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.