Yes, shifting from the conclusion (calling it bad) to the argument (calling it bad) is essentially the same thing.
Is it that last 1% of assurance you are looking for @JonnyPitt ?
As in, if an actually free person can make a “bad argument/conclusion” they could also be wrong about actual freedom itself?
That is indeed the risk. Yet, as the years go by, the stakes are far lower.
Everything that has a beginning has an end; that is a verifiable fact, at least it seems so.
However, if it is a fact that ‘we’ do indeed go on forever. So be it. Nothing we decide would change that. The question is whether we would sacrifice ‘ourselves’ for the freedom of these actual humans.
I think the point of the Soros argument isn’t whether there is warming happening or not, but whether it is man-made or not. The argument is that the NWO folks are deliberately misleading people
Part of that argument is that studies are being ‘cooked,’ so citing more of those studies wouldn’t help much
If you watch enough SkyNews in Australia - you may think differently Jon. What media do you consume that shapes your worldview? You are in USA, right? My wife listens to NPR first thing in the morning. They talk nonstop about how whites are oppressing blacks, and men are oppressing women. Not surprisingly, she has formed a worldview that is consistent with the content she’s consumed.
My dear mother on the other hand, being of the same age cohort as dear Richard and Vineeto, watches Fox News and Tucker Carlson. Not surprisingly, my mother’s worldview sounds remarkably similar to the media content that she consumes. Coincidence?
Is it so far-fetched to consider that the media we consume, the evidence presented before us, the content these organizations deem important, shapes our cognitive perception of the world?
Enjoy a clip from Sky News Australia, owned by Mr. Murdoch, the same feller who owns Fox News in the US. Both Sky News and Fox News. This is mainstream news. This is not crazy stuff. This is not insanity (strictly speaking). This is a normal, typical, ordinary, common, middle-of-the-road, and unexceptional opinion of things.
My university educated sister disparages and scoffs at her Fox News-watching mother, while consuming her brand of ideology-infused media, geared to her cohort.
Neither one understands how the other can be stupid to think in the way they do.
Absolutely. But citing Soros isn’t evidence that those studies are being cooked. Like you pointed out, the methodology is too specialized to argue against. So it is difficult to show those studies are being cooked. But you can show their predictions have not bore out. You can present alternative reasons for the warming. And you can show the emission estimates are way over-estimated or the amount of heat these gasses trap is way over-stated. Those would all be good arguments!
Now you made the point that if Soros is funding all the research and demands all the evidence be cooked then it’d be impossible to argue against the research. Agreed. But citing Soros isn’t evidence that he’s doing those things. Someone who believes that he is would need to cite evidence of a conspiracy. Otherwise, it’s a bad argument. He’d also need some demonstration that no fossil fuel groups are funding any research countering Soros’s mission. Otherwise, there would be, potentially, a pool of evidence to draw good arguments from: showing climate predictions to be false, alternative reasons for warming, different emission estimates and the different heat holding capacity estimates.
@rick
It’s just about the arguments. There are good ones and there are bad ones. My question is if emotion isn’t the sole reason why people hold onto bad arguments then what may be some other reasons?
Perhaps the good/bad argument dichotomy is something very few people can understand. I find that surprising given our entire legal system is based on evidentiary logic and all scientific progress is based on a method of filtering out what is and what isn’t. But then again juries are known to be easily led and very very few people could make it as either a lawyer or a scientist. So like you pointed out earlier, maybe our brains lack the capacity.
Only ideally. This is not what happens day-to-day in the court rooms, or in the editor’s room of major scientific journals that influence public policy.
Not only that - lawyers and scientists are people too. They interpret data depending on their proclivities. Of course, there are “methods” (like the scientific method) that are supposed to minimize that kind of thing. But in reality that’s not what happens.
It’s the best it can do at this point in its evolution.
Facts change which could make something look biased. For example I saw a guy say that the market was going to do x. Later on he sad it was going to do something different and he said that the facts had changed and when the facts change then he changes,
Citing Soros isn’t a bad argument. It’s not an argument at all. It’s stating a fact — the fact is that Soros funds X, Y and Z. It’s also a fact Soros has A, B and C political views , etc.
These facts don’t constitute direct evidence that they are cooking the studies. But they do constitute circumstancial evidence :
Circumstantial evidence is evidence of facts that the court can draw conclusions from. For example, if an assault happened on O’Connell Street at 6.15pm, you can give evidence that you saw the accused walking down O’Connell Street at 6pm. In that situation, you are giving the court circumstantial evidence. The court can draw conclusions from the fact that the accused was on O’Connell Street at 6pm, but you have not given evidence about whether the accused attacked a person.
Just because the accused was on the street at 6pm doesn’t mean he did it. But it contributes to the evidence that he did - in this case showing he could have (being physically close).
So if Soros did want some studies cooked … it seems like he could. Lots of money will do that. And if he were to cook it they would be cooked in a way that supports his worldview or aims etc.
Note that contrary to common belief circumstantial evidence is admissible in court. If there’s only one piece of evidence — like him walking down street at 6pm — that won’t be enough to convict. But if his fingerprints are also on the murder weapon and that weapon was found in his backyard … none of it directly proves he did it (the murderer could have taken the knife from his house , committed the murder and dropped it off in his backyard), but it might be enough to convict.
So yeaup… not a bad argument. Again doesn’t prove it but … circumstantial. It seems more like you already have a conclusion (global warming is man-made) and therefore discount the evidence as ‘bad’ by making a judgement call. Not a logical fallacy, not a flaw in logical chain of thought.
C’mon bro. You’re better than that. It’s very poor circumstantial evidence. And an argument that relies on it would be a bad argument. I mean really. Didn’t you major in logic in college?
I think it’s funny you’re explaining how evidence and court cases work. We know. So try this on for size. Say victim ‘V’ is found coughing blood and having seizures. The state says that it’s entirely in line with a certain poison ‘P’. They move to arrest defendant ‘D’. The defense claims in court that another guy ‘X’ had a motive to frame D and the defendant couldn’t have been the attacker because V is a really really obese guy and it would be impossible for him to be poisoned. Now that would be a bad argument. Doesn’t mean that D isn’t innocent. He may be. Doesn’t mean the state’s evidence of poison is good. It may not be. It does mean the defense offered up a very poor argument to the jury.
Yes. I’ll just quote myself instead of re-writing it. I already replied:
I have noticed all the good arguments are on one side of the ledger. And certain actually free people have made bad arguments in the past. But what you’re accusing me of doing is begging the question and your primary evidence is that I’m discounting circumstantial evidence. No. I recognize the Soros thing to be bad circumstantial evidence. And I explained why. That doesn’t make me the rube. It doesn’t mean I’m begging the question. I even specifically wrote down what avenues can be explored that could produce good arguments.
Another way to look at my original question is: Why do people pursue bad arguments when there are better arguments (if not good ones) available that lead to the same conclusion? Why aren’t they just using the best available arguments that support their desired conclusion? In global warming, one could talk pretty extensively about rapid climate change that vacillated back and forth for centuries about 100,000 years ago. But they don’t. (And there are probably other equally good arguments that aren’t coming to me just now.) This to me suggest that some humans are incapable of objectively distinguishing between good arguments and bad ones. And that would explain the existence of bias in even people who have no emotional basis for it.
No. Because arguments can be objectively graded based on mathematical consistency. And premises can be verified via documentation.
The more one does this in every day life whether casually or systematically, the better they get at it. Personally, I don’t think it’s that difficult to spot the common logical inconsistencies. Slippery slope, for example. And after researching enough claims (the premises some of these arguments are based on), the more quickly you are able to spot the most frequently repeated lies. Whenever, you hear something that you haven’t heard before you simply look it up. It’s not that hard. You give it enough credence to look it up and go from there.
And are there humans out there that can identify/distinguish good or bad arguments according to this mathematical consistency, 100 percent of the time?
Do you have a link to the mathematical formula that grades an argument “good” or “bad”?
No. I’m on the level where I am familiar with the most common logical fallacies. But that’s it. If someone where to accuse me of a logical fallacy I’ve never heard of. I’d have to listen to their claim and ponder it for as long as necessary. I don’t have a link for you.
If someone where to use an argument that contained a logical fallacy I was unaware of, I could go on being duped for years. It would take someone else to let me know that the argument I had heretofore accepted was in fact based on a logical fallacy.
This works decently enough in some kind of ‘closed system’ where all the factors are known and can be counted on, but the universe / world is not a closed system. People lie, there are oodles of things in the natural world that we don’t understand very well at this stage, there are factors happening that we aren’t even close to discovering yet. No mathematical model can account for all these factors. I would actually argue that the human social sphere is one of the most complex systems happening in the universe.
For eons ‘intuition’ has been how we make sense of it, and now for the first time ‘intelligence’ is available. But intelligence doesn’t make one omniscient, nor does it depend on being precisely mathematically rational. It works in a subtle associative manner.
I would be? No. I’m merely surprised that AF people don’t universally accept good counter arguments. And rather chose to hold on to their poor original argument. And I was wondering what was the reason for that - the mechanism.
