Tag: bad arguments

How to argue badly: assume that need = plan

Two bunnies
Image from here: https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/mammals/understand-mammal-behaviour-rabbits

Imagine this. You and I are house-mates having trouble making rent, and I say, “We should get a bunch of bunnies.” You say, “I think getting bunnies would be spending more money, when our whole problem is that we don’t have enough money.” And I say, “You just think we should get evicted?” And then I go on about how disastrous it would be to get evicted. I accuse you of not caring about whether we get evicted.[1]

You’d recognize my response as unreasonable. Because it is.

Yet, that is exactly the pattern of our public discourse about politics. Too often, we assume that there is only one “plan” (solution, policy, approach), so if someone rejects our preferred plan, it’s because they don’t acknowledge the need. Therefore, our political discourse is all about need, and how horrible (irrational, corrupt, stupid) everyone is who disagrees with our plan. I’ll come back to that, but let’s start with what a good disagreement looks like.

And here’s where some concepts shared by folks in conflict resolution, policy argumentation, and a bunch of other fields come in. It’s useful to think about a problem in terms of seven questions:
1) What is the problem?
2) How bad is this problem? (What are the consequences of not solving it? Will it go away on its own?)
3) What caused this problem? How did this problem arise?
4) What are our options for solving this problem? (What are the various plans we might adopt?)
5) Which plans solve the problem we’ve identified?
6) What is the likelihood of success, ads/disads, costs/benefits for the most plausible plans? How do they compare to one another?
7) What are the likely consequences of the various plans? Is there a possibility of unintended consequences worse than the problem we’re trying to solve?

1) For you and me, the problem is that we can’t make rent, and 2) that’s a bad problem, since if we can’t solve it, we’ll get evicted.

3) So, what caused it? Our problem might be that the rent has gone up astronomically, or that I lost my job and haven’t tried to get another one, or that I’ve been spending money recklessly.

Here’s why the narrative as to how we got here matters: each of those causes implies a different kind of solution.

4) If the only reason is that the rent has gone up astronomically, then one approach might be to see if that was legal—did the landlord violate the lease? Laws regarding rent? If the only reason is that I lost my job and haven’t tried to find another, then it would make sense for me to try to find another job, or it might make sense for you to evict me, and get a new house-mate. If I’ve been spending recklessly, then I should stop doing that, and you might have some trouble figuring out how to get that to happen.

It’s possible that there are several contributing factors, in which case the approaches most likely to be successful might be combinations—I try to get a job and get my spending under control; you give me a deadline by which I’ve gotten a job or you’ll evict me; I try to get a job and we get a third room-mate.

One option is for us to get bunnies; it isn’t necessarily a good option, but it’s an option. And so the question is: why do I think that would solve the problem? How is that related to how we got here? If I am unable to pay rent because I keep getting involved in MLM, and I’ve become enamored of a bunny MLM, it would be reasonable for you to point out that I’m repeating exactly the behavior that caused the problem.

I might argue that I’ve always wanted bunnies, or that getting evicted is making me sad and bunnies will cheer me up—getting bunnies might solve some problem (my desire, my sadness), but not this problem: our facing eviction. In fact, since there would be added expenses, it might make the problem worse.

It’s also possible that there is no solution—that I can’t get a job that would enable us to afford the astronomical rent. In that case, it might make sense to try to find a way to break the lease that doesn’t involve eviction (so we don’t have an eviction on our financial record).

6) Winning the lottery would solve the problem, but that doesn’t mean that spending all our money on lottery tickets is a good plan; the likelihood of success is small. Advocating that we spend all our money on lottery tickets presumes that it’s a successful plan—people sometimes advocate a plan on the grounds that it would work, when in fact it might not. Seeing if the landlord has violated the lease (or the law) might work, but adopting that plan would mean getting expert advice (which might cost). Getting a job might also require expenditures, or be difficult in various ways. Every possible plan has advantages and disadvantages, and some plans are incompatible. We can’t spend all our money on lottery tickets and spend money to get expert advice on the lease. If I’m spending all my time job hunting, I wouldn’t have time to talk with experts about the lease.

7) Talking about unintended consequences is that hardest, I think. It’s basically worst case scenario thinking (how might this go wrong), and many people are superstitious about worst case scenario thinking. But thinking about it ahead of adopting a plan can mean that we put things in place to prevent the worst case from happening (e.g., have a backup plan), or that will let us know things are going south. Hiring an attorney to fight the rent increase might cost a lot of money and simply enrage the landlord, guaranteeing our eviction. Getting bunnies might be a violation of the lease, another way of guaranteeing our eviction.

My basic point is that acknowledging that there is a need is not necessarily associated with one solution. Similarly, disagreeing about what we should do (the plan) doesn’t mean disagreeing that there is a need. You might believe that we should have a lemonade stand, or cut back on what we’re spending in various areas, or get a loan—we have a lot of policy options, and we need to talk about them.

What happens in too much political discourse, though, is the bunny move. We have a problem, and disagree about the plan, and then instead of going through the various questions, we stay on the first. We either accuse the opponent of not really caring about the problem. Or, if we don’t like what we think are the only possible plans, or have no idea what to do, we deny that there is a problem. Neither tactic gets us reasonable disagreement or effective policies.


[1] For added unreasonable points, I might accuse you of being a bunny hater, communist, fascist, or some other group I hate.

Anti-vaxxers, bad drivers, and other people who reason badly

banner for dhmo information siteYou can’t know what you don’t know. You can’t know what you weren’t told. You can’t know what you didn’t notice.

A lot of people outraged about anti-vaxxers think they’re ignoring facts. But they aren’t. I’ve argued with them, and they have a lot of facts, and a lot of those facts are true. The problem isn’t in their facts, but in how they think about what makes a good argument. Anti-vaxxers are a great example of how not to think about having a good argument—one shared by a lot of people.

Their argument is: “We shouldn’t require that people get vaccines because [this vaccine] is bad because [fact].” And so they know that they’re right because they live in a world in which they are continually “shown” that they are right. They are given lots of facts (which might even be true) and lots of information about what their opponents believe (most of which is straw man). If you don’t drift into the world of anti-vaxxers, you don’t know that.

Just to be clear: I think anti-vaxxers are full of shit. I sincerely believe that anti-vaxxers believe they are truthful. And they also have a lot of facts, many of which are true. But their fullofshitness isn’t about whether they have facts, or whether they are truthful. It’s about their logic. It isn’t about whether they have facts, but about how they reason, and about the informational worlds they choose to inhabit.

Here’s an anti-vaxxer argument I’ve come across more than once. It’s something along the lines of, “If you look at the ingredients for this vaccine, you can see it has this ingredient, and, if you look up that ingredient on the internet, you can see that it’s really dangerous.”

That argument is a series of claims, each of which is factually true. It really does have that ingredient, and you really can look it up, and you really can see that it is harmful. The facts are true, but the logic is dumb.

If we step away from whether people have “facts” to how they’re arguing, then you can see that those claims don’t lead to each other.

Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO) is a notoriously dangerous chemical. It is responsible for thousands of deaths every year, and it’s in biological and chemical weapons. There’s a list here  of its dangers, and they are many. So, if the logic of the argument above is good—this vaccine is dangerous because it has an ingredient that’s dangerous–, then the person making that argument has to support the claim that any medications containing DHMO are dangerous.

If it’s a bad way to argue in regard to DHMO, then it’s a bad way to argue about any of the chemicals in vaccines.

DHMO is water.

It’s a bad way to argue.

When I try to point this out to people, they often say something like, “But water is different. Water is okay—this stuff isn’t.” And they can’t understand that they’re arguing in a circle. They have an unfalsifiable belief. They believe what they believe because they believe it and can find supporting evidence. That’s motivated reasoning.

It doesn’t seem like a bad way to argue because people choose to live in worlds in which we only hear how great our beliefs are and how dumb the criticisms of our beliefs are. We don’t know that we’re getting a straw man. And we don’t know it because the most cunning (and damaging) versions of the straw man are something someone really said but edited, taken out of context, or not representative. So, for instance, a pro-vaccine article might point out that early vaccines were dangerous, and an anti-vaxxer could quote only that part, not making it clear that the comment was about the cowpox vaccine. Or, and I’ve had this argument, they quote someone associated with pharmaceuticals (such as Shkreli) and use that as proof that everyone involved with pharmaceuticals is a greedy villain who doesn’t really care about anyone’s health.

Once again, the claim (everyone involved with pharmaceuticals is a greedy villain who doesn’t really care about anyone’s health) is supported by facts I believe are true (I think most reasonable people would)—Shkreli really is a greedy villain, and he really was associated with pharmaceuticals. The facts are fine, but the logic is bad. If one person associated with pharmaceuticals can be taken to stand for everyone who advocates vaccines, then one person associated with anti-vax can be taken to stand for everyone opposed to vaccines.

And that should be the moment the person realizes it’s a bad way to argue, but they often don’t because their informational world is filled with dumb, hateful, and horrible things that “pro-vaxxers” have said. A person in the anti-vax world thinks it’s fair to take Shkreli to stand for everyone promoting pharmaceuticals because he is so much like all the other examples that slither through the anti-vax informational world. What that person wouldn’t know is that they are only seeing the most awful examples of the out-group, and they rarely (perhaps never) hear about bad behavior of in-group members.

They don’t know that they don’t know enough to have accurate stereotypes about the in- and out-groups. Because we can’t know what we don’t know (but that’s a different post).

Here I just want to point out that these two related problems (thinking we have a “good argument” just because it has true claims, and thinking it’s true because it confirms everything else we choose to hear) aren’t solved by looking for facts, or by asking ourselves if we’re reasoning rationally. And both of those ways of thinking about beliefs suck.

We can ask these questions:
• Am I open to persuasion on this issue, and, if so, what evidence would persuade me?
• If the out-group was right in an important way, or the in-group wrong in an important way, am I relying on sources of information that would tell me?
• Would I consider this an argument a good one if I flipped the identities in it? In other words, if the argument is “This thing [that I already believe is bad] is bad because [other claim]” would I be persuaded if the argument was “This thing [that I believe is good] is bad because [that same kind of claim]”?

That last one is hard for some people, so I’ll give some examples:

Let’s say that I, a fan of Hubert Sumlin, say, “Chester Burnette is a terrible President because he issues a lot of Executive Orders.” Would I be persuaded that “Hubert Sumlin is a terrible President because he issued a lot of executive orders”? If not, then I don’t really believe the logic of the argument I’m making.

If the answer to each of these questions is no, then regardless of how many facts I have, I have bad arguments.

What’s wrong with the “women should be afraid that their sons will be accused of rape” meme

[Edited to include the meme I’d seen elsewhere that I couldn’t find at the time I wrote this.]

The meme circulating is almost everything wrong with current GOP rhetoric (GOP rhetoric wasn’t always this bad, and being conservative does not mean you have to be stupid). It’s engaging in a false binary, shifting the stasis, asserting empirically indefensible claims, reducing  women to mothers (and, in some versions, wives), and fear-mongering. It’s also weirdly entangled in racist experiences of the justice system. And there is the really bizarre argument that Ford’s accusations can be dismissed because they’re politically motivated, which is a subset of the rape culture topos that rape accusers have bad motives.

Sometimes this meme is explicitly connected to Kavanaugh, and the accusation against him. And it’s sometimes asserted that a male can be convicted on the basis of a single woman’s word. While there are people arguing that Kavanaugh shouldn’t be confirmed because of this accusation, far more are arguing that his confirmation shouldn’t be, as the GOP is doing, rushed. They are calling for an investigation, perhaps by the FBI. Some are simply asking that Kavanaugh testify under oath about this incident. Some are saying that, in addition to his stance on Roe v Wade, he shouldn’t be confirmed. The reactions to the accusations about Kavanaugh don’t neatly split into two.

The dominant argument is that the charges should be investigated, exactly the opposite claim of the meme. So, this meme shifts the stasis from “we should slow down in this confirmation process” to “women are slutty mcslutfaces who love accusing men of rape because men go to jail over one slutty mcslutface’s word.”

[Edited to add: just to be clear, the argument that most critics of the process are making is that we should slow down this process, and investigate the claims. So, it isn’t critics of Kavanaugh who are cutting short an investigation–it’s his defenders.]

Obviously, women who make accusations of rape are more likely to have their lives destroyed than the men, but there are cases of men being charged who have been falsely accused of rape. And it’s true that major figures will weigh in and insist on punishment even before the trial, such as Trump’s false accusation against the Central Park rapists (which he’s never retracted). So, if you want to worry about someone in power who will make and refuse to retract irresponsible accusations of rape, you might look at Trump. It’s interesting that the cases that get so much media attention tend to be white men (Rolling Stone grovelled, but Trump never has, for instance). The media is very worried about the lives of white males whose lives might be ruined by rape accusations, less worried about how the lives of accusers are always in ruins, and meanwhile almost entirely ignoring that the real crime is convictions on the basis of false accusations. And, to be blunt, suburban GOP white women don’t need to worry that their sons will be convicted of rape on the grounds of the word of a single woman who has no supporting evidence.

There are mothers who need to worry about that, though–the mothers of the Scottsboro Boys, of course, the Central Park Five (whom Trump wanted executed). There are false accusations of rape, and, yes, men have spent a lot of time in prison over those false accusations. Men have been indisputably exonerated.

But the Kavanaugh confirmation has nothing to do with whether white men are falsely accused of rape. That’s the most cunning and wicked stasis-shift of all. Hearings are supposed to be about getting to the truth. As I crawl around the internet, I’m finding that one of the most common defenses of Kavanaugh is that Ford and her supporters have bad motives for their claims. For instance, they claim it’s suspicious that Feinstein delayed releasing the letter, although that’s clearly explained in the initial letter–she requested confidentiality until they could speak. (They don’t know that–they’re drinking the flavor-aid, and dutifully repeating the talking points they’ve been given, not realizing they’re uncritically repeating stupid arguments.)

But, here’s what matters: people who care about the truth don’t care about the motives of people. It doesn’t matter whether Ford has good or bad motives; what matters is whether what she says is true. (Or not, what matters is that the GOP and Kavanaugh’s response is they’re deep in rape culture.) When someone argues that Ford doesn’t get her claims to be investigated, they are openly saying that they favor rabid political factionalism over the truth.

And that’s where the GOP is these days. And it’s tragic. A healthy democracy has people of good will and intelligence reasonably arguing for various policies from various perspectives. The GOP is openly opposed to democratic deliberation.