“Woo! OK!” she said. I couldn’t agree more.
Here we are, in our offices and in front of our desks, on the first work day after the first Presidential debate of the 2016 election. Ho man. If you’re anything like pretty much anyone else on earth, you’re probably spending at least a third of your time on Facebook, watching the pinging back and forth between your “Bernie or Bust” college roommate and your redneck uncle who’s stockpiling weapons somewhere in the Idaho panhandle.
Yessirree, it’s going to be a wild few months on the ‘ol social media as the Great American Experiment grinds through the electoral process and millions of armchair analysts freshen their coffee, turn on CAPS LOCK, and fire away into the cloud.
It can get confusing out there, in your Facebook newsfeed. There’s yelling. There are hyperlinks to plain HTML websites with black backgrounds as citations. People keep telling you you hate the troops and you’re going to hell and all you really want is an affordable way to go to college. What gives?
At work in this country is our communal failure to properly identify and avoid logical fallacies in the pursuit of our civic process. And so to help streamline things a little bit, I’ve picked out a few that you should keep an eye out for.
The Logical Fallacies of Facebook:
a user’s guide to dealing with your redneck uncle and whackjob aunt so you can all still enjoy Thanksgiving together in a few months
The False Equivalency – falsum ex condigno – This is a big one. Maybe the main one. It stems from establishing an incorrect premise on which an argument is built. Think about it this way: if you were baking a cake, and you ran out of ingredients, but then you remembered hearing in a presidential debate that vegetable oil and motor oil are interchangeable, your cake would make a lot of people sick. This kind of confusion happens a lot.
One of the most damaging false equivalencies that keeps rearing its head is the notion that science is science, and therefore all science is equal. We see this across fields. Whether folks are arguing that Creationism is just as scientifically valid as Evolution, or that climate change is somehow not a thing, or that some bar chart that the Drudge Report shared is as rigorous as a peer reviewed and published statistical analysis of police violence against minorities.
Because that’s the thing about science. It’s tricky. Which is why we have scientists who do it for us. And just to make sure those scientists don’t get all fast and loose, we have other scientists check their work through a process called peer review. So when it gets through that, you can be pretty sure it’s legit.
We rely on scientists to do our science for the same reason that we elect politicians, and go to doctors, and have people with tattoos make our coffee. It’s so that we don’t have to figure out how to do it ourselves. Multi-level Bayesian analysis and crafting policy and negotiating arms deals with Iran is confusing. We hire people to do that for us so that we can follow our true calling: cranking beers and yelling at each other on the internet.
The Appeal to Nature – appellare ad naturam – And while we’re talking about science, the notion that something is “natural” is not a valid argument for why it is right. Vaccinate your damn kids.
The Anecdotal Fallacy – anecdotal fallacia – I had a roommate once tell me that he never wears a seat belt because his father has been in three rollover collisions without a seat belt and every time he was thrown to safety. You can file this in the same place as the story that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheered as the towers came down: it is, at best, irrelevant, and pretty much guaranteed to be made up bullshit anyway.
The Bandwagon Approach – argumentum ad populum – “A lot of people are saying [insert claim here].” This one should be obvious. Cite your damn sources. Real ones. Not that fifth-page-Google-results tripe that just links to Alex Jones blogs if anything at all.
The Irrelevant Conclusion – ignorantio elenchi – This is another big one, and you see it a lot in debates, both televised and unfolding on the wall of an unsuspecting gradeschool classmate that you haven’t seen or spoken to in nearly two decades. It’s sort of like saying “I have a pet duck, therefore your car is purple.”
Keep a close eye out for Straw Man (changing or oversimplifying an opponent’s argument so that it’s easier to refute) and Red Herring (changing the subject because your point doesn’t actually make any sense and you don’t want to talk about it anymore) arguments, and remember that neither of them are characters on Game of Thrones.
Appeal to Improper Authority – argumentum ad verecundium – “CALL SEAN HANNITY! ASK HIM!”
Remember, the employment if these fallacies is not crafty debate technique. It just makes you look ignorant and uninformed. So study up, cite your sources, and don’t be afraid to change an opinion when faced with compelling evidence that refutes it!
