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.

Why Fallacies are False -- 13, false dilemma

Now I turn to another of my favorite fallacies because it shows the limitations of mortal thought.

It’s the false dilemma. It gives you two options and it’s a sort of sampling bias if they are not the ONLY options available in the natural world.

In other words, to me, nature presents more than a pair of options, and sometimes a long ribbon of options.

So whenever anybody presents me with a dilemma, I reject it until I’ve had time to think of the third possibility, or the umpteenth one, or whatever it is.

There’s a really fun way of coming up with the other options.

1/ You have to know your audience.

2/ You have to know what would make their head explode.

3/ You have to evaluate whether that is an option that exists out in reality.

And I have found over and over again, that you can avoid the trap of the false dilemma by going straight for the option that will make heads explode.

I’ll give you an example.

How many of you were told you had to go to college, even if you majored in a business field, or you would never get a good paying job?

And did you stop and think about why you couldn’t be vocational? Why couldn’t you go and learn HVAC or plumbing or electrical work or any of the myriad other skills we need in our infrastructure? Some of those jobs pay well, you can get loans for trade school if your parents won’t pay for it, and they are ALWAYS needed.

Your parents couldn’t see that option, or didn’t want to, or didn’t know enough to see that it could be a good thing. And that’s why you got shoved into college in the first place.

In college, your parents forced you to take classes only if required, or only in your major, by refusing to pay for anything else. This is called “staying in your lane”. If you went for post-graduate work, your advisor did the same thing, enforcing it by downgrading your work.

There’s another name for “staying in your lane”, it’s pipelining and it creates sampling bias. I can’t tell you how many academic papers I’ve read and rejected because the author pipelined the research and missed important facts that discredited their conclusion. I can’t tell you how often I’ve replied to a tweet or skeet and included a link to professional data or historical reports on the missing facts.

You’re saying, “but you told us we could break the problem up and work each small piece separately”. I sure did. That’s Cartesian method. Peer review guarantees that somebody reports on whether the small pieces fit back into the big picture. I’m talking now about papers that don’t seem to know there is a big picture to fit into, or they don’t follow the method. Anybody writing about the Philistines after 1995, who wants to be taken seriously, has to show that they know about the Sea Peoples and that Linear B was a script used by their Pelishtim subset as well as in Crete. The big picture goes far beyond the Bible.

Anybody doing archaeology after the Oxford Project reported out its findings, about 2010, has to show they know that radiocarbon dating shows the ancient past of the Mediterranean was more ancient than we thought. A well-known archaeologist bucked this trend in his work at Avaris by ignoring radiocarbon dating altogether, and he has been criticized to death. It only got worse when archaeologists found out during peer review, that his old-fashioned stratigraphy was at best all wrong and at worst manipulated.

Anybody writing about the migration of peoples after the report of the Human Genome Project, has to show the DNA hard evidence supporting their supposed history. That’s that philology thing I talked about a few weeks ago.

It takes some practice to make a habit of looking for the third option, and it takes research to find it. And you have to get out of your lane to do some of the research.

But you’ll avoid getting trapped in a no-win situation and you lessen the possibility that your work will get debunked.