House of Eratosthenes

You know, what really strikes me as odious about the Loose Sweater Thread Paradigm isn’t quite so much this notion that all situations must be connected, when they’re really not — although that is bad enough. It’s this notion that you can test the quality of a thought process by the conclusion reached when one uses it.

Your Home Team is playing against Visitors this weekend. You think the home team is going to win. Therefore, you know whoever is betting on the visitors is failing to engage in “critical thinking.”

What’s even worse, is somehow, inexplicably, you become convinced that everyone who agrees with you has followed the proper steps for reaching a decision. They may not have followed anything of the sort; some of them might have flipped a coin.

This problem with Michael Savage’s comments about autistic spectrum disorders (ASD), has a lot of overlap with this. Now, he chose to make his comments indelicately, and so it’s inappropriate for him to demand kid-glove treatment. But that doesn’t have to do with the merits of what he was talking about. And it seems to me we’ve forgotten something important here — your kid is diagnosed with autism, my kid has been diagnosed with autism, you think the diagnosis is sound and I think my kid’s diagnosis is a bunch of bullshit…it’s a real possibility that maybe we both used sound thinking processes to reach the conclusions we did.

We forget that the two situations are different…and that’s what this “Loose Sweater Thread” thing is all about.

We also have a tendency to forget that a sound thought process can reach whatever conclusion it’s going to. And, being nonsense and therefore adhering to the nature of nonsense, an unsound thought process can conclude in just about anything. Which is a slightly different fallacy, but one well worth deliberating.

I was reminded of this by means of a link from Rick, to a bloggress (bloggerette?) who is nigh-on fed up with people not engaged in “critical thinking” — she can tell it’s a problem because people aren’t reaching the conclusions she’s reaching.

And oh, my goodness. The condescension, it just drips…like venom off fangs of a rattlesnake, cobra or black widow…it’s an amazing thing to behold.

My first thoughts are that all Christians need to take a course in critical thinking. This is critical. As an adult convert (at the age of 30) who went to a regular liberal arts college and learned the art of critical thinking and discourse, I have been regularly appalled at the lack of critical thinking that I see amongst the brethren and sistren. It is why so many are now so bitterly disillusioned with President Bush. Those of us who are critical thinkers saw him for who he was back in 1999; a charlatan. But most Christians only heard what they wanted to hear in 2000 and again in 2004. Having done that, and been so badly burned they seem unwilling to trust any politician again.

They need to listen for themselves and read for themselves what the candidates are saying. Do not rely on the media reports…For instance,hen [sic] the story broke about Barak [sic] Obama’s pastor (Dr. Wright), I searched YouTube until I found his entire sermon and found the little bitty clips in context. They meant something then and were not nearly as offensive. If you know anything about the African-American church in this country, then you can understand where they came from. If you don’t, then shame on you. You have some homework to do.

“Those of us who are critical thinkers saw him for who he was back in 1999; a charlatan.” So if you engaged in critical thinking, you saw him as a charlatan, and if you did not, you saw him as something else.

As far as the thing with Jeremiah Wright, some Obama defenders have intoned that no matter what the Pastor did or didn’t say, this has no bearing whatsoever on the character of Barack Obama. And you know — the possibility arises that they may very well have a point. But if they have a point, she doesn’t, and vice-versa. They’re mutually-exclusive points. Especially when the author of this posts insists that if you don’t understand where Wright’s comments “came from…you have some homework to do.”

I left the following comment there:

I agree wholeheartedly on the bit about critical thinking, and am interested in your definition of it. I think I’m solid on the “you’re thinking critically if you agree with me and you’re not if you don’t” part, but it looks like there’s something more to it than just that, something more structured. At least, that’s the impression I get. Can you fill in the empty spaces?

And then, being the nasty two-faced little ogre I am, I expounded further at Rick’s place, Brutally Honest:

This guy goes into a bar at eleven o’clock and there’s this blond sitting there with a glass of wine, watching the TV. As the news comes on, there’s a story about a man threatening to jump from the bridge. The blond leans over to the guy who walked in and say “That’s so sad…I hope they manage to talk him off there.” And the guy says, “Nothin’ doin’. He’s gonna jump. Twenty bucks says.” So the blond says, okay, and they both put up twenty dollars.

Five minutes later, the man on TV jumps from the bridge, and dies.

The blond orders another glass of wine, and hands the guy the money. He says “Miss, I’m sorry, I can’t take your money. I already knew what happened to the guy because I watched it on the six o’clock news.” The blond says “So did I, but I was hoping this time it’d turn out better.”

Methinks she went to the same liberal arts college and learned about the same arts of critical thinking.

Of course, the idea that “I am superior to all those idiots who don’t think like me” is an important component of how liberals think. That’s why liberals don’t support democracy. They don’t believe that they should have to justify their thinking and reasoning, because people like you and I are just too stupid to understand. That’s also why liberals so easily fall into the trap of rationalizations.

Of course, this is a problem for all of us. That’s one reason why it’s so important to actively promote diversity of views, which is an idea of which you’ve been critical.

However, there is also another component at play here. The fact is that it will always be easier to criticize than to develop. It’s certainly true that everyone who criticizes Bush thinks that everyone else who criticizes him agrees. However, there are a million ways to disagree and only a very few ways in which to agree. Unfortunately, this works with the “us against them” mentality to make it seem as though everyone who opposes Bush in one thing are united, when, in fact, they won’t be after Obama is elected. It’s just that they’re so caught up in their opposition that they don’t see what they’re supporting.

That’s one good reason to work to limit the power of the Presidency. The office of the Executive has grown far beyond that which was intended by the framers of the Constitution. Unfortunately, the problem itself hinders any attempt to create the consensus needed to act to fix it.
- JohnJ | 07/23/2008 @ 15:06
Well, I’d probably place a lot more desirability on diversity of points of view, if those points of view were limited to the ones that accepted the responsibility you’re describing. Or, if some of the points-of-view did and some of the points-of-view did not, the ones that did rose to the top of the influence ladder.

You know as well as I do, that’s not how human nature works. We tend to hand out the greater shares of influence to people who just repeat the same commandments over and over again, concealing inside a black-box the machinery by which they arrived at those commandments. That’s why people like Sonja behave the way they do. They want influence, they know exactly how to get it, and so everything out of their mouths is “THIS is what we should do, Can I Get An Amen Here? And if your answer isn’t ‘yes’ then you can just keep your cake hole shut, thank you very much.”

Sonja is having an Inigo Montoya moment with the phrase “critical thinking”; I do not think it means what she thinks it means. But that hasn’t stopped her from responding, and what a stupefying response it is.
- mkfreeberg | 07/23/2008 @ 15:30
I voted for Harry Brown in 2000 myself, hoping that Bush would win anyway. I was trying to send a message to the Republican party that they were too close to the Democrats in their “rush to big government” — even if they weren’t as bad.

When Gore almost won (that’s right, almost … he didn’t win), I felt the country dodged a bullett.

As the years wore on I became even more convinced.

The whole argument that Bush won only because all the “stupid Christians” voted for him is a favorite of the secular left. It’s nonsense.

After 9/11, I shuddered to think what Gore’s reaction would have been. I was glad that Bush won even though I didn’t vote for him.

I signed a petition urging caution in our response. And guess what? I believe caution was taken. This is why we didn’t send eleventy-jillion soldiers to Afghanistan and eventually to Iraq. It would have looked to the Arabs like we meant to annex the Middle East. Which we most decidedly did not intend to do, nor did we do it. There were risks either way, but the Administration’s critical thinking process led them to chose fewer troops. McCain would’ve chosen more troops. Who was right? We’ll never know, but I do know one thing – whichever route was taken by a Republican administration would have been villified as the wrong one by the Democrats. Since Bush chose fewer troops, it was argued we should have sent more.

In 2004 my blog was included on the Blogs for Bush blogroll because I knew we needed to show the Muslim world that we aren’t the weak-stomached pushovers Osama Bin Laden had told them we are. It was our percieved weakness that invited the attack — Osama said it himself multiple times (between pandering to the global Left with Israel and other distractions).

Then came the surge — which was more about showing the Muslim world that we weren’t tucking tail and running right when it seemed things were going the worst (which there was some truth to but it was largely aided to a media hostile to Bush and the war). 20,000 more troops didn’t make the difference on the battlefield. It made the difference in showing the Iraqis (and the Iranians, and Al Queda) that we were not leaving. And this is why it worked.

Say what you like about the man, but Bush is no charlatan. He has largely done what he said he would do — and this is why I voted for him in 2004 and tried to convince as many people as I could to vote for him. When you look at his … ~30% approval rating, I’m in there for this reason. Lord knows I haven’t agreed with his take on everything — but as far as character in a president, I think the man has it in spades. He’s not concerned with polls and popularity, he’s concerned with doing his job while he’s in office.

As worried as I was about a President Kerry, I am even more concerned with a President Obama. He’s a blatant socialist, he buys into the “victimhood and reparations” mentality, and he wants to impress those who want to kill us and run our society into the ground — with how nicely we’ll treat them while they do it.

Tripple-whammy, slam-dunk, “vote-for-the-other-guy” even if the other “guy” were Hillary, that’s how strongly I feel. This guy is bad, bad news.
- philmon | 07/24/2008 @ 11:04
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