Ranthropologist

Author: Ranthropologist

  • Logical Fallacies: The Gambler’s Fallacy

    Logical Fallacies: The Gambler’s Fallacy

    Unfortunately, I have a very personal reason for choosing the gambler’s fallacy as my next topic. I am experiencing the effects of this fallacy with someone close to me who is in the grips of a gambling addiction. For years, she has exhorted me that winning depends upon making large bets. She believes that betting more money improves the odds of coming up lucky on her vice of choice, the slot machine. No amount of patient explanation of statistics and odds can dissuade her from this belief. She also falls prey to the classic version of the gambler’s fallacy, which essentially states that the odds of one event are influenced by the outcome of the preceding event. This can sometimes be true. For example, in cases where numbers are drawn and not replaced, as in bingo, the odds of the remaining numbers being drawn increase with each subsequent draw (that is, in a bag of ten numbered balls, the odds of drawing any of the numbers is one in ten. Once the first ball is drawn, the odds of drawing any of the remaining numbers becomes one in nine, and so on). However, it is not true for simple odds such as coin tosses. Each and every toss of a coin is an independent event. So, even if you get nine tails in a row, the odds of getting heads on the tenth toss remains exactly the same as it was for the preceding nine tosses; that is, 50 percent. Yet, many people will believe that the tenth toss has much greater odds of being heads because the previous nine tosses were tails. This is the gambler’s fallacy.

    It is amazing how many people fall for the gambler’s fallacy. You see it operating not only in casinos but in lotteries. When a lottery jackpot gets really big, it is because several drawings have passed with no winner. And of course, the bigger the jackpot gets, the more people buy tickets. Many people do this simply because they hope to win the huge jackpot, not because they believe their odds are any better; but I have had conversations with many people who insist that they are more likely to win when the jackpot is bigger. Their argument is a perfect example of the gambler’s fallacy: because no winner has been drawn for so many weeks, the odds of a winner must be greater for the bigger jackpots! This is actually true in one specific sense, because the more people who buy tickets, the more potential combinations of numbers there are in the ticket pool. But the big jackpot and the long time elapsed since a winner does not change the fundamental odds of drawing, say, five numbers out of 56. No matter how big the jackpot, the odds remain exactly the same for each and every drawing. For the Mega Millions lottery, the odds of drawing five particular numbers and the Mega number are 1 in 175,711,536. Again, these odds remain the same no matter how big the jackpot and no matter how many tickets have been purchased. It seems that attaching money or some other consequence to the outcome of a random event scrambles people’s ability to rationally judge the odds.

  • Logical Fallacies: The Slippery Slope

    Logical Fallacies: The Slippery Slope


    The slippery slope fallacy is another of those logical mistakes to which so many people fall prey. I’m sure you recognize it; it’s the idea that doing one thing will inevitably lead to doing something worse. It’s a common argument deployed for things like drug use, in which a drug like marijuana is labeled a “gateway drug” because it allegedly opens the door to much more dangerous and addictive substances. In other words, once you start using marijuana you’ve started down the slippery slope towards becoming a full-blown cocaine/meth/heroin/oxycontin, etc. addict. The problem with the slippery slope fallacy, paradoxically, is that it’s true often enough that people start to become convinced that it’s true for everything. Certainly there are drug addicts who started with marijuana and ended up with heroin; the problem is the assumption that the worst will always happen. It becomes a form of confirmation bias. People remember the cases where one decision led to another, and then another… and the next thing you know, the world as we know it has come to an end!

    The slippery slope fallacy is used all the time in public and political discourse. Recent events illustrate well that the slippery slope is a common bludgeon for changing people’s positions or illustrating their stance. So, gay marriage inevitably leads to multiple marriage (polygamy), then marriage between children and adults, then marriage between people and animals, and so on. It reminds me of Peter Venkman, Bill Murray’s character in Ghostbusters: “Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats, living together! Mass hysteria!” (Of course, the interesting thing about this particular argument is that polygamy is widely practiced in many cultures, and girls and boys who might be considered children by Western standards are considered to be of marriageable age as early as 13 in some parts of the world… but that doesn’t mean that this is going to be accepted in all cultures, or even that it should be. Personally, I have no problem whatsoever with polygamy, although I wouldn’t want it for myself).

    We see a similar argument occurring in the gun control debate: if gun control laws are tightened, then only criminals will have guns, and law-abiding citizens will have to live in fear for their property, safety, and their lives. The converse is that if gun laws are relaxed, gun crimes and gun deaths in general will skyrocket as people go around randomly shooting each other. Obviously I’m exaggerating to make a point, but this is the natural consequence of the slippery slope argument.

    One place where I fall prey to the slippery slope myself is in my concerns over how digital and wireless technology is allowing more and more intrusion into our private lives. I harbor dark fears that eventually, no one will be able to do anything without it being recorded somewhere, somehow. I cringe every time I read a story about the new ways technology is intruding into our lives, in many cases without our knowledge. A company in the UK has developed public trash cans that can track smart phone signals and display ads based on the personal habits of passers-by. This sort of thing keeps me awake at night and gets me started down the slippery slope. I think my overall concerns about privacy and government/corporate overreach are well founded; but do these concerns necessarily lead to a completely totalitarian, Orwellian world? Perhaps, but simply arguing that one thing inevitably leads to another is not enough.

    Like all the things I write about, there are always grey areas. Sometimes a slippery slope concern ends up being justified, but even if it is, slippery slope arguments are still fallacious. People always sense danger when they feel their worldview is being threatened, and some people see threats everywhere. Even if we feel justified in listening to our fears about the slope, we are still obligated to do the actual work of using facts and logic to determine what the potential outcomes may be. Fear, as compelling as it may be, is not rational, and neither is the slippery slope.

  • Technology and Its Discontents: Planned Obsolescence

    Technology and Its Discontents: Planned Obsolescence

    Last Sunday a friend and I took a trip to visit the Antique Gas and Steam Engine Museum in Vista. I have been tremendously enjoying the process of learning to use my new camera, and the museum provided an abundance of wonderful subjects. Yet, as I wandered amongst the rusting hulks of old tractors, engines, trucks, and farm equipment, I felt a pang of unease. The museum is a testament to obsolete or aging technology, and some of the machines have been lovingly cared for or meticulously restored so that visitors can appreciate the technology of days gone by. In many cases, the old machinery did not look that different from what is in use today, but small, incremental changes over time led to the abandonment of the old in favor of the new. In other cases, as with the steam engines, radical new technologies led to the complete obsolescence of previous innovations.

    George Bernard Shaw said “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” When I came across this quote I shuddered. To me it speaks directly to the human desire to shape the world in his image. It is steeped in a theological ideology of man’s supremacy over and domination of the world. It does not see humans as the animals they are, destined to adapt – or not – to their environment. As I noted in a previous post, human adaptation takes the form of wanting things to be easier, faster, and better, and this idea was amply illustrated at the museum. What was wrong with the machines that had been abandoned for better (and there’s a word that needs a critical unpacking) models? I’m not arguing that innovation is necessarily a bad thing; but when we consider how our ability to do more things more easily has changed the world and our ability to survive in it in greater and greater numbers with a greater and greater impact, it’s worth thinking about whether it’s necessarily a good thing.

    Taking a turn towards more modern technologies, I find myself wondering when we will have museums filled with obsolete televisions, computers, and cellphones. I realize we have antique communicative technologies in museums already; radio has been around for more than a century, and so have telegraphs and telephones. Television is not far behind, and computers are nearing the half-century mark. But unlike the technologies of old, which seemed to change and innovate relatively slowly, computers in particular are changing so fast that what you buy today is practically obsolete tomorrow. This is not an accident. Humans seem unable to leave well enough alone and adapt to what they already have. Shaw’s remark about progress is pertinent, except that I don’t think it’s the unreasonable man alone who is responsible for Shaw’s so-called progress. Instead, it is human nature itself, because it wants faster, easier, better… and ultimately, higher status technologies even if we don’t actually need them. We are being relentlessly manipulated and trained into believing that we must have the next big thing, and nowhere is this more apparent to me than in cellphones and computers.

    I don’t want this to turn into a rant about advertising, but I am so angry and distressed at the commercials I have seen recently that attest to this planned obsolescence phenomenon. One is for Cox Communications and features a recurring, annoying dad character who races around boasting of his blazing fast internet speed and his ability to watch streaming movies and TV everywhere he goes. In a scene where he walks down a staircase, eyes glued to his computer tablet, I found myself wishing the commercial’s punchline would be dad tripping and tumbling to his death from a broken neck. Alas, that wouldn’t sell many subscriptions to Cox. Another commercial, for AT&T, states that they are offering a new plan wherein customers can Upgrade to a New Phone Every Year! With No Activation Fee! And No New Phone Upcharge! All I could think when I saw that one was “holy shit, we are doomed.” I recently met an old friend for dinner, and he was using a cell phone he’d had for 13 years… and it still works. It doesn’t text, or have more than a rudimentary screen, or a (what used to be so cool) flip cover; it’s just a phone. And guess what? We were able to use it to communicate. I found myself feeling a mixture of envy and nostalgia for his decision to stick with the basics.

    What are we doing to ourselves with this attachment to newer, better, faster? What are the ultimate long-term consequences of “progress”? Is it really better that we have increased the earth’s human carrying capacity to billions? Or is our insatiable need to take what’s not really obsolete, or even necessary, and trade up for something better going to lead to a crash? In a way, by refusing to adapt to the world as it is, we are planning our own, ultimate obsolescence.

  • Logical Fallacies: Appeal to Popularity

    Logical Fallacies: Appeal to Popularity

    A few days ago I was in Staples buying some supplies for a new craft project, and the cashier inquired whether I had a Staples preferred customer card. When I answered in the negative, he asked if I wanted one. I declined. He persisted: “But our customers are so happy to be in our program! Millions of people can’t be wrong!” On the contrary, I replied; they very well could be wrong. I did end up joining the program because it’s free and might save me some money – but his reference to millions of happy customers had no bearing on my decision.

    This logical fallacy is known as the appeal to popularity. It is one of the many irrelevant appeals that people use to back a particular point of view, and like the ad hominem argument from my previous post, it is very easy to explain: just because a view is held by many people does not make it correct. Yet, it is a very common argument. I often find it used in defense of religious beliefs, e.g. God must exist because most people believe he does. How could all those people be wrong? As appealing as that argument may be, it is not rational, logical, or based on facts. Over the thousands of years of human history, millions of people have shared countless incorrect beliefs. Physicians used to treat patients without washing their hands or their instruments, because what we now call the germ theory of disease hadn’t yet been formulated (thank you, Louis Pasteur and your predecessors). Instead, doctors believed that disease spread from what they called miasma, or bad air. They had no conception of microscopic organisms such as bacteria, or invisible particles of virus, or even tiny parasites. Millions of people, including the physicians responsible for treating them, believed in miasma… and they were all wrong.

    None of this is to say that the opposite of the appeal to popularity is true; that is, that the truth is only known by a select few and the rest of the world is simply mislead or deluded. This kind of thinking is common amongst conspiracy theorists. Much of their certainty comes from the feeling that they have access to rare, special knowledge that others don’t know or won’t accept. They convince themselves that they have extra sharp powers of logic and perception because they accept things others won’t, even when the facts aren’t on their side. Conspiracy beliefs make the believer feel like they are part of a special, rarefied group of the truly knowledgeable, and may actually work against the appeal to popularity by saying that the more people believe something (e.g. that fluoridated water or childhood vaccines are safe) the less likely it is to actually be true. This means we have to beware not just the appeal to popularity itself, but how it is deployed. Be extremely wary of any argument that goes along the lines of “But that’s what they want you to believe!”

    It is also important to remember that plenty of things that almost everybody in the world believes to be true are actually true; but they aren’t true because we all believe them to be true – they are true because they are facts. In other words, our belief in something, or lack thereof, is completely irrelevant to the truth value of what we believe in. And the number of people who believe in something – or don’t believe in something – is equally irrelevant to the truth value of a given argument.

  • Mini Rant: Opium of Irrelevance

    Mini Rant: Opium of Irrelevance

    I’m taking a yogurt break at work, and as I headed towards the fridge to get my snack I heard the downstairs lobby TV blaring with the latest irrelevant bit of nonsense from the Jodi Arias trial. If you’ve been following this blog you already know how I feel about this sort of thing being dressed up as real news. For whatever reason, though, today I felt incensed. For crying out loud, a bunch of people, including children, died yesterday in that huge tornado in Moore, Oklahoma. Syria is in the midst of a civil war where even more people are being injured, traumatized, killed. The US Justice Department is essentially staking out reporters and potentially threatening press freedom. We’ve now surpassed an atmospheric carbon load of 400 PPM – beyond the threshold where we can recover from the effects of climate change. And THIS is the day’s big news? I’m horrified, saddened, jaded, cynical. This is the bullshit – the irrelevant, completely pointless crap – that lulls people away from the real news. Jodi Arias should only be relevant to Jodi Arias, her family, the victim’s family, and the criminal justice system in Arizona. IT IS NOT NEWS. It is an opiate that keeps people sated and hallucinating that what they hear is relevant, and it makes me furious.

  • Logical Fallacies: Ad Hominem

    Logical Fallacies: Ad Hominem

    It’s been a while since my last post, primarily because much of my attention has been focused on my other endeavor over at the Rock and Shell Club. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been nurturing several rants, large and small. I am occupied by the usual topics of critical thinking, the over-saturation of social media in our daily lives, and the peaks and valleys of capitalist consumerism. One goal I’ve been considering for quite some time is to develop a curriculum or course description for an anthropology class that centers around the topic of critical thinking. More specifically, I’d like to teach a class that discusses how and why people think about things the way they do. Anthropology is ideally suited to such a topic, because anthropological analysis requires cultivating the ability to see things from other points of view.

    Michael Shermer wrote a book that I would require for my class: Why People Believe Weird Things. This book clarified and helped me conceptualize many of the things I was already thinking about the workings of the human brain. I believe that having a good understanding of how people think is absolutely crucial to living a fully aware life. Even more important, understanding how thinking works, and how it can trip us up, helps us be more careful about our own thinking process. It’s one thing to criticize and evaluate others’ ideas; it’s something else entirely to be able to turn that process back onto your own analyses. I think the world would be a better place if more people did this. To that end, I’d like to discuss, in a series of posts, some of the basic logical fallacies. These are the things that seem to be the most common in people’s thought processes, and the things I think everybody should know and look for in their own thinking. They are also the things I’d start with in my eventual class on critical thinking.

    A fallacy in thinking basically means coming to an irrational conclusion that is not supported by the facts. Instead of arguing from a factual or rational basis, logical fallacies tend to revolve around arguments that stem from emotion, appeals to the spiritual or supernatural, personal attacks, or errors of cause and effect. They fall into many categories and some are more common than others. One of the most common, and simplest to explain, is the ad hominem argument. An ad hominem argument is generally understood as one in which you attack the arguer rather than the argument. This is commonly perceived as a personal attack, where you berate, insult, or criticize the person with whom you are arguing. However, it is important to note that an ad hominem argument does not have to be an attack per se; it is simply an approach by which you say something about the arguer rather than the argument. So, to take a simple example, you could say “You only support gay marriage because your brother is gay; therefore, gay marriage shouldn’t be legalized.” In this argument you aren’t saying anything negative about your interlocutor; but neither are you saying anything factual, rational, or logical in support of the position that gay marriage should or shouldn’t be legal.

    The ad hominem argument does absolutely nothing to advance your case. If it is the kind of ad hominem that actually stoops to the level of a personal attack, then I feel it may actually impede your case – not in a rational sense, because the ad hominem argument does not in any way negate the logic (or lack thereof) of your position – but because it degrades and impedes constructive discourse. No matter how much you may personally disagree with someone’s position, no matter how much personal animosity you may feel towards them, no matter how egregious or offensive or bigoted or immoral you may find their position to be, none of those feelings have any bearing on the logic of either your or your opponent’s position.

    I started with ad hominem not only because it’s the simplest, but it is extremely common and, I believe, extremely damaging. If you use it as a personal attack, your bring yourself down. If you use it to question or draw attention to the arguer rather than the argument, it does nothing to help prove your case. Believe me, I know what it feels like to get angry during a debate, and I know what it feels like to want to call your opponent names or question their character. Resist the urge. If your position truly has merit, that in itself should give you the ammunition you need in your fight.

    Speaking of which, once you’ve retired the ad hominem argument from your arsenal of false weapons, you are on your way to making more room in your quiver for logical arrows. In the next post, I’ll address some of the more complicated, but still common, logical fallacies that remain.