Some Cases of Fallacious Reasoning
that I have recently come across in my social circle....
Here are three examples of fallacious reasoning that I have recently come across in my social circle.
Some Things Just Ain’t In the Head
Engaging in long thinking on a particular move is associated with 600 ELO poorer performance in chess, says chess statistician Ken Regan.
A wrong take on that piece of statistics would be to infer that a player should not think long—he should play fast. The absurd conclusion here is that long thinking causes poorer performance.
That interpretation would, of course, ignore the possibility of a third factor that causes both long thinking and poorer performance, namely the difficulty of the situation. It's not as if people play worse when they think longer; it’s that people engage in long thinking because of the difficulty of the position. Long thinking is a reflection of the difficulty of the situation.
Although this reasoning error is recognized fairly quickly, there is a related reasoning error that is much more widespread. Consider this: if Regan had been investigating what kind of performance was associated with fear, he would have probably found out that the presence of fear on a particular move within a game was associated with weaker performance.
A wrong take from that piece of statistics would be to suggest to the player that he should simply relax. Such suggestions are symptomatic of an age whose guiding principle is that “it's all in the head” and that all that matters is “not what happens, it’s how you react to what happens”.
However, something similar happened to me back when I was learning how to drive. My driving instructor would often tell me to “relax”, implying that fear was responsible for my bad driving. While it is true that there is a correlation between fear and poorer performance in a task, that correlation does not imply that fear causes poorer performance.
My fear was a reflection of my driving competence (or the “difficulty of the situation” for me) at the time. It was not the case that fear influenced my poor driving. Rather, both worse driving and fear were a consequence of my insufficient competence as a driver.
Telling a person who is insufficiently competent at a task to relax while performing that task is probably bad advice1, a suggestion that rests on a failure to understand the function of fear. The function of fear in such cases is to raise the alertness of the organism to pay more attention to its environment, a result of taking into account the estimated level of competence of the organism to cope with the challenges of the task, as well as the cost of a potential error.
Eliminating fear does not eliminate the underlying incompetence (or the difficulty of the situation) that causes it—it only eliminates the organism’s natural reaction that occurs at tasks in which the organism is incompetent, which probably causes poorer performance, contrary to the initial presupposition.
A related point is that anxiety experienced while taking a test (such as an IQ test) is more about lower intelligence (= lack of competence) than anxiety interfering with performance on the test, as the great
points out in his recent post.Conflating the Personal and the Subpersonal
A few months ago
posted about a new paper showing physiological reactions to news stories across 17 countries. One unit increase in negativity was associated with skin-conductance levels and heart rate variation indicating more physiological activation. His conclusion?“The media is negative because it's what people want”, he says.
People often say stuff like that implying that people themselves are responsible for the quality of the media. After all, the media is merely catering to the consumers’ demands. Or so the story goes.
The assumption seems to be that negativity bias implies something about what people want. However, is it really true that the fact that negative information captures people’s attention more easily than positive information implies that people want to process or consume negative information? After all, people are also more attentive to the sound of a fire alarm than to the sound of laughter but does that mean people want to hear the fire alarm? Perhaps you could say that if the alarm sound is relevant to you (a reliable indicator of fire in an area that concerns you). Is a fire alarm also giving people “what they want” when it is wrongly activated so that you should stop complaining if you hear it all the time? Well, I guess so if your criterion of “what you want” is skin-conductance levels and heart rate.
Hanania’s error here (well, at least one of it) is the failure to distinguish between the personal and subpersonal levels of explanation. What I want belongs to the personal level. What kind of biases my cognitive apparatus has belongs to the subpersonal level.
I won’t get into the distinction much, you can check that on your own if you like. In a nutshell:
Explanations in psychology are described as personal when they attribute psychological phenomena to the person, as when we attribute beliefs and thought processes to each other, for example. By contrast, explanations in psychology are described as subpersonal when they attribute psychological phenomena below the level of the person, as occurs when scientists describe parts of the brain as representing or evaluating, for example.
So yes, you can be angry at the media. As I like to say, the main problem with the modern news media is exploiting the underlying logic of communication, what relevance theorists call the communicative principle of relevance, namely that every communicative act conveys a presumption of its own optimal relevance.
In other words, when people communicate, there is an implicit expectation that the information shared will be relevant enough to justify the effort expended in processing it. This is patently not the case with most news in the media. With clickbaits, junk news and fake (or biased) news, the media is betraying the trust that communication presupposes. Declining public trust in the mainstream media follows as a consequence.
Meritocracy Is Not Simply About Causation
Some people, like Joseph Bronski, seem to assume that a high positive correlation between “good” traits like intelligence/conscientiousness and wealth/power implies meritocracy. After all, one would expect that in a meritocratic society intelligence and hard work would “pay off”.
However, this is wrong since a person can use his high IQ and conscientiousness to attain wealth and power in ways that we would not consider deserved. The correlation between intelligence/conscientiousness and wealth, even if the relation was causal, is silent on the question of merit.
if I got paid for doing nothing but managed to successfully use my high intelligence to convince the employer that I did everything, people would not consider my salary deserved.
Hence the correlation between IQ/conscientiousness and wealth/power does not imply "merit" or "meritocracy". The notion of meritocracy goes beyond the mere requirement that my abilities are causally related to the acquisition of wealth or power. It requires certain value judgments.
The point of meritocracy, one could argue, is to incentivize the application of one's abilities in a way that is beneficial to others.
Excluding cases of pathologically excessive fear, of course.