newspapers with known biases and poor track records, and falls for pretty much every urban legend around.

I know somebody who works for a science-based organization who has no clue about the importance of clinical studies, never met one in their life, and thinks MSM publications are valid evidence to support a claim about a medical conclusion.

And as we all know, there are people who fall for every fallacious conspiracy theory put out by their favorite organizations. MAGA and Fox are the most glaring example.

But at the same time, we know of otherwise reputable media like the Lancet, which have published studies that turned out to be flawed. One was the connection between the MMR vaccine and autism. Another recent one was a paper using the known false Gaza Health Ministry death statistics. For the record, Lancet has retracted both of them.

MSM is not like that. They almost never retract. And they are untrustworthy about law, science, or religion. In 1980s cost-cutting, they fired their experts. They no longer have anybody to tell them what is significant in these fields. In the last 10 years or so, they began firing their expensive writers who knew how to do in-depth research; research takes time, and fails to keep up with trends. More and more, I find that articles read like some 22 year old was turned loose with Google. The writer lacked deep background; they may have been under deadline pressure, making good research impossible. So they turned out meaningless drivel. I rarely quote MSM in social media unless I dispute their claims – some outlets I don’t access at all.

There are people who either fail to realize how unreliable MSM is, or they ignore it in favor of getting attention on social media. I’ve busted their chops and sometimes gotten blocked because I bruised their egos. Some of these same people whine about disinformation while putting it out.

People also stick with what they know, whether because of ego or because they live in an echo chamber. Some people from the glasnost period are still stuck in that mindset and when I hear them give radio interviews, I ignore what they say. You want names? I can give you a couple.

And then there’s Wikipedia. Well, really, there are all encyclopedias. This comes from a skeet exchange; the other person said they use encyclopedias as a start, and the bibliography for more information. Not realizing that the bibliography was the starting point for the false or debunked facts in the article. Let alone what I said last week about books not counting as evidence of expertise. Let alone that the bibliography books or articles could be filled with fallacies, just like the article. All of which I pointed out in my skeets.

This all started from an announcement that Encyclopedia Britannica was going AI. Well, the old EB had falsehood and fallacy based articles, and AI will not make it better.

The closer your source is to whoever generated the data, the more trustworthy it is. I’ll say this again in a different way later.

So you should be reading the papers at NIH, not listening to a 30-second statement on radio, if you want the truth about weight loss.

Now, I can hear you saying, “But I don’t understand that stuff.” What’s that old song? When You’ve Only Got A Hundred Years to Live? Is it really OK for people to lie to you for a hundred years, as long as you don’t have to learn anything you didn’t know before?

If you’re interested in a subject, and you don’t want people to lie to you, you have to become the expert. You have to keep a tickler file of reports. Then you have to go to a site called Retraction Watch.

Anything in your tickler file that shows up there, you need to dump.

And you need to review your ticklers from time to time. If one of them bucks the trend, red-flag it in case it’s based on false data. Dump it when it gets formally debunked.

All of which is hard to do. But if we don’t do it, we wind up failing the Test of Occam’s Razor when our data gets debunked. An old article, claiming that philology shows the Indo-Europeans originated in and around the Holy Land, is debunked by 21^st century DNA hard evidence. (I always ignore philology; I have a post for that.)

Learn which people are not making their best efforts, starting with analyzing their claims in case they used fallacies.

The ones that seem to be making their best effort, go in your tickler file – but you have to dump them if they get debunked.

It’s called life-long learning. It’s recommended for preventing Alzheimer’s, along with eating right and exercising.

Look, I admit I have a problem. I’m cursed with being old, and having read since I was four, and having a good memory and a logical mind. About age 15 I got tired of being lied to so as to control my ideas and behavior, so that makes me a tight-ass about these things. Time after time, curating my sources of information has helped me avoid problems that other people have. My faults have saved my money, my time, maybe my life. But that’s just me.