House of Eratosthenes

Sometimes you don’t have to know the right answer to be able to recognize a wrong answer. And sometimes just the method for getting an answer is enough to tell you that it’s wrong.

There are many subjects which I may not have time to fully investigate and become fully knowledgeable (if at all) on them, yet when seeing people who do write about them, I can nevertheless still tell that their arguments are full of crap.

Let’s take the argument that the government was not to blame for inflating the housing bubble. Here is an example (which I don’t mean to pick on as it’s far from the worst offender, but I came across it today):

the claims that Fannie and Freddie were the primary culprits behind the inflation of the housing bubble and the flood of fraudulent mortgages is nonsense. … the worse junk mortgages were not bought and securitised by Fannie and Freddie. These were packaged and sold by the investment banks, Goldman Sachs, Lehman, Citigroup and the rest. Fannie and Freddie got into junk mortgages late in the game, and even then, their primary motive was to regain lost market share.

This belongs to a species of argument, cherished also by the likes of Paul Krugman, that involves bringing statistical measures to bear so as to show that Fannie and Freddie didn’t buy ‘most of’, or a ‘majority of’, subprime loans, or didn’t issue subprime bonds, or whatever. The intent is to demonstrate that their ‘presence’ in the portion of the market deemed problematic (‘subprime’, or something) was small, and/or that other actors (investment banks, e.g.) bought the loans which were deemed problematic. The conclusion is that the government (Fannie/Freddie) can’t have been to blame.

It is clear that this argument is incorrect merely based on the methodology. The logic used is just plain incorrect, and in fact, economically ignorant. It cannot be correct.

This doesn’t mean I have a proof that the government was to blame. It just means that all the people I’ve ever seen saying it wasn’t, have crappy arguments that don’t hold water. They are using the wrong kind of argument, a kind that cannot possibly be correct.

“Cannot possibly be correct” is a little on the strong side, I’d say. This neglects the “stopped clock right twice a day” thing, which is key to the persuasive power of these wrong, flawed arguments. Every now and then, the wrong methodology is used to reach a thoroughly bolluxed conclusion, random in all respects save for the frenzied agenda that drives it. But then the ball happens to land on the right roulette slot and the scatterbrain looks like a wizened sage. Is this not exactly what happened with the “no WMDs in Iraq” situation? Twenty-twenty hindsight reigns supreme.

But the observation is a valid one, and perhaps we need a new word to describe it. Neal Boortz has been maintaining for a long time that the dreadful state of public school education in this country is not only directly responsible for the flawed, ramshackle arguments finding currency & natural vibe; but may in fact be complicit in this. This, too, I find to be mostly meritorious, although again I see some gaps: I know lots of people who paid good free-market money for their education (or whose parents did on their behalf) and think very highly of this particular piece of their learnin’s. But they wouldn’t know truth if it ran up and kicked ’em square in the nuts, because they dismiss decent arguments before they’ve fairly evaluated them. In fact, in many cases they seem to equate the quality of their education with the speed with which they dismiss arguments that might, in fact, actually mean something and be worth considering. In effect, they have paid good money out of their parents’ second-mortgages, for lifelong habits that will keep them ignorant.

It’s a bigger issue than formalized education, whether the education is provided in a public or private setting. This drives to the very heart of how, in Anno Domini Twenty Eleven, we here the the western hemisphere define things like “smart,” “erudite,” “reasoned,” “well-reasoned,” “logical,” “rational,” “truthful”…our tragic recent tendency is to equate all these things with a single, smooth, quick deft motion to shunt bits of information aside without absorbing them. Because, supposedly, those bits of information are contraband…because, supposedly, they have a toxic effect. It’s as if, by merely coming in contact with them, the thinker contaminates the rest of his knowledge-base.

Although deep down we all know: If there’s any verity at all in that worn-out college cliche, “I’m not here to tell you what to think I’m here to tell you how to think,” there should be nothing to worry about there. You should be able to pick up a piece of information, even if it is delusive, deceptive, sneaky, and reeks of propaganda; come into contact with it; evaluate it, rigorously, playing “what-if” games with it, accepting-for-sake-of-argument. None of this means you have to believe it with no reservations or attaching your name or reputation to it. If you have been educated in any way that means anything at all, anywhere, you should have been able to build up that “no-man’s-land” because you should have been able to foster an ability to detect bullshit & react accordingly. Without becoming an intellectual pussy, summarily rejecting things that might be bullshit.

Why is this important? Because when you treat knowledge as a potential contagion, you run into the problem discussed at the beginning of the post…you start spewing nonsense, using Krugman-arguments people can tell are flawed by their very methodology. You end up consuming precisely what you were trying to avoid consuming. Worse still, you end up regurgitating it.

It’s like our modern culture has started to value anti-spyware and anti-virus software packages in the neighborhood of hundreds of thousands of dollars per license, and then when you order up such a package you just get a postcard in the mail that says “don’t log on to the Internet.”

Neal Boortz has been maintaining for a long time that the dreadful state of public school education in this country is not only directly responsible for the flawed, ramshackle arguments finding currency & natural vibe; but may in fact be complicit in this.

This is 100% correct.

The best piece of writing I have ever read, on any subject, is “Idealism: A Victorian Horror Story,” a two-part essay by the philosopher David Stove. It sounds dry and academic — the Idealism he’s talking about is an old, musty, dead formal philosophy — but it lays out the argument on which all modern liberal arts education rests.

Stove calls it “The Gem,” and it goes like this: We can only know things when certain necessary preconditions (brain states, or whatever) are met; therefore, we cannot know things as they are in themselves.

Stove points out that the first part of that statement is actually a tautology — stripped of its highfalutin’ verbiage, it really means “we can only know what we can know.” Since the first statement is literally meaningless, any conclusions you draw from it are necessarily false. Unfortunately, all the highfalutin’ verbiage makes it sound all profound and important, and because tautologies are by definition true (a = a), it lends an air of legitimacy to wildly counterintuitive, completely politicized bullshit.

For instance: All culture is relative, therefore no cultures are better than others. The first part is a tautology; the second is a straight political claim. And once you’ve started down that road, illogical political non sequiturs are not only easy but fun: all culture is relative; therefore no cultures are better than others… but Western culture is definitely worse.

Kids are taught in Gems, tout court, in everything except the sciences (and even there the Gem shines brightly; haven’t you heard that science is also a social construction?). I’d wager that every single item on the leftist agenda, if it has any argument at all behind it, rests on a Gem-type argument. Is it any wonder nobody knows how to evaluate a factual claim anymore?
- Severian | 05/22/2011 @ 21:20

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“It is Clear That This Argument is Incorrect Merely Based on the Methodology”Sunday, May 22nd, 2011

“It is Clear That This Argument is Incorrect Merely Based on the Methodology”
Sunday, May 22nd, 2011