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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   28172 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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Woke propaganda is omnipresent in Western education in this day and age.

I got my degree outside of the West so I wasn't exposed to much of it in college.

But my younger brother studies in Canada, and I often hop on a video call while he studies. Humanities courses are fucked.

E.g., most universities have a first-semester course where they teach how to write an essay and common logical fallacies. I was taught this course very formally, the logical fallacies had latin names and the examples were all examples you come across in your personal life.

In contrast, the course my bro is going through; all the fallacies have revamped English names and alternate meanings. "Appeal to authority" is switched for "appeal to questionable authority". And all the examples are political, by happenstance, the left wing pov is the nonfallacious one. Quite a few fallacies' original meanings were extended.

Posts like yours are just another grain in the heap. The woke have complete institutional capture over education. Every student that passes through a college has to go through such a course.

Appeal to authority has always been flawed IMO. I raised this issue in class back in the day. They were trying to distinguish between good and bad kinds of appeal to authority.

Is it correct to believe the statements of oil companies about oil drilling/pipelines and so on? They're the domain experts after all. Yet they have a clear incentive to be economical with the truth.

Is it correct to believe the statements of doctors about medical treatments? Same issue.

All we were left with is that you shouldn't trust ridiculous nonsense like a Kardashian sponsored toothbrush. They don't know anything about teeth. But nobody would even bother seriously attacking that at a philosophical level. I suspect that what happens in the real world is that people just use appeal to questionable authority against their political enemies (oil companies) and defend it as legitimate for their allies (doctors). I sort of do the same thing against Kardashians unconsciously:

"Well of course the Kardashians don't know anything about teeth, they're airheads (I say despite knowing next to nothing about them, even presuming they probably have very white teeth/general cosmetics knowledge)"

"Well of course the oil companies don't know or care about safety, they only care about money (I say despite knowing nothing about the prevalence and danger of leaks on any kind of statistical basis, comparing cost/harm of oil leaks to the maintenance of industrial civilization)"

Appeal to authority is a fallacy in formal logic. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a useful heuristic. Likewise, if XYZ claims N, and you accurately say XYZ is a liar that doesn’t in a formal sense negate N but is is a useful heuristic in assessing the likelihood of N.

Understanding both is important.

Having taught a bunch of Intro to Critical Thinking Courses, I completely agree with this take, and I'd usually have a dedicated class on epistemic trust, authority, and expertise following directly on from the first round of fallacies stuff. The broad set of conclusions I'd generally try to move towards with the class were things like (i) we're inevitably reliant on epistemic trust sometimes because we can't be an expert in everything, (ii) there are some reasonable heuristics for assessing who we should trust on what subjects (e.g., certifications and qualifications, career achievements, track record), and (iii) these heuristics themselves should come into question in certain circumstances (e.g., when an expert faces misaligned incentives, has personal biases, or is operating outside their usual domain of knowledge).

Appeal to authority is a hack, a heuristic, a quick and dirty way to gather information in a world where our time and will is finite. It's like building a house on sand.

When you argue using authority, you're taking someone else's words on faith (or to be more generous/realistic, you're making a good bet). If you knew (ie have read and reasoned about) their argument, you might as well have used that. Since you did not, when the person you're arguing against starts questioning the authority, all that's left is to insist they have faith (or use and continue the authorities reasoning, as could've been done in the first place, without the appeal). No further argument can be made against you, except insofar as can be argued that you made a bad bet.

you shouldn't trust ridiculous nonsense like a Kardashian sponsored toothbrush

I figure that can be perfectly valid evidence for the quality of the product! A company shelling out money for sponsorships signal that they believe in the product itself, which is important in situations where the consumer needs confidence that they won't drop support for it in the near future. For e.g. tech like game consoles this is especially valuable.

The Kardashians also have a personal brand to protect. If they sponsor a product I can be more confident it won't be so bad it'll damage their image; ceteris paribus this is certainly better than nothing.

I don't know about that:

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/07/kim-kardashian-floyd-mayweather-crypto-scam-lawsuit-dismissed.html

Much as I hate to diss crypto, coins whose primary selling point is some gimmick of burning supply when people buy/sell are garbage. There ought to be some kind of use-case. Well in this case the use-case is forking it and running off with people's ETH.

EMAX launched with a total supply of 2 quadrillion tokens, yet that circulating supply continues to decrease as our tokenomics include a 0% tax on buys, a 6% tax on sells and transfers, 3% of which remains in treasury and 3% is burned every other week.

Well, I mean evidence in the bayesian sense. When it comes to "new crypto coin with no clear practical use case" my prior is strongly on "scammy pyramid scheme"; the soft evidence of celebrity endorsements does not do too much to move that.

I had always understood “appeal to authority” as one of the “softer” fallacies, where it doesn’t sink the argument but you better make sure that it (and the authority) actually checks out.

In contrast, the course my bro is going through; all the fallacies have revamped English names, and alternate meanings. "Appeal to authority" is switchdd for "appeal to questionable authority". And all the examples are political, by happenstance the left wing pov is the non fallacious one. Quite a few fallacies original meanings were extended.

This is disturbingly fascinating to me; like the slogan edits in Animal Farm. I don't suppose you could get your hands on the course material (or a citation for it), and/or a complete list of names to share here?

I can. I'll post an update soon.

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