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.