jennypenny wrote:
Those comments seem remarkably similar to comments I hear about climate change. A person isn’t automatically a “denier” just because they haven’t jumped onboard the Climate Change band wagon yet. The average, reasonable person might believe what they read about the science, but still get that niggling in the back of their mind when first-hand evidence doesn’t match their understanding of the science (like when they have to shovel snow in October). That uncertainty then mixes with a percolating distrust of the government’s role and purpose, which causes some people to wonder if proposed climate change policies are meant to help the average citizen or just feed the Big Gov’t/Wall St juggernaut. I don’t think that makes the average person dumb, or ignorant, or a candidate for the flat earth society.
I was hesitant to poke this thread with a stick again, but I feel like there’s a large group of not-quite-there-yet or as-yet-undecided people who get trod on and lumped in with the woo crowd unfairly.
Yay, my favourite thread
That "niggling in the back of their mind" because they can't match up global warming with the snow in their backyard is basically an "argument from personal incredulity" which is a fallacious kind of argument. Actually it is rarely an actual argument in their mind but more like a hunch or a feeling which is why this fallacy is so easy to fall into. Especially in these internet times when "tl;dr have opinion anyway" seems to be standard MO.
The unstated premise is:
1) I believe I'm a pretty educated/informed person(*)
And the stated premise is:
2) The scientific conclusions don't make sense to me.
Which leads to:
3) Therefore, I remain skeptical about the science.
However, this conclusion is false, if premise #1 is wrong, because just because something doesn't make sense to you personally, it doesn't mean that it doesn't make sense to people who are more informed.
E.g.
1) I have a PhD in accounting and 20 years of tax experience (subconsciously: so I must know how microbiology works too. Forsooth, I pretty much know how everything works.)
2) The theory of evolution makes no sense to me.
3) Therefore, evolution is false.
(*) Unfortunately, many if not most people believe this. Very few will readily admit their ignorance to themselves or to others. Thanks to Dunning-Kruger, the weaker the grounds for holding this premise of thinking oneself informed, the stronger it's being held.
I see this fallacy in the blog comments a lot, so it's not only in politics, but also in ERE complaints. For ERE, it's the cliche complainypants who spends 5 minutes reading a blog post and then proceed to tell me how I must have made the whole thing up because there's no way he can imagine spending so little. The complainypants will even rationalize this with consumerist examples that demonstrate his lack of imagination and understanding while remaining entirely oblivious to the fact that he just demonstrated this ignorance explicitly.
The wiki article on reason says the following:
"Reason is the capacity for consciously making sense of things, applying logic, establishing and verifying facts, and changing or justifying practices, institutions, and beliefs based on new or existing information."
This is a good and succinct definition of reason, so I'll go with that.
The only REASONABLE approach for a skeptic (who is committing the incredulity fallacy) would therefore be to educate themselves on the science OR put their trust in the scientists who have spent that time educating themselves.
That would be
1) I realize I know little about X.
2) I would like to have an informed opinion about X.
3) Therefore I should educate myself.
or
1) I realize I know little about X.
2) I would like to have an informed opinion about X.
3) Therefore I should ask someone whom I trust to be informed to give me their opinion.
However, the average person hates to educate themselves and so they're not going to do that every time they're confronted with something they don't understand.---Besides, average people think they have a pretty good understanding of most things. So this approach rarely works.
BTW: In my experience there's no such thing as an "average reasonable" person which seems to be an oxymoron at least on par with "common sense".
This leaves putting their trust in the scientists themselves. Knowing this, someone looking to make people believe that climate change is wrong can either
1) Show that it is wrong using reason.
2) Make people believe that experts can't be trusted to make an informed conclusion.
Doing (1) is pretty damn hard since X was arrived at by the scientific method which will converge on the most reasonable answer by construction. A few scientists still try to poke holes in the theory using _reason_ and that kind of skepticism, call it cientific-skepticism, is COMMENDABLE and provide a valuable scientific service.
Doing (2) turns out to be fairly easy. In fact, it is very easy to make an uninformed person mistrust an expert. As Dragline informed us above, some of the methods are tools of the trade for the lawyer profession, but even lawyers have lines they won't or aren't allowed to cross. Propaganda meisters have no such lines, so they can use all the tools in the box including lying (which lawyers aren't allowed to do). I listed the ten or so most common methods of manipulation a few messages up. This kind of skepticism, call it propaganda-skepticism, is REPREHENSIBLE and deserves to be condemned.
Generally, there aren't many "not-quite-there-yet or as-yet-undecided people" who have pursued reason by picking up a textbook or read an actual scientific review. I understand that, because it takes a lot of time to understand something as complex as climate. Those who have done so tend to stop being skeptics. Because in this case the amount of evidence is overwhelming.
On the contrary, the much more popular approach is to google some politically slanted news article or repeat an argument from (2) without verification (e.g. checking whether the graph was manipulated to change the impression of the conclusion). Essentially people are buying into/falling for the manipulation being carried out in (2) focusing on the wrong data and for the wrong reasons and being led towards the wrong conclusions. This is anti-reason. It needs to be strongly discouraged and shown for what it is.
Repeating the conditions ...
"Reason is the capacity for consciously making sense of things, applying logic, establishing and verifying facts, and changing or justifying practices, institutions, and beliefs based on new or existing information."
The requirement is
1) Adhering to the principles of logic. (E.g. if a is true and a leads to be is true, then b is true... even if we don't like b)
2) Establishing and verifying facts. (E.g. no such thing as "that's not a fact, that's just your opinion" or "I'll look at that later")
3) Changing beliefs based on new information. (E.g. no such thing as "that may be true, but I still choose not to believe in that")
This would be the foundation of a reasoned debate.
Basically, I'm not too sympathetic towards repeat offences of logical fallacies.---which is why this thread gets me so riled up. Hence, I don't accept the "I'm uninformed so therefore I'm skeptical" argument. Basically, the only reasonable stance a uninformed person is either state that they are uninformed (and abstain from judgement) OR they can side with the experts (due to the overwhelming agreement between experts). However, they can not come down on the side against the experts while being uninformed themselves. Because that is unreasonable.
) and the exact same kinds of physics (obviously not in degree but in kind), so I'd say that my layman's opinion is rather informed. I could probably transition into the field of climate modelling and contribute after a year or so of acquiring specific and detailed domain knowledge as it's not all the different from what I already know. Kinda like switching from flying jets to passenger planes.
