Why Fallacies are False -- 10, manipulation

All right. I’m back from my sources sidebar and back on the track of failing the Test of Occam’s Razor, data portion. I talked about sampling bias and other violations of the completeness requirement, including quoting out of context to hide inconvenient facts. Now I’m up to the misrepresentation problem. This includes photoshopping and creating deep fakes, as well as publishing years-old photos or videos and claiming it as evidence of a current event.

And I’m here to talk about something that won’t make sense to you unless you’re a language geek like me. Even if you are a language geek, you may profit from me making this point. I have a scientific (tested) theory to back me up, and I have about 30 posts on the subject on my blog.

http://pajheil.blogspot.com/2017/01/fact-checking-torah-two-which-are-four.html

But if you have been reading my threads on Biblical Hebrew and Classical Greek, you know where I’m going.

First, there’s the fallacy. A strawman argument misrepresents what somebody said in the interests of arguing against them. People use it to try to refute an opponent, but it fails because it doesn’t refute what they actually said, it only refutes what the speaker pretends they said.

It’s related to the red herring fallacy, which tries to introduce a different subject that may or may not be related to the discussion, and argue about that while ignoring the original subject of the argument. Us old people may remember the OJ Simpson trial with the lawyer who held Simpson’s feet to the fire by saying “that’s not what I asked.” The lawyer was rejecting red herrings.

Where am I going with this?

There is no translation of material, especially non-scientific literature, that 100% represents the source. Every language has words for which there is no equivalent in the target language. Any translator who substitutes one word in the source by one word in the translation, fails, if the language of the translation does not have an equivalent. Even if there is, the translator may carelessly, ignorantly, or with intent use a different word, of which I will have an example later.

It gets worse. Every language has idioms, which combine words to get a meaning that the component words cannot express. Any translator who does a word-for-word substitution with an idiom produces nonsense.

And it goes on. If the language of the source document has a different grammatical structure than the language of the translation, nuances disappear in translation. If the source language has honorific morphology and the target does not, the translator has to add honorific words or lose the sense of the source document.

And finally, language expresses the worldview and culture of the people who grow up speaking that language. This is the fundamental reason why two countries understand each other so poorly on occasion. It even happens between English-speaking nations like the US and UK.

But it also applies within a country. I have evidence from multiple sources, that people in different subsets of a single culture think and speak differently. Both the way they word things and the content of what they say, differs from other subsets. When people sneer at speakers who change what they say and how, in different audiences, it shows ignorance of the need to “know your audience” and write or speak so that each specific audience will understand what you say. Your audience has to get it to agree with it, and you are responsible for helping them get it.

It came out in the Mendel Beilis trial. The prosecutors and judge kept trying to pinpoint dates and times when things happened. The witnesses – shopkeepers, laborers, their relatives – did not know what month it was when things happened; even if they could read, they did not use or did not have access to calendars. They thought in terms of seasons of the year or church observances. And some church observances are moveable feasts. The prosecutors spent court time harassing witnesses to sign off that a given event occurred on a given date, and it always failed. It cast doubt on the testimony of those witnesses. Beilis was acquitted for that and a number of other reasons.

The way you speak in tone and word, is a litmus test to see who is, or is willing to be, part of your cultural subset.

Now do you understand why you don’t understand what your teenagers say half the time?

Does this help explain to you why MAGA and non-MAGA cannot communicate en masse? If not, go back and reread all of these posts.

I’ll stop here and give you a chance to do that, and then I’ll pick up with something I’ve already discussed, from a new angle.

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.

21st Century Classical Greek -- dependent clauses

So I'm going back to fill in gaps in what I wrote about how bad the old Greek grammars are and I think I have objective data for why their discussions of dependent clauses are so bad. Now that you know how geeky this post will be, you can stop reading.

The old description of dependent clauses required them to start with particles like ὡς  or ὅτι (there are three others). But that is Grenglish. In English, we require dependent clauses to start with words identifying either its function in the sentence, or relative pronouns or subordinating conjunctions. Part of the reason is our lack of case markers which, in Greek, identify the antecedents of the subjects of dependent clauses.

In Classical Greek, you get personal gerundives in the same gender, case and number as their subject, which is elsewhere in the sentence, that introduce dependent clauses. You find them in Peloponnesian War I 1.1. with the personal gerundives agreeing with Thoukidides, that add information. They have none of the particles.

Where you get the particles, other things are happening in the sentence.

a) The dependent clause has a subject which immediately precedes it in a different case. That's the clause right after "Peloponnesians and Athenians". It reinforces that the subject of the dependent clause is the same as the last topic mentioned.

b) The dependent clause has a different subject from the clause it depends on, or which is not the last topic mentioned. So tekmairomenos refers to Thucydides, but the dependent clause has "the Peloponnesians and Athenians" understood to be the subject.

The dependent clause may itself be subordinate to a dependent clause; you have this in the text I refer to in (b).

This description of subordinate clauses shows that one use of an is a case of (b), making it a subordinating article IN SOME CONTEXTS. In these contexts there are only two possible subjects for the dependent clause, and in a vague way this relates to using an to introduce the "then" of a conditional which, of course, has only an "if" statement and a "then" statement (although one of them may be suppressed). 

(a) and (b) describe where you NEED the particles. You CAN have a dependent clause without a particle, which all the old grammarians ignore because first, their sources ignored it and, second, they were thinking in Grenglish. Third, they regarded personal gerundives as "absolutes", usually expressing time -- except for the -oi case. They denied that "nominative absolutes" existed, although you will find the term in English grammar. 

I'm going to keep studying this. In particular, I want to see if you can only use ὡς immediately after the antecedent of the subject of the dependent clause, while other particles have some other relationship to their antecedent the way an does. If I find other uses for the particles or I find examples of these usages that don't have a particle, I'll tell you. I'll also tell you if I find examples where ὡς after a topic, introduces a dependent clause which does not have that topic as its subject.

So once again, the point is that Classical Greek is not some poor cousin of Latin or some close relative of English. It is DIFFERENT and deserves to be treated on its own merits.

Why Fallacies are False -- 08, Sampling Bias

Living in an echo chamber creates a fallacy called sampling bias.

It automatically excludes some true data from consideration.

You may ask “what if I have a huge circle of experts in my echo chamber?” You have to make sure your people really are experts.

There’s a legal definition for that. If the person has an extensive background of research and publishing in peer-reviewed periodicals, often with some teaching thrown in, that person can testify as an expert witness in court. But only in the field where they have done research. A psychiatrist can testify about a patient’s mental condition, but not about what caused a car crash involving the patient.

Or, if they have trained in a given field and worked there for years, they can testify as an expert witness. But only in the field where they have worked. An FAA controller can testify to how air traffic control works, but not about airplane engineering unless (see above).

People called as expert witnesses have been disqualified if they published only in periodicals that promote a specific line of thought. Their research is not scientific; the name for it is advocacy research. These people usually commit sampling bias; all their research is done among people in their echo chambers. A court will only accept their testimony if it is supported by work done outside the echo chamber.

Publishing books doesn’t count instead of or in addition to periodicals, unless the books are commercial versions of peer-reviewed professional publications, like the book form of an approved dissertation. Publishers are famous for getting authors to tart up their work to make it more exciting (I’ll say more about the excitement factor in later posts). Too many books get debunked; diet books all get debunked sooner or later.

Dr. A was an expert on biochemistry, but his book would have attracted an invitation from an echo chamber about the Bible, about which he knew nothing but what DH discussed.

Sampling bias and a number of other fallacies fail the data portion of the Test of Occam’s Razor, which says you have to cover all data that meets the description of your dataset, and do it honestly, without corruption or manipulation. I’ll talk about the manipulation part in later posts.

A number of fallacies have similar features to sampling bias; here are three of them.

The first is the one I talked about for the drug test. You pick a dataset and then you claim the drug is effective (a categorical) when your dataset only covers 10% of the world population. If you want a true claim that your drug is effective, your dataset has to be the start of a series of tests, each of which will address a different demographic. It has to be the “break up the problem and test one piece at a time” portion of Cartesian method. It cannot be the whole show.

Another is often called “cherry picking”. You do all the testing, then you report only on the successful trials. I saw this depicted on ER, once. A doctor was running trials of a drug, and reported out only the successful trials. The rest he grouped as “underlying unfavorable conditions”. A younger doctor assisting in the trials questioned this – and was fired. He was right to question it; he got fired over a bruised ego. Yeah, I know that was a TV show, if you know a lot about drug testing, speak up with a more realistic version and we’ll all learn something.

The third is one that I told Gary Curtis about, called The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. You create your output, then you create the description of the dataset to cover the outcomes you like. Sort of like, a guy shoots at his barn, then decides which ones he wants to brag about. Draws a line around them and claims that was the target all along.

A partially related fallacy is “quoting out of context”, which I discuss on my blog in three posts. 

Quoting out of context has been used for millennia to influence people to think or behave a given way.

Sampling bias also relates to weak analogies. An analogy might ignore inconvenient truths in the interests of making a point. An archaeologist once claimed that an inscription referencing Balaam was a reference to the Balaam in the Bible. It was a Moabitic site, which coordinated with Balaam in the Bible working for the king of Moab. But Balaam was part of the Exodus story, and the Israelites existed in the Holy Land in time for Merneptah to write his stele (1230s BCE), while the Moabite inscription dated to the 800s BCE. Add to that the 100% difference between what the inscription and the Bible record, and that archaeologist proved nothing except their own incompetence.

There’s a tradeoff between dataset creation and the use you can make of it. But remember, you’re the one who decides on the dataset, and unless you cast a broad enough net, your claims of “I haven’t seen…” become irrelevant.

Why Fallacies are False -- 07, Categoricals and Negatives

The phrase “I haven’t seen…” is an attempt to assert a categorical negative claim. Let’s look at categoricals.

A categorical claim says that all X are Y.

If you can find even one example of X that is not Y, the statement is false.

And since none of us are omniscient, nor can we access every piece of evidence that might exist, we cannot make categorical claims – UNLESS WE HAVE A COMPLETE DATASET.

To get a complete dataset to make claims about, we need a clear definition of what is in our dataset and what is not. But we can make the definition so stringent we defeat ourselves.

Real world example? You want to test a drug. If your dataset of test subjects is strictly white males between 20 and 50, your results don’t necessarily apply to women, to children, to the elderly, or to POC. So you can’t make the categorical statement that “Drug X is 75% effective” except for test subjects who represent 10% or less of the world’s demographics. But decades ago, everybody assumed that if it worked on white males of a given age, it would work on everybody else. People died over that assumption.

The “all X are Y” claim means every member of one dataset is also a member of another dataset or has the same description. The problem comes if you claim that all X are not Y. This can mean two things.

One is that no member of dataset X is in dataset Y or matches the description in dataset Y. When we’re just talking normally, saying “all X are not Y” could mean that some X ARE Y: “all dogs are not vicious” in normal conversation could mean you’ve been talking about dogs that are vicious but you want to point out that viciousness is not a universal quality of dogs.

That doesn’t work in logic. If you mean “some are not”, you have to say “some are not”.

The other thing it can mean is that you are confusing inherent qualities (essence) and qualities perceived or caused (accidence). This is the basis for the “all dogs are not vicious”. The person saying that probably knows that historically, abused animals turn mean. They’re saying that dogs are not inherently vicious, the viciousness is caused.

Negation is an operation in Boolean algebra. It is a categorical claim that something does not exist. When you don’t have a complete dataset, making a negative claim risks somebody finding the exception that proves your claim doesn’t hold water.

“I haven’t seen…” is an attempt to pretend that you have a complete dataset. In reality, on social media for example, it only means that you don’t follow every account on every possible platform.

Instead, it often means that you only follow the accounts of people who already agree with you. It’s called “being in an echo chamber”. If you want to say “I haven’t seen…”, make sure you do it inside your echo chamber, because people outside it may have the evidence that what you say is false. And so I have a habit of replying “follow more accounts”, especially when I HAVE seen whatever the OP is denying.

Instead of saying “I haven’t seen…”, give the hard evidence that the probability of existence is infinitesimal. Calculating an infinitesimal probability of truth shows that an argument is “down in the noise”, not worth troubling your head over. That’s what forensic DNA testing does, tells the court that there’s an infinitesimal probability that somebody other than the accused provided the sample that gave the test results.

Now. In logic, you can also defeat a negative by proving that it creates an absurdity, reductio ad absurdam. It’s kind of like what Elle did to her ex in class in Legally Blonde. He made a categorical claim that a guy was not stalking the girl who birthed his child, he was worried about what happened to the sperm he had donated. Elle reduced that to an absurdity by asking if he would do the same thing if he donated to a sperm bank or had a nocturnal emission. But that was in class, not in court.

So let’s be careful about both the categoricals and the negatives that we try to prove.

Knitting -- videos

Time has passed since I started my Knitting thread. Some of the videos I link to don't work any more. 

Johnny Vasquez' New Stitch a Day site used to have videos for basic stitch patterns but they have reorganized on some stupid principle you will never figure out and a search for "basic knit stitch" doesn't turn up a video.

Here's one solution. I have used a number of Joanne's patterns.

https://joannesweb.com/how-to-knit-the-absolute-beginners-guide/

This page has a video for the long tail cast on that I have learned to love, as well as knit and purl stitches.

https://joannesweb.com/how-to-knit-the-absolute-beginners-guide/

If you've been using my knitting blog and got frustrated by links that didn't work, I hope this helps.

Why Fallacies are False -- 06, Argument from Silence

The issue of hard evidence is important to every argument. When you don’t have any hard evidence, you’re done. You can’t prove anything. Right? Right?

Have you ever heard the phrase “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”?

I’ll give you a concrete example some of you may be too young to know about.

There are currently no Buddhist statues in Afghanistan. Does that mean there never were?

Us old people may remember the Bamian Buddhist statues carved into rock in Afghanistan. The Taliban blew them up. Pictures remain, but if you don’t know about the history or you’ve never seen the pictures, you might claim those statues never existed.

This is a fallacy called “The false argument from silence”. Does that sound familiar?

There is a true argument from silence. You can’t make it unless you have the complete dataset.

So if you claim that HBO is not running a specific film, all you have to do is show the HBO program schedule. If that film isn’t in the schedule, it follows as the night the day that HBO is not running it. HBO has complete control of the dataset and they are not going to list something they are not running.

But when anybody goes on social media and says “I haven’t seen…” they are running into the false argument from silence for several reasons.

First, they are not Gd. They are not omniscient. There can be many things they do not know. I have labeled this The Omniscience Fallacy but it’s a subset of the false argument from silence.

Second, the world churns out 1 terabyte of data daily. It is not possible for a mortal to access every piece of data the world turns out.

“I haven’t seen” is also a bigger issue called making a negative claim, and it’s related to categorical statements, which deserve a post of their own.

But on the subject of the false argument from silence, before there was a terabyte of data in the world, the false argument had concrete examples. If you’re a paleontologist, you know it as natura non facit saltus.

No paleontologist can discover a new fossil without knowing that at least half a billion years of ancestors lie behind it. That’s because the hard evidence for the age of earth says it is 4.5 billion years old, and the hard evidence for the history of life says it goes back 4 billion years. There’s no such thing as finding a fossil, and thinking that it had no parents, grandparents, or other antecedents. You don’t need hard evidence of all the antecedents to know they existed.

And we know of many mechanisms that deprive us of the remains of living things: fires; volcanoes; earthquakes that bury them; tectonic plate shifts; normal decay and weathering; rockslides and cave collapses.

On my blog, I change this for archaeologists: cultura non facit saltus. There are no archaeological remains that arise out of nothing. They all have cultural antecedents. But a 350 century old archaeological site had 1 micrometer per year of remains, in a hunting camp repeatedly occupied across human evolution, by both Neanderthals and Cro Magnon. As time went on and human tools became more durable, remains at the various archaeological sites became deeper; ceramics lasted longer than leather bottles and metal survived longer than ceramics, except for precious metals and iron which were remelted and recast.

And any historian who talks about Dark Ages and pretends that the next stage in a culture arose out of nothing can go pound sand, for the same reason. No historian has a complete dataset even for a single year in time, let alone for the antecedents of whatever they are studying.

So with my Torah example, claim one saying that there is a single source for it, does not need hard evidence for support. Torah definitely exists, and being a cultural artifact, has a history behind it involving that culture. We will never have all the steps in that history. But denying that there is a history is bad logic. I’ll say more about this at the end of this thread.

The same is true for DH. Just because we have no hard evidence for JEDP, doesn’t mean they didn’t exist. The problem for DH is that the concept is full of false data and fallacies.

So next time you are tempted to say “there’s no evidence of that”, stop yourself and ask “do I have a complete dataset?” Being that we are not omniscient and can’t cope with all the evidence that might exist, the answer is probably no. Even if you’re a specialist in the field, remember my professor, who wrote the dissertation on Biblical Hebrew and didn’t know that there was external evidence that what he wrote about was a thing.

I’ll say more about incomplete datasets later, but next week I’m going to clean up after myself.