Without data, we have only a bloke

"A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants."

—Chuckles the Clown

.....Now, lots of folks in academia claim to teach "argumentation"—how to argue. But they aren't always teaching the same things.
.....It has long struck me as odd that, while philosophers teach their students that facts about an arguer are irrelevant (this is the essence of their teachings re the "ad hominem" fallacy), writing and speech instructors often seem to teach the opposite, for they make a great point of the importance, for the writer or speaker (the arguer), of presenting himself in a certain way: as reasonable, knowledgeable, etc.
.....The explanation of this difference, of course, concerns the different purposes these people have. The philosopher/logician seeks the truth and thus teaches students how to seek the truth. Hence, he focuses on evidence and reasons—what writing instructors call "logos" or the "logical appeal." He is not concerned with "pathos" or "ethos"—i.e., the emotional appeal or the appeal that derives from how the writer presents himself.
.....Writing instructors, however, are more about "effectiveness" (or persuasion) than truth, and so, for them, "logic" is just one tool among several. For instance, if you want to convince your readers of something—say, that John McCain is too addled to be President—then, assuming they aren't very logical (usually a safe assumption), you'd be a fool to offer mere logic. Reasons and evidence? Most audiences will become bored with that; they'll walk away. Better get out the blooper reel. (See Why we need rhetoric.)
.....Philosophers, as philosophers, are happy to have people walk away. They want to know the truth, and knowing the truth has nothing to do with having lots of eager listeners or readers. (Indeed, folks who seek the truth invariably become very nervous when their ideas become attractive to others.)
.....Roughly speaking, writing instructors are unhappy when the audience (or the "reasonable" among the audience) walks away. And so they spend a good deal of time talking about the importance of presenting yourself properly, i.e., effectively. (Ironically, writing and speech instructors can trace their body of theory to the writings of a philosopher/logician, but one who held audiences in low esteem. See Aristotle's rhetoric.)
.....Um, but if your readers buy that, they're committing a fallacy, right?
..... —Oh, absolutely. Great. Now show us Obama Girl!

.....Ben Oldacre’s “Bad Science” column this morning (in the Guardian) concerns what happens when audiences focus on how a speaker presents himself (ethos) without focussing on his evidence and reasons (logos):

Testing the plausibility effect:

.....You will remember, two weeks ago now, we saw the Sunday Express claiming on its front page that an impressive government adviser called Dr Roger Coghill had performed a research study demonstrating that the Bridgend suicide cases all lived closer to a mobile phone mast than average. When I contacted Coghill it turned out he wasn't really a government adviser, he said the Express had made a mistake in calling him a doctor, he had lost the data, and he couldn't even explain what he meant by average.
…
.....Without data, we have only a bloke. Week in, week out, we see apparently scientific claims being made in the newspapers with great confidence, as if they were based on evidence, when in reality they are based on nothing more than authority, and often from one man. This is because science is communicated to the public by journalists, who sometimes have no understanding of what it means for there to be evidence for an assertion. They are impressed by enthusiasm, long words, by a PhD, a white coat, or a medical qualification. [My emphasis.]
.....What if this is taken to an extreme? In 1973 a group of academics noticed that student ratings of teachers often seemed to depend more on personality than educational content. They wanted to find out how far this effect could be stretched: what if you had an impressive, charismatic and witty lecturer, who knew nothing at all about the subject on which they were lecturing?….
.....They hired a large, affable gentleman who "looked distinguished and sounded authoritative". They called him "Dr Myron L Fox" and he was given a long, impressive, and fictitious CV. Dr Fox was an authority on the application of mathematics to human behaviour.
.....They slipped Dr Fox on to the programme at an academic conference on medical education. His audience was made up of doctors, healthcare workers, and academics. The title of his lecture was Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education. Dr Fox filled his lecture and his question and answer session with double talk, jargon, dubious neologisms, non sequiturs, and mutually contradictory statements. This was interspersed with elaborate diversions into parenthetical humour and "meaningless references to unrelated topics". It's the kind of education you pay good money for in the UK.
.....The lecture went down well. At the end, a questionnaire was distributed and every person in the audience gave significantly more favourable than unfavourable feedback. The comments were gushing, and yet thoughtful: "excellent presentation, enjoyed listening", "good flow, seems enthusiastic", and "too intellectual a presentation, my orientation is more pragmatic".
.....The researchers repeated the performance. Time and again they got the same result….

My advice? Let's start teaching students what is relevant and what is not. We're drowning in illogic.

Philosophers/Logicians love this Monty Python bit: "the Argument Clinic":



.....“A second type of … argument is the speaker’s character, not only as established by his reputation, but also as conveyed in the speech itself. Most orators agree that one’s character is the most potent weapon in one’s rhetorical arsenal.”

—From A Brief Summary of Classical Rhetoric, made available to students at Harvard

[Thomas Hobbes] maintains that the establishment of ethos is an irrelevance not merely in the natural sciences…but in the moral sciences as well. His translation of Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric accordingly omits the entire section in which Aristotle speaks of the crucial importance of taking steps to make a good impression on one’s audience.

–From Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, Quentin Skinner

"A disgrace"? Could someone please explain Mr. McCain to me?

.....I suppose that many of you have seen or heard John McCain's recent remarks re Social Security (see video)—which he offered as some "straight talk." I am puzzled by this alleged straight talk.
.....We need to separate two issues. One issue is whether there is something broken about Social Security. McCain thinks so, and I suspect he is right about that.
.....A second issue concerns what McCain says toward the end of his above remarks. He describes the Social Security system itself, which involves money put into the system by people now working and money taken out by people now retired. Now, as I understand it, Social Security has always involved precisely that "system."
.....In the video, in no uncertain terms, McCain judges that system to be "a disgrace."
.....Now, I really don't see what is disgraceful about it (the above "system," I mean). Prima facie, it seems sensible, fair. Evidently, ordinary Americans, too, whether Republicans or Democrats, have long liked it; they have not found it to be "a disgrace."
.....What on earth is McCain talking about?
.....Perhaps Mr. McCain does not realize that the system he describes is what Social Security has always been? Does he suppose that, until recently, beneficiaries of the system were withdrawing the money they themselves put into accounts throughout their working years? If so, he's a spectacular ignoramus, one who is too foolish to be the President.
.....Or perhaps Mr. McCain meant to opine, not about the system he describes (in which current workers pay for current benefits), but the particular circumstance—owing to the Baby Boom, etc.—that not enough is being put into the system now to cover what is taken out (or will be taken out). If so, we must conclude that he is either vulnerable to remarkable bouts of confusion while speaking, or he is the world's most inarticulate fellow, saying clearly what he clearly does not mean to say.
.....Am I missing something? Help me out here! (I will attempt to find the larger context of McCain's remarks, but I doubt that that will help.)

P.S.: My friend Steve sent the video below. Yes, happiness is a warm puppy—or a guy singing a bunch of warm puppies to sleep!

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit

• BULLSHIT PRODUCT.

.....Have you noticed advertisements by a new company called "Philosophy"? Philosophy sells cosmetics. Their motto is "believe in miracles."
.....I know a lot of philosophers. The philosophers I know are about as likely to believe in miracles as they are to believe in the Tooth Fairy.

.....One of Philosophy's products is "Hope in a Jar." On the jar, we're told that, "where there is hope, there can be faith. Where there is faith miracles can occur."
.....Well, by definition, where there is faith, there is belief without evidence. And a miracle is an event that defies natural laws. Why would belief w/o evidence bring about an event that defies natural laws? What total bullshit.

• BULLSHIT TV SHOW.

.....While we're on the topic of BULLSHIT, have you ever seen Penn & Teller's Showtime TV show called "Bullshit"?
.....It's pretty entertaining. Here's one of their better segments—on bottled water. The best part comes in the second half, when customers at a fancy-schmancy restaurant pay big money for bottled water that, in reality, comes straight from a hose in the back alley. "You'll laugh so hard your sides will ache, your heart will go pitter pat."



.....I don't mind P&T's cursing and name-calling: that's just their style, their humor. But they can be sloppy (no, boys, they didn't burn witches in Salem, they hanged 'em.). They can be unfair—they've been accused of cherry-picking evidence (e.g., regarding the efficacy of recycling). Sometimes, they're just dead wrong (as when they rejected claims of the dangers of second-hand smoke, based on outdated info). I give 'em an A in entertainment and a C in logic.

• BULLSHIT PHILOSOPHER.

.....A few years ago, philosopher Harry Frankfurt made quite a splash with his published essay On Bullshit (2005; written in '86). According to Wikipedia,

...Harry Frankfurt of Princeton University characterizes bullshit as a form of falsehood distinct from lying. The liar, Frankfurt holds, knows and cares about the truth, but deliberately sets out to mislead instead of telling the truth. The "bullshitter", on the other hand, does not care about the truth and is only seeking to impress:

"It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.”

Frankfurt connects this analysis of bullshit with Ludwig Wittgenstein's disdain of "non-sense" talk, and with the popular concept of a "bull session" in which speakers may try out unusual views without commitment. He fixes the blame for the prevalence of "bullshit" in modern society upon anti-realism and upon the growing frequency of situations in which people are expected to speak or have opinions without appropriate knowledge of the subject matter.

Here's an interview of Frankfurt re "bullshit"



.....The interviewer presses Frankfurt for an example of BS. With some reluctance, the professor cites the notion that John Kerry's heroic actions during the Vietnam War (the interview occurred a few years ago) qualify him to be President. "Bullshit," he says. And surely he is correct. (Note that F expresses no skepticism about K's heroism.)
.....Very recently (June 29), Wes Clark got into hot water when, in reference to Pres. candidate John McCain, he said, "Well, I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president."
.....Well, again, surely he is correct. Importantly correct. Nevertheless, Clark's comment caused a shitstorm. One must not speak the truth about this matter, evidently. Clark should have known better than to defy right-wing PC—a particularly funky species of bullshit.

• BULLSHIT PRESIDENT.

.....Harry Truman was known to have a colorful vocabulary. According to a familiar story,

Always an earthy talker, Truman once offended a friend of his wife's by referring repeatedly to "the good manure" that must have been used to nurture the fine blossoms at a Washington horticulture show. "Bess, couldn't you get the President to say 'fertilizer'?" the woman complained. Replied Mrs. Truman: "Heavens, no. It took me 25 years to get him to say 'manure.'"

The Army's new "secret weapon"; critical thinking video; responding to a need

• From the Guardian: US weapons research is raising a stink: The US Army's XM1063 projectile is designed to be 'non-lethal' - but is it peaceful or hovering on the brink of illegality? [Note: above original photos of relevant howitzer sent to us by our pals over at 13 Stoploss]:

.....Is the XM1063 a stink bomb, a banana skin, or a bad trip? ... XM1063 is the code name for the US army's new secret weapon which will "suppress" people without harming them, as well as stopping vehicles in an area 100m square. But is it a violation of chemical weapons treaties, or a welcome move towards less destructive warfare using non-lethal weapons? ¶ ...The first part of the weapon is an artillery round...fired from a 155mm howitzer.... It scatters 152 small non-explosive submunitions over a 1-hectare area; as each parachutes down, it sprays a chemical agent....

• CRITICAL THINKING VIDEO. A reliable reader (Bohrstein) has drawn my/our attention to a video (Here Be Dragons), which is an introduction to critical thinking by Brian Dunning of Skeptoid. I've seen most of it, and it appears to be quite good and entertaining as well.

• From the San Jose Mercury: College to expand program on solar-panel installation:

.....Skyline College in San Bruno is renewing a successful solar-installation program for the fall and plans to expand its curriculum in response to the growing alternative-energy market.
.....The program trains students to become certified solar installers and is funded by a grant of about $450,000 from the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office, organizers said.
....."It's creating a pipeline for potential employees for the solar industry," said project leader Sandra Wallenstein….

Thursday evening Chunkery

• COOL PICS. There’s an odd-but-cool article in the Times about a Modjeska Canyon resident and her elegant garden: Modjeska Canyon garden's water-wise ways take bloom. Check it out, if you dare.

"To live in chaparral and have a creek in this canyon is amazing," she says. "It is a privilege and a responsibility to live here and not waste it. We are so lucky that it didn't burn down. I would have been just as upset to lose the garden as the house. I guess we would have had to rebuild." Sarkissian is quiet for a moment as she looks at the creek and reflects on her time here. "But you just don't have that many 13-year periods of your life."

The article includes an unusually lovely slide show. Garden, flowers, blue shirt.

• THE GREAT STINK. Matt Cocker (!?) at the OC Weekly (THE GREAT P-U) explains that the endless Irvine “Great Park” events these days are being undone by a big 'n' stinky compost pile. As my old Opa would say, "It did shtink."

• VENGEANCE IS THEIRS. R. Scott Moxley, also at the OC Weekly, writes about the Susan Atkins (of Manson Family infamy) parole issue: DA Tony Rackauckas Joins the Battle Over Susan Atkins' Dying Wish.

Atkins, who has an impeccable prison record, is sinking fast (brain tumor, amputated leg, etc.), but Rackauckas (a charter member of Mike Schroeder’s “Team Rat Bastard”) has joined the LA Times in opposing release.

Moxley quotes the Times as recently opining: “Atkins gravely wounded our collective peace, and society has a right, even the obligation, to exact vengeance.”

Exact vengeance? Well, either the Times editorial writer needs to work on his tone, or he’s just a moron.


• CRAPULENCE AND PHOTOGRAPHY. I was out in the world again today and so I took my camera. Two of these shots are near my house: on Live Oak Canyon Rd (above) and at the entrance of Lambrose Canyon (at the beginning of this post, above). Another (below) is from that crazy overpass from the 5 south to the toll road north (toward the Santa Ana mountains). (Click on photos.)

I was feeling sick (never mind), and so I just took 'em from the car, through the windshield.


• THE DARK END OF THE STREET. Couldn't sleep last night. Started watching an old episode of Millennium (Lance Henriksen), which included a moving sequence using James Carr's "Dark End of the Street" (1967). Do you know it? It's wonderful. (So's Millennium, BTW.)

The smoky north

Along with Louis B. Jones, the Reb directs the prestigious Writers Workshop at Squaw Valley. Thus, soon, she and her crew will be heading north, as per usual. (Click on photo to enlarge.)

It'll be a bit smoky up there, of course. Here's a satellite image of Cal wildfires in this morning's OC Reg. I've indicated the approximate location of Squaw Valley (Olympic Valley).

MEANWHILE, THE TOASTY SOUTH. See Marla Jo's article in the Reg: 3 O.C. community colleges make top 100: Annual list ranks schools based on number of associate degrees they confer. Evidently, a trade publication ranks Coastline, Orange Coast and Santa Ana colleges in the top 100, in this odd regard. (Many traditional students forgo acquiring Associate degrees, since they are unnecessary for transfer to a four-year institution.)

AND THE SULTRY SOUTHEAST. There’s a marvelous story in this morning’s Inside Higher Ed (In Culture Wars, Do Facts Matter?) about a phony quote, falsely attributed to an academic by the usual right-wing suspects: “No. We don’t hire Republicans because they are stupid and we are not. Why should we knowingly hire stupid professors?”

Here's the actual, somewhat more "nuanced," quote, from a philosophy professor: “We try to hire the best, smartest people available. If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire. Mill’s analysis may go some way towards explaining the power of the Republican party in our society and the relative scarcity of Republicans in academia. Players in the NBA tend to be taller than average. There is a good reason for this. Members of academia tend to be a bit smarter than average. There is a good reason for this too.”

Just how big an IF is that IF? Yet another empirical question, one about which most of us would rather not discuss openly or directly.

What Mill actually said was: "Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative." Now, if you add the premise that "there are many stupid people," then you can expect there to be lots of conservatives, i.e., Republicans. But one may not infer that conservatives (Repubs) will be scarce among (the smart) academics, since, for all that Mill has said, it is possible that most smart people are conservative. I mean, it is at least possible that, oddly, if you're stupid, you're conservative, and if you're smart, you're conservative (and maybe if you're average, you're non-conservative). Whew.

Erwin Chemerinsky's law school "team lineup"

Marla Jo Fisher over at the OC Reg just posted this:

Who is on UCI's law school team lineup?

Marla informs us that the "legal blogosphere around the country has been buzzing in recent weeks with speculation and news about Irvine's new faculty, which has been described as unusual in the number of prominent women, and also in its ethnic composition."

Indeed it has. You’ll recall that Erwin Chemerinsky, the new dean, was hired, then fired, then rehired. Evidently, local right-wingers were upset about Professor C's politics. Some intelligent conservatives (even local ones) came to his defense.

Among Chemerinsky’s hires are

• Rachel Moran, “a UC Berkeley law professor who will become the president next year of the Association of American Law Schools.”

“She has been the director of the Institute for the Study of Social Change at UC Berkeley's law school, Boalt Hall.”

• “A veteran Los Angeles Times legal affairs reporter, Henry Weinstein, who took a buyout recently, will also join the staff to teach fledgling lawyers how to investigate facts.” (New hire Catherine Fisk is pictured at right.)

The Reg article gives the full list of hires. Also hired was someone whose career I’ve followed for years: UCI Psychology Professor Elizabeth Loftus, a renowned expert on memory.

Loftus is somewhat of a hero in the “skeptical” movement (which, essentially, debunks pseudoscience and promotes logic and science). Wikipedia briefly describes the ”Jane Doe” case and Loftus’ famous investigation concerning it, which has helped discredit therapies involving repressed and recovered “memories”:

"Jane Doe" was the subject of a case study published in 1997 by Dr. David Corwin on issues of repressed and recovered memory. Neither the study nor later follow-up studies and articles referred to her by her real name. As a psychiatrist retained in a divorce case, Corwin had videotaped an interview with Jane Doe—then six years old—in which she claimed to have suffered physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her biological mother. Eleven years later, Corwin showed Jane Doe the original tape after obtaining approval from her and her guardian. Corwin then videotaped a follow-up interview in which Jane Doe appeared to spontaneously recall another abusive event she had suffered despite having had no conscious memory of abuse in the years since the initial interview. Corwin published a transcript of the tape and an explanatory article. With Doe's permission, Corwin also played portions of both videotapes to numerous professional audiences.

Loftus hired a private investigator in California and together with co-researcher Melvin Guyer undertook a subsequent investigation into the case, reviewed extensive court records and interviewed Jane's mother and foster mother. In 2002, based on the information obtained, Loftus and Guyer published an article entitled "Who Abused Jane Doe? The Hazards of the Single Case History" in the Skeptical Inquirer. The article was highly critical of the scientific validity of Corwin's 1997 article, and questioned the factual accuracy of his account.

SEE also:

• On so-called “repressed memories”
• ”The Myth of repressed memory”