2024 ELECTION THREAD
The next presidential race will be here soon! Please see current Bovada odds. Thoughts?
If you can't explain it yourself (which you clearly can't), then it definitely is. Also, I'm almost pissing my pants in laughter at you equating maths textbooks with gender ideology. That's probably exactly what you think.
You should probably see a doctor then, that level of incontinence is worrying
My own personal example came up after a doctor gave me one of the two standard prostate exams and it turned out negative. The second type of exam was scheduled the next day. I asked him how much the probability that I had prostate cancer was reduced from what it was before the first exam. He replied something like "not at all the second exam is regarding a different section of the prostate." He didn't realize that if a negative on the first exam didn't affect the overall probability it wouldn't
I think toy examples with the numbers increased help in these scenarios. If you had 99 tests that were all negative, it's pretty intuitive to most people that your overall probability of having cancer is not the same on before the 100th test as it was before the 1st test.
Same with Monty hall. If you change it up so that Monty opens 98 doors he knows to be empty and leaves only the one you picked and one more, it becomes a lot easier for people to see intuitively why switching is correct.
i'm still quite frankly confused over why you'd bring that up when we're clearly talking about elective cosmetic surgery
The answer is because you made a broad statement about medical care for inmates generally. Your comment was not limited to cosmetic surgery. I was surprised by your apparent support for the broad proposition, and thus asked a hypothetical question about medical care unrelated to cosmetic surgery.
I don't understand why this is confusing.
Is this the ELECTION THREAD?
Trump freaking out at his own followers
Did he just tell his cult they're fat and lazy?
He keeps insulting them, and they keep lapping it up.
Haha, told them for nearly a decade not to vote early, and then complains that they don't vote early.
Will I never be able to retire? Here is the actual answer regarding disagreeing with experts.
I don't think you are providing quite the education that you imagine, but whatever.
It depends on whether the disagreer is moderately knowledgeable about the subject and how much more intelligent he is in general than the expert. The biggest example where it is silly to stick to the so-called expert involves sports decision that require an ability in probability. Up until recently coaches and managers were frequently making fools of themselves when claiming their expertise in the sport they were coaching, made them more likely to be right than the statisticians that were criticizing them.
If a plumber recommends a procedure that a physicist strongly disagrees with, I'd lay six to five on the latter. If a Phd in chemistry from MIT strongly disagrees with a doctor's prescription, the doctor is probably wrong.
It obviously depends on how blindingly stupid the plumber's advice is, and as you point out, whether the physicist has any knowledge of plumbing. I'm not convinced that your average physicist has more knowledge of proper joint fittings for waste pipes than your average baker does.
My own personal example came up after a doctor gave me one of the two standard prostate exams and it turned out negative. The second type of exam was scheduled the next day. I asked him how much the probability that I had prostate cancer was reduced from what it was before the first exam. He replied something like "not at all the second exam is regarding a different section of the prostate." He didn't realize that if a negative on the first exam didn't affect the overall probability it wouldn't be necessary. In this particular case his ignorance didn't matter but it certainly could in other cases.
Your doctor's response was obviously wrong, but I wonder if he just interpreted your question as "am I in the clear?"
Another example came up in an article by Harvard doctors where they incorrectly stated that a drug that passed the 5% threshold for statistical significance had a 95% chance of working better than a placebo. When I wrote to them, they admitted their error. Harvard doctors. Making an error that 100,000 college freshman wouldn't make.
I agree this is quite bad, especially if it was in a published article.
Of course, with all that being said, the fact is that 99% of disagreement with experts are hogwash.
This is mostly the point that people are making.
And that 99% of challenges are far from harmless in some fields, especially medicine.
Also note that in the given examples, people with education in areas (statistics and probability) were challenging people with education focused on a different area (though should still have a base level of education at least in that area).
The entire point is people that are NOT educated in that area should butt out.
re doctors & probability, this has been discussed before
Doctors don’t know Bayes’ Theorem
The article mainly concerns Gerd Gigerenzer, the director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy in Berlin, who wrote a book called Risk Savvy which “takes aim at health professionals for not giving patients the information they need to make choices about healthcare.” The first statistical problem presented to doctors was the following:
A 50-year-old woman, no symptoms, participates in routine mammography screening. She tests positive, is alarmed, and wants to know from you whether she has breast cancer for certain or what the chances are. Apart from the screening results, you know nothing else about this woman. How many women who test positive actually have breast cancer? What is the best answer?
nine in 10
eight in 10
one in 10
one in 100
Given:
The probability that a woman has breast cancer is 1% (“prevalence”😉
If a woman has breast cancer, the probability that she tests positive is 90% (“sensitivity”😉
If a woman does not have breast cancer, the probability that she nevertheless tests positive is 9% (“false alarm rate”😉
https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2014/...
21% of doctors got it right.
Appeal to authority is a fallacy when the authority in question is not qualified on the subject for which they're being cited. Quoting Stephen Hawking when arguing about biology could be legitimately criticised as "appeal to authority". But right wing dipshits see the words "appeal to authority fallacy" and think it just means "appeal to any authority" because we all know how what right wingers think of people who are actually educated or trained in something, these so-called experts. Pfft.
Eh. It's a species of logical fallacy no matter what. Stephen Hawking's stature as an astrophysicist isn't dispositive proof that an argument made by Stephen Hawking is correct, even if the topic is astrophysics.
But we don't live in a formal debate club. Relying on experts as a concession to both the shortness of life and the limits of your own knowledge and intelligence is a reasonable way for most people to navigate most circumstances.
re doctors & probability, this has been discussed before
https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2014/...
21% of doctors got it right.
Which is probably why we go to medical doctors for their advice on medicine, not probability, which would actually constitute the "appeal to authority" fallacy that some posters here seem to be so fond of pointing out.
Eh. It's a species of logical fallacy no matter what. Stephen Hawking's stature as an astrophysicist isn't dispositive proof that an argument made by Stephen Hawking is correct, even if the topic is astrophysics.
But we don't live in a formal debate club. Relying on experts as a concession to both the shortness of life and the limits of your own knowledge and intelligence is a reasonable way for most people to navigate most circumstances.
Unless you're going to rediscover/reinvent every field of human endeavour from scratch yourself, you're going to need to appeal to some authority when making pretty much any nontrivial argument relating to anything in science, engineering, medicine, law, economics, etc. etc., so calling it a fallacy seems misleading as it's completely unavoidable.
Unless you're going to rediscover/reinvent every field of human endeavour from scratch yourself, you're going to need to appeal to some authority when making pretty much any argument, so calling it a fallacy seems misleading as it's completely unavoidable.
No not really true at all. It would be pretty easy to talk about c-command or something and not mention Chomsky.
Someone doesn't need to know Bayes' Theorem or even to have studied Maths and they may well see the right answer, so it's not a case of "not knowing Bayes' Theorem".
No not really true at all. It would be pretty easy to talk about c-command or something and not mention Chomsky.
What is c-command and what is the argument you want to make about it? Is Chomsky the only person in the world except you who understands it?
Next, explain how you arrived at your argument without referencing any work by Chomsky or anyone else on the subject. Or do you think if you implicitly rely on information in a paper or an article or a textbook written by an expert without explicitly citing your source then you're not really relying on the expert? Easy game then, just state your arguments as incontrovertible facts that fell from the sky and never cite your sources. Not a very persuasive approach, I daresay, but it cunningly sidesteps this "appeal to authority" trap that you all seem so keen to avoid.
The answer is because you made a broad statement about medical care for inmates generally. Your comment was not limited to cosmetic surgery. I was surprised by your apparent support for the broad proposition, and thus asked a hypothetical question about medical care unrelated to cosmetic surgery.
I don't understand why this is confusing.
this feels reasonable #14
Unless you're going to rediscover/reinvent every field of human endeavour from scratch yourself, you're going to need to appeal to some authority when making pretty much any nontrivial argument relating to anything in science, engineering, medicine, law, economics, etc. etc., so calling it a fallacy seems misleading as it's completely unavoidable.
There is a difference between saying:
1) An argument about plumbing must be correct if it is made by an experienced, competent plumber.
AND
2) It is logical and reasonable for a person with limited knowledge about plumbing to rely on the advice of experienced plumbers.
The first statement is technically fallacious. The second statement of course is not.
What is c-command and what is the argument you want to make about it? Is Chomsky the only person in the world except you who understands it?
Next, explain how you arrived at your argument without referencing any work by Chomsky or anyone else on the subject. Or do you think if you implicitly rely on information in a paper or an article or a textbook written by an expert without explicitly citing your source then you're not really relying on the expert? Easy game then, just state your arguments as
C-command is a linguistics concept relating to nodes in a sentence diagram. I have no specific arguments about it and you can google about it yourself. My only argument is that one not need to cite experts in talking about it or making arguments about it, as that's just not how arguments about language (which are very much evidence-driven) work.
There is a difference between saying:
1) An argument about plumbing must be correct if it is made by an experienced, competent plumber.
AND
2) It is logical and reasonable for a person with limited knowledge about plumbing to rely on the advice of experienced plumbers.
The first statement is technically fallacious. The second statement of course is not.
If we take this as given, how would you ever prove a statement about plumbing correct (or incorrect) in a non-fallacious manner?
C-command is a linguistics concept relating to nodes in a sentence diagram. I have no specific arguments about it and you can google about it yourself. My only argument is that one not need to cite experts in talking about it or making arguments about it, as that's just not how arguments about language (which are very much evidence-driven) work.
You are implicitly "citing" the experts that came up with the whole concept though, it's just that nobody cares. If I presented this thread with a similar diagram about different genders, someone would ask "who came up with this?" I'd look up where the diagram came from, name some "expert" and be immediately met with "aPpEAl tO aUtHorIty!". Just because nobody cares that Chomsky or whoever else came up with the sentence structure diagrams doesn't make your hypothetical diagram any different in principle to mine. You didn't come up with the whole concept of c-command, someone else did, and that person or group of people is the "expert" in your scenario.
Now, you could argue that Chomsky is more qualified to talk about sentence structure than some professor of gender studies is to talk about, well, anything, and intuitively I'd probably be inclined to agree, but that's not the argument being made here. It's not some specific authority that's being questioned, it's the whole principle of relying on "expert opinion" itself
You are implicitly "citing" the experts that came up with the whole concept though, it's just that nobody cares. If I presented this thread with a similar diagram about different genders, someone would ask "who came up with this?" I'd look up where the diagram came from, name some "expert" and be immediately met with "aPpEAl tO aUtHorIty!". Just because nobody cares that Chomsky or whoever else came up with the sentence structure diagrams doesn't make your hypothetical diagram any different in
It doesn't matter who came up with the ideas. The crucial point is that the arguments-- like most good arguments-- are evidence driven.
And so if one person lays out the evidence and the arguments stemming from that evidence, then someone else can do the same and if they want to give credit to the person who first forumated the idea then that's up to them but it's not necessary in order to make the same argument themselves.
In the spirit of fairness, given I spent 5 years noting Biden's dementia was only going to get worse, and then things went exactly as I predicted; I now feel compelled to note that Trump's dementia is also only going to get worse. On the dementia scale he is still not as far along as Biden now, and probably not as far as Biden 4 years ago, but these things dont progress linearly.
He had enough wherewithal to play it off, but having a 15 minute senile "moment" of swaying in place in the middle of a rally isn't a great sign of things to come.
If we take this as given, how would you ever prove a statement about plumbing correct (or incorrect) in a non-fallacious manner?
It depends on what the statement is. If the statement is, "NYC requires that all sink connections be made with pipes of [X] size", then we could go to the city codes and look it up.
If the statement is "this is the best plumbing tool to unclog your toilet," then I guess we could conduct some sort of well-designed experiment to test the proposition. That wouldn't be a mathematical proof, but at least it would give us reliable data. But life is far too short for such nonsense, which is why my default would be to rely on the experience and expertise of the plumber.
It doesn't matter who came up with the ideas. The crucial point is that the arguments-- like most good arguments-- are evidence driven.
And so if one person lays out the evidence and the arguments stemming from that evidence, then someone else can do the same and if they want to give credit to the person who first forumated the idea then that's up to them but it's not necessary in order to make the same argument themselves.
That's fine. But if I wanted to make an argument about gender studies, my only evidence is going to come from work done by others, experts if you will. Same if I wanted to make an argument about chemistry, since I don't do my own experiments, or physics, because I'm not smart enough to come up with quantum mechanics or the theory of relativity myself.
I think we are talking cross purposes somewhat. I understood the poster saying "define this and that without appeal to authority" to be saying "without relying on any work done by so-called any experts in this field in general" which is of course impossible, and he has since pretty much confirmed that my interpretation was correct. If he meant "you can cite work done by experts as long as it adheres to the scientific method and is not just some pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo", which is more along the lines of what you seem to be arguing, then he should have said that, but again, I'm pretty sure that my original interpretation is what he actually meant.
In the spirit of fairness, given I spent 5 years noting Biden's dementia was only going to get worse, and then things went exactly as I predicted; I now feel compelled to note that Trump's dementia is also only going to get worse. On the dementia scale he is still not as far along as Biden now, and probably not as far as Biden 4 years ago, but these things dont progress linearly.
He had enough wherewithal to play it off, but having a 15 minute senile "moment" of swaying in place in the middle of
Would you agree that cognitive decline is even more troubling if the presidential candidate in question was deeply narcissistic, unprincipled, and self-absorbed before the cognitive decline set in?
Appeal to authority is a fallacy when the authority in question is not qualified on the subject for which they're being cited. Quoting Stephen Hawking when arguing about biology could be legitimately criticised as "appeal to authority". But right wing dipshits see the words "appeal to authority fallacy" and think it just means "appeal to any authority" because we all know how what right wingers think of people who are actually educated or trained in something, these so-called experts. Pfft.
Yup. Figuring out what your doctor and the medical community recommend on a medical issue and doing that while ignoring the republican party platform and dim sounding internet commenters is not a fallacy. No matter how much culture warrior bros want to pretend like it is.
