The Great Logic Fallacy of the Science Deniers

The current issue of Scientific American has a short but interesting article by Naomi Oreskes, The False Logic of Science Denial. Climate science deniers dislike her for trying to debunk climate science denial. She points out that logic fallacies are common and even scientists fall prey to them over things they really should know better than to fall prey to.[1] Oreskes writes:

"All this is to say that logical fallacies are everywhere and not always easily refuted. Truth, at least in science, is not self-evident. And this helps to explain why science denial is easy to generate and hard to slay. Today we live in a world where science denial, about everything from climate change to COVID-19, is rampant, informed by fallacies of all kinds. 

But there is a meta-fallacy—an über-fallacy if you will—that motivates these other, specific fallacies. It also explains why so many of the same people who reject the scientific evidence of anthropogenic climate change also question the evidence related to COVID-19. 

Given how common it is, it is remarkable that philosophers have failed to give it a formal name. But I think we can view it as a variety of what sociologists call implicatory denial. I interpret implicatory denial as taking this form: If P, then Q. But I don't like Q! Therefore, P must be wrong. This is the logic (or illogic) that underlies most science rejection. 

Climate change: I reject the suggestion that the “magic of the market” has failed and that we need government intervention to remedy the market failure. Evolutionary theory: I am offended by the suggestion that life is random and meaningless and that there is no God. COVID-19: I resent staying home, losing income or being told by the government what do to."

So there it is. Implicatory denial is much of the explanation[2] for why climate science is deniable. Deniers don't like the idea of human-caused climate change and/or the idea of government doing anything about it. Therefore, there is no climate change for whatever reason(s) makes it believable.

The same flawed logic applies to denying vaccine usefulness, COVID-19, or whatever other accepted science gets rejected.


Footnotes:
1. Oreskes argues that a common and "vexing" fallacy a among scientists is this: If theory P is correct, then Q is predicted. An experiment to see if Q pops up, and it does. Therefore, theory P is true. This conclusion is based on a logic fallacy. Q could pop up for one or more reasons unrelated to P. The frequency of that fallacy led philosopher Karl Popper to argue that the method of science should be falsification. Popper's logic was a theory cannot be proved to be true, because not every every circumstance can be tested. A single counterexample proves a theory false.

Oreskes asserts that Popper's theory was based on logic flaw. Specifically an experiment can failed for reasons unrelated to the theory being tested. Reasons for failure include insufficiently sensitivity to detect the predicted effect or analysis software throws out real data points that are programmed to be rejected as spurious. She argues that here is no logical resolution to this. So scientists generally deal with it through consilience. That means looks to find or infer the explanation that is the most consistent with evidence from a variety of sources That approach looks at a problem from a variety of angles to see what holds up best.

2. The paper that Oreskes cites for implicatory denial, Sociological Explanations for Climate Change Denial, asserts that it is one of two common forms of science denial. The other is called interpretative denial, where facts are accepted, but the interpretation of what the facts logically lead to a different (flawed) conclusion from what unbiased people would usually come to.

Over the years, my personal experience has been that implicatory denial is more common than interpretative denial. But that's just anecdote, not solid data.

The Ivanka and Jared Show

The 22 minute video is from John Oliver's show. It is mostly about Ivanka and Jared. Ivanka shares her father's belief about the low importance of truth. She is also truly expert at sounding reasonable and on point, while in fact saying essentially nothing at all. As Oliver puts it, "the apple doesn't fall far from the orange."

The main point I want to make is about how Ivanka views truth. These two screen shots from the video clip explain it nicely and in her own words.

Apparently Ivanka believes that letting people hold false beliefs is not being dulpicitous so long as it is to your advantage. After all, perception is more important that reality, except of course when it isn't. It is reasonable to think that Ivanka thinks that if it isn't to your advantage, then by all means, try to correct the error.

Thanks to V4V for bringing this video clip to my attention.

Some thoughts on thinking…

Full article here. 

"How to think effectively: Six stages of critical thinking"

• Researchers propose six levels of critical thinkers: Unreflective thinkers, Challenged thinkers, Beginning thinkers, Practicing thinkers, Advanced thinkers, and Master thinkers.

• The framework comes from educational psychologists Linda Elder and Richard Paul.

• Teaching critical thinking skills is a crucial challenge in our times.

The stage theory of critical thinking development, devised by psychologists Linda Elder and Richard Paul, can help us gauge the sophistication of our current mental approaches and provides a roadmap to the thinking of others.

The researchers identified six predictable levels of critical thinkers, from ones lower in depth and effort to the advanced mind-masters, who are always steps ahead.

As the scientists write, moving up on this pyramid of thinking "is dependent upon a necessary level of commitment on the part of an individual to develop as a critical thinker." Using your mind more effectively is not automatic and "is unlikely to take place "subconsciously." In other words – you have to put in the work and keep doing it, or you'll lose the faculty.

Here's how the stages of intellectual development break down:
 

Stage One: The Unreflective Thinker

These are people who don't reflect about thinking and the effect it has on their lives. As such, they form opinions and make decisions based on prejudices and misconceptions while their thinking doesn't improve.

Stage Two: The Challenged Thinker

This next level up thinker has awareness of the importance of thinking on their existence and knows that deficiencies in thinking can bring about major issues. As the psychologists explain, to solve a problem, you must first admit you have one.

Stage Three: The Beginning Thinker

Thinkers at this level can go beyond the nascent intellectual humility and actively look to take control of their thinking across areas of their lives. They know that their own thinking can have blind spots and other problems and take steps to address those, but in a limited capacity.

Stage Four: The Practicing Thinker

This more experienced kind of thinker not only appreciates their own deficiencies, but has skills to deal with them. A thinker of this level will practice better thinking habits and will analyze their mental processes with regularity.

Stage Five: The Advanced Thinker

One doesn't typically get to this stage until college and beyond, estimate the scientists. This higher-level thinker would have strong habits that would allow them to analyze their thinking with insight about different areas of life. They would be fair-minded and able to spot the prejudicial aspects in the points of view of others and their own understanding.

Stage Six: The Master Thinker

This is the super-thinker, the one who is totally in control of how they process information and make decisions. Such people constantly seek to improve their thought skills, and through experience "regularly raise their thinking to the level of conscious realization."

 *     *     *

The significance of critical thinking in our daily lives, especially in these confusing times, so rife with quick and often-misleading information, cannot be overstated. The decisions we make today can truly be life and death.
 

Now for your input:

-What do you think?  Does this analysis make sense to you? 

-Where do you see yourself on the pyramid? 

-Do you want to advance?  If so, how far up do you want to go?  Do you realistically think you can get there?  If yes, why?  If not, why not?

Thanks for thinking about it and recommending.

False Memories and Political Disinformation

When fake is taken for real, what is real becomes fake. -- Story of the Stone (aka Dream of the Red Chamber)

Recall of memories is currently believed to involve reconstruction of past events, images or sensations instead of recall of something akin to a photograph or an audio or video recording. The reconstruction process is error prone and susceptible to false suggestions that can generate memories that are at least partly false. Sometimes even a vivid memory is completely false. Even without false suggestions, memories drift over time.

Since memory reconstruction is an unconscious process, we are unaware of errors a recalled memory might contain or where the errors might have come from. People who believe in a false memory honestly believe their recall is true. They are simply unaware that their minds have distorted what was real into something that is not real.

Methods to create false memories are well-known to science. For various reasons, the data on memory implantation must be interpreted with caution. This area of science has moved past its infancy into adolescence. Researchers are coming to understand the factors that lead to variability in outcomes from various memory implant protocols. This paves the way for more confidence in protocols to induce false memories and an understanding if the biology is the same in all scenarios or if there are multiple pathways to false memory or personal factors that correlate with an increased or decreased propensity to create false memories.

False memories can arise in various ways. One is by forming an intention to do something and then not doing it. Later, the person can come to believe that they actually did what the intended but did not do. This is fairly common. One commentator observed: “it is not surprising at all that intending to complete a task also can create a false memory. Our brains do not appear to have a clean functional separation between imagination and memory.”

The misinformation method

The misinformation method to induce false memories relies on exposure to misinformation about a past event that a person witnessed. This is one of the most common methods researchers to induce false memories. The protocol is simple. People experience an event, then later they receive misinformation about it, and after that they are tested for their memory of the event.

Some research asks if people vary in their susceptibility to misinformation. Traits such as intelligence, personality, and traits such as anxiety or depression have been examined and some tentative hypotheses on cause and effect have been made. For example, a 2010 meta-analysis observed:

“Results revealed sizable and systematic individual differences in false memory arising from exposure to misinformation. False memories were significantly and negatively correlated with measures of intelligence ...., perception ...., memory ...., and face judgement. These findings suggest that people with relatively low intelligence and poor perceptual abilities might be more susceptible to the misinformation effect.”

Motivated false memory 

A 2012 paper (Feb. 2020 revision available here) indicates that memory can be distorted by what the researchers call motivated memory.[1] For fans of the brain it is probably not surprising that people have a tendency to distort memory in their own favor:

“We observe systematic incidences of false memory in favor of positive events and positive amnesia in forgetting past negative events. Both positive delusion and positive confabulation significantly relate to present bias, but this is not the case for positive amnesia. ..... we demonstrate that positive false memory, rather than selective amnesia, serves to enhance confidence in one’s future self in equilibrium, thereby accounting for our experimental findings. ..... The presence of motivated false memory has pervasive
real-life relevance, e.g., in enhancing one's self-image to boost labor market value,
building an academic dream to motivate graduate students and junior professors, and inducing collective delusion in organizations to enhance corporate performance. ..... To varying degrees, people process information in a motivated direction to reach conclusions they favor, including forgetfulness and false memory encompassing memory illusion and delusion.”

Politics and disinformation

Disinformation is false information, fake conspiracies, defamation and the like, that is intended to confuse, mislead and/or deflect negative attention among opposition, competitors, the media and/or the public. It is routinely used to distort both unconscious and conscious reasoning and beliefs in the direction the liar and deceiver wants thinking to go. It can also be used to create false memories. False memory creation is probably another aspect of why disinformation (dark free speech or propaganda) that is repeated is so powerful with so many people. It isn't just thinking that is unconsciously poisoned. It also unconsciously poisons memories.

It is the unconscious, toxic nature of disinformation that renders it so immoral or even evil if the speaker or source intends malice. A significant portion of the American people have been poisoned by decades of political disinformation. Over time those minds have sincerely and honestly come to believe that many things that are fake, lies and/or illusions are real, while what is real is fake.

So far, no one that I am aware of makes has an easy answer for how to deal with this poisonous mind plague. Some of the science directed to this problem has helpful suggestions, but the fact remains that the torrent of disinformation backed by billions of dollars worth of advertising will not stop. Apparently, the political, economic and Christian religious upsides far outweigh the downsides. Society has been damaged to the point that this plague has significantly overwhelmed our defenses.


Footnote:
1. Motivated memory appears to be a process that is at least outwardly similar to motivated reasoning.

Wikipedia: Motivated reasoning is a phenomenon that arises from emotionally-biased reasoning to produce justifications or make decisions that are most desired rather than those that accurately reflect the evidence, while still reducing cognitive dissonance. In other words, motivated reasoning is the "tendency to find arguments in favor of conclusions we want to believe to be stronger than arguments for conclusions we do not want to believe". It can lead to forming and clinging to false beliefs despite substantial evidence to the contrary.

Pandemic Politics and Its Failure

“President Trump and his bold actions from the very beginning of this pandemic stand in stark contrast to the do-nothing Democrats and radical left who just complain, criticize and condemn anything this president does to preserve this nation.” -- Disinformation from the radical right White House spokesman Judd Deere blaming others for White House failures in dealing with the pandemic

“But their ultimate goal was to shift responsibility for leading the fight against the pandemic from the White House to the states. They referred to this as “state authority handoff,” and it was at the heart of what would become at once a catastrophic policy blunder and an attempt to escape blame for a crisis that had engulfed the country — perhaps one of the greatest failures of presidential leadership in generations.” -- New York Times commenting on the White House plan to shift responsibility for the pandemic from the president and federal government to the states

“Only in Washington, D.C., do they think that they have the answer for all of America.” -- Ideological disinformation spin from the radical right White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to help shift responsibility from the Trump administration to the states

A New York Times investigation looked into the details of why the federal pandemic response was so poor and why we are still in such deep trouble. The story is disgusting and tragic, but not surprising. In essence, the White House response was being run by political operatives with no public health experience. The one real expert, Dr. Deborah Birx, was sincere but wrong about projecting the pandemic would ease and the economy could reopen. She was blindsided by the president's actions that undercut the effort to keep the virus in check. The political operatives were taking their cues from the president, not from public health experts. It turned out that there really was one answer for all of America, but the White House ignored it, or psychologically could not accept it, for purely political reasons.

The deadly mistake came in a period beginning in mid-April when the president and his team convinced themselves that the pandemic was going away like magic. They also falsely believed that they had given state governments everything they needed to contain it. In their minds, it was time end the lockdown.

The NYT writes:

“Even as a chorus of state officials and health experts warned that the pandemic was far from under control, Mr. Trump went, in a matter of days, from proclaiming that he alone had the authority to decide when the economy would reopen to pushing that responsibility onto the states. The government issued detailed reopening guidelines, but almost immediately, Mr. Trump began criticizing Democratic governors who did not “liberate” their states.

Mr. Trump’s bet that the crisis would fade away proved wrong. But an examination of the shift in April and its aftermath shows that the approach he embraced was not just a misjudgment. Instead, it was a deliberate strategy that he would stick doggedly to as evidence mounted that, in the absence of strong leadership from the White House, the virus would continue to infect and kill large numbers of Americans.

Dr. Birx was more central than publicly known to the judgment inside the West Wing that the virus was on a downward path. Colleagues described her as dedicated to public health and working herself to exhaustion to get the data right, but her model-based assessment nonetheless failed to account for a vital variable: how Mr. Trump’s rush to urge a return to normal would help undercut the social distancing and other measures that were holding down the numbers.”

It took until early June for the White House to begin to realize that their assumptions were wrong. According to the NYT article, people in the White House are still debating how publicly honest to be about the seriousness of the situation. Obviously, there is be no acceptance of responsibility for failures by this mendacious president or his mendacious enablers. The president was trapped by his own upbeat but false statements that things would turn out just fine very soon and it was time to reopen the economy.

The president did extend the lockdown period in April, but during that time he and his aides worked to build their case that the federal government had done its job very well and the president had no responsibility for the failed response.

The rest of the article describes the purely political mindset that drove the president and his White House into needless failures and unjustifiable denial of responsibility. The rest of the country is now paying a very heavy price for politics as usual.

Trump Fact Checker Update

The Washington Post keeps track of the number of false and misleading statements the president makes. The team makes its database available to the public so that people can see for themselves how statements are analyzed and assigned one of four levels of falsity or deceit. On July 9, the president hit 20,055. The cumulative number over time is shown above, and the monthly number is shown below.

In an accompanying article, the WaPo comments:

“Just as when Trump crossed the 10,000 threshold, an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News helped Trump breach the 20,000 mark. Trump racked up 62 claims on July 9, about half of which came during the Hannity interview: Trump’s statements cover a substantial range of his bogus attacks, conspiracy theories, boasts and inaccurate information:”

The evidence of the president’s mendacity and immorality speaks for itself.