xway's posterous

Does it pass Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit?

Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit

Warning signs that suggest deception. The following are suggested as tools for testing arguments and detecting fallacious or fraudulent arguments:

Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the facts.

Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.

Arguments from authority carry little weight (in science there are no "authorities").

Spin more than one hypothesis - don't simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.

Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it's yours.

Quantify, wherever possible.

If there is a chain of argument every link in the chain must work.

Occam's razor - if there are two hypotheses that explain the data equally well choose the simpler.

Ask whether the hypothesis can, at least in principle, be falsified (shown to be false by some unambiguous test). In other words, it is testable? Can others duplicate the experiment and get the same result?

Additional issues are:

Conduct control experiments - especially "double blind" experiments where the person taking measurements is not aware of the test and control subjects.

Check for confounding factors - separate the variables.

Common fallacies of logic and rhetoric

Ad hominem - attacking the arguer and not the argument.

Argument from "authority".

Argument from adverse consequences (putting pressure on the decision maker by pointing out dire consequences of an "unfavorable" decision).

Appeal to ignorance (absence of evidence is not evidence of absence).

Special pleading (typically referring to god's will).

Begging the question (assuming an answer in the way the question is phrased).

Observational selection (counting the hits and forgetting the misses).

Statistics of small numbers (such as drawing conclusions from inadequate sample sizes).

Misunderstanding the nature of statistics (President Eisenhower expressing astonishment and alarm on discovering that fully half of all Americans have below average intelligence!)

Inconsistency (e.g. military expenditures based on worst case scenarios but scientific projections on environmental dangers thriftily ignored because they are not "proved").

Non sequitur - "it does not follow" - the logic falls down.

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc - "it happened after so it was caused by" - confusion of cause and effect.

Meaningless question ("what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?).

Excluded middle - considering only the two extremes in a range of possibilities (making the "other side" look worse than it really is).

Short-term v. long-term - a subset of excluded middle ("why pursue fundamental science when we have so huge a budget deficit?").

Slippery slope - a subset of excluded middle - unwarranted extrapolation of the effects (give an inch and they will take a mile).

Confusion of correlation and causation.

Caricaturing (or stereotyping) a position to make it easier to attack.

Suppressed evidence or half-truths.

Weasel words - for example, use of euphemisms for war such as "police action" to get around limitations on Presidential powers. "An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public"

Excerpted from the book, “The Demon Haunted World” by Carl Sagan. 

Purchase a copy from one of these many sellers: http://isbn.nu/9780394535128

For more information, go to www.carlsagan.com

 

 

Petussis (Whooping Cough) Health menace? Who in their right mind wants more of these blue states to turn to red states?

From:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/02/why_we_immunize.php
 
  Why we immunize
  Category: Antivaccination lunacy • Medicine
  Posted on: February 24, 2009 12:00 AM, by Orac
 
"This is Mandatory reading:"
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/010978.html#010978
 
This included graphic from Petussis.com shows a map of the states
where their color has nothing to do with politics but everything to do
with a growing health menace. Who in their right mind wants more of
these blue states to turn to red states?
 
"When the diphtheria anti-toxin was first used successfully in Berlin,
Germany, Christmas 1891, it was the first time any disease anywhere
had actually been cured. Up until then, all that medicine had ever
been able to do was support a patient until that patient’s own immune
system either worked—or didn’t."
 
Photo is of Black Cemetery in Berlin, Vermont. Graphic includes just
some of the death notices from young graves in just ONE cemetery in
ONE small town in ONE state, Vermont.
 
Photo of Balto statue. Diphtheria is why Balto, a sled dog, has his
statue in Central Park, and why the Iditarod is run every year, in
memory of the 1925 run that brought diphtheria anti-toxin to Nome,
Alaska.

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