Every single time the weather gets colder someone tells a joke about global warming. Every single time someone does that a logical fairy dies. I don’t know how extinction works with imaginary beings, but I believe their population is pretty thin right now, with all the anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers, climate change deniers and other “it’s just a theory” guys and gals.
Look what you have done!
But…why does a logical fairy die? Shouldn’t it be an environmental fairy? Well… those have been gone for a long time, and besides that, the whole argument is a fallacy, i.e. it sounds right, but has a big logical flaw. In this case it’s a kind of suppressing evidence fallacy or cherry picking. Cherry picking happens when someone selectively picks one or a few data points that fit the fallacious presumption in order to convince a naïve public. Accordingly, when your foolish friend sees you wearing a jacket, trembling in the cold, and says “what about global warming, huh?!”, or when a US senator tosses a snowball down the senate floor (it has happened, google it) they’re both committing a fallacy.
Do you see what he did there?
A fallacy is an invalid, faulty, misleading or just absurd argument used intentionally or unintentionally. There are fallacies with inner logic errors, like an appeal to probability, or the gambler’s fallacy (independent events are, well, independent, so if you toss a coin four times and gets three heads in a row you won’t have a higher chance of getting tails in the fourth), or informal fallacies, like the slippery slope (when one establishes a series of catastrophic events starting with an argument and culminating in a major disaster, e.g. “if we open our doors to immigrants they won’t incorporate our traditions and will preach their culture and religion to our kids, and then in a few years our traditions will vanish”).
Seriously?!
The use of fallacies is common in everyday speech, like in social media arguments and informal talks, and unfortunately also in formal media outlets, political hearings and rallies and even in some scientific discussions. Yep, scientists, like every other human being, eventually commit fallacies in the middle of their arguments, sometimes unknowingly but sometimes intentionally. The reasons are many; at times the scientist just makes an honest mistake, but at other times they actively protect the interests of corporations and other groups, like the Robert A. Kehoe and Ethyl Corporation case (see more in the Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey episode 7).
The thing about identifying, understanding (sometimes pointing out) and countering fallacies is that they are, by their own nature, a tool in every jerk’s rhetoric toolbox, used to mislead or manipulate public opinion or to try and undermine whole groups and their members. Even though fallacies can be present in any kind of conversation, debate or interview, not only scientific ones, I believe it is our job as researchers to inform the general public about science and its logic, hence it is also our job to educate the public on this kind of fallacious rhetoric.
Everywhere, everyplace, everytime
The first thing to do is identify the fallacy. There is a great website here that details 24 types of fallacy with examples and also has a big nice poster about it. We have already talked a little about three of them (cherry picking, the gambler’s fallacy and the slippery slope), but let’s look at some other common types.
The strawman fallacy is really common in both scientific and non-scientific environments, and consists of a misrepresentation of a theory, concept, idea, etc, in order to try to debunk the whole theory.
Dude, it’s just pizza.
Another really common and eventually innocent fallacy is the false correlation, where someone argues that if two or more thing happens simultaneously or at the same rate they are necessarily connected. This happens a lot since we normally assume that correlation is a symptom of causation, which it isn’t. To see how correlations can be spurious a website named Spurious Correlations gathered around 30,000 of them. My favorite one is about Nicolas Cage films and cases of drowning in pools. This kind of fallacy is regularly used by a majority of frightened parents and by some unreliable doctors and policy makers supporting the anti-vaxxer movement.
Well, we can never be sure…
There are many other examples you can find in rhetoric books, the internet, your philosophy or logic classes and so on, and I strongly encourage you to read more about them, learn about these kinds of argumentative strategy, spread the word about the differences between reliable and fallacious arguments and crush those trolls and science deniers on Facebook.
P.S. Remember: this is never about convincing the troll/denier, in fact it’s about shedding some light on a misunderstood subject so everyone interested in it can grasp it correctly (but go crush those morons nonetheless).
Café com LSD 