In last week’s post, How to sharpen your bullsh*t detection skills, I covered the nine tools that the legendary American astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author and science communicator, Carl Sagan, considered essential to any thinking person’s ‘baloney detection kit’.
When I published that post, it appeared that the official COVID narrative had collapsed under the weight of its own ridiculous self-contradictions. But wouldn’t you know it, now fear-mongering is ramping up over a new scariant of SARS-CoV-2, “nicknamed by scientists on social media as Pirola” – maybe they should get off social media and do some real work. And consequently, your baloney detection muscles are going to be getting a good workout as the next wave of COVID propaganda thunders in.
In the same chapter of his 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a candle in the dark, “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection”, Sagan also summarised the 20 most common and perilous logical fallacies that we must be alert to whenever anyone is trying to persuade us of anything – whether it’s a religious leader trying to persuade us to accept their theology, a salesperson trying to talk us into a purchase, or a public figure pitching us a policy.
Logical fallacies are errors or gaps in the reasoning process that invalidate an argument. Everyday conversation abounds with logical fallacies, because very few people have been formally trained in logic, and therefore they don’t recognise the errors in their own reasoning processes.
Fortunately, the consequences of being taken in by a person who is innocently employing logical fallacies in their argumentation are rarely dire. For instance, if your friend convinces you that she has won her last three races because she was wearing a particular hat, and you decide to wear her ‘lucky hat’ when running your next race, not much can go wrong.
But it’s a completely different story when people in positions of power are employing logical fallacies to persuade others to believe or do things that have a real impact on their lives.
In ancient Greece, a group of teachers who became known as Sophists taught the art of convincing rhetoric. The sophists intentionally deployed logical fallacies in their elaborate arguments, in order to persuade others of the point of view they were espousing. The Sophists were frequently hired by those who were in, or wished to be in, positions of power because they would happily take any side of an argument – for a fee.
In this post, I’ll be covering the first ten of the twenty logical fallacies that Carl Sagan identified as the most common, with some illustrative examples from the COVID-19 debacle:
Latin for ‘to the man’, an ad hominem argument attacks the arguer, instead of disputing the argument itself.
The use of the term ‘conspiracy theorist’ to dismiss anyone who raises concerns about any aspect of the global response to COVID-19 is an example of the ad hominem fallacy. Calling anyone who has questions about the safety and efficacy of the COVID vaccines (including, ludicrously, those injured by them) an ‘antivaxxer’ is another.
Ad hominem is used both to derail the person who is being attacked, by forcing them to defend themselves rather than pursue their argument; and to distract the audience’s attention from the substance of the argument so that they don’t ask the questions they really should be asking, in order to understand the substance of the argument.
The admonition to ‘trust the experts’ is a prime example of this rampant logical fallacy. Australians might remember former Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s airy dismissal of valid concerns about the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 injections with this classic of the genre: “The best medical professionals in the world have signed off on these vaccines so you can be confident.” Wow, that didn’t age well.
Every person occupying a position of power or authority should be expected to demonstrate their competence and worthiness to occupy that position by presenting cogent, evidence-based arguments for their decisions and policies.
To allow yourself to be persuaded by anyone who presents themselves, or is presented by others, as an ‘authority’ without insisting that they demonstrate their expertise – preferably in a forum in which it can be challenged by others with expertise on the subject – is to be taken in by the logical fallacy of argument from authority.
This type of logical fallacy is based on another logical fallacy – an appeal to emotion – and is essentially an argument that a belief is either true or false based on whether the belief leads to desirable or undesirable consequences.
An example of the argument from adverse consequences is the insistence by many public health ‘authorities’ that infection with SARS-CoV-2 presents a grave danger to all people, including children, athletes and healthy adults. Accepting the alternative argument – that susceptibility to developing COVID-19 is largely attributable to age and health status – might lead to discrimination against elderly people and those who are metabolically unhealthy (obese, diabetic, or suffering from cardiovascular disease).
However, facts are facts. It is never acceptable to obfuscate facts because they might cause people to doubt the dominant narrative or hold views that you wish they wouldn’t.
This fallacy is based on the assumption that a statement must be true if it cannot be proven false, or false if it cannot be proven true.
This logical fallacy is frequently employed to dismiss health concerns that arise after a person has received a drug or injection.
When a medical treatment, such as COVID-19 injections that employ never-before-utilised technologies, is administered to millions of people of widely varying ages, health statuses and ethnicities, adverse effects that did not appear in the clinical trials (which were conducted primarily on relatively young, healthy people of majority race) are virtually guaranteed to occur 1.
Dismissing these adverse events as ‘coincidences’ because they did not appear in the clinical trials, is an example of the appeal to ignorance. Absence of evidence of a causal relationship between the adverse event and the treatment is not evidence of absence of this relationship.
It’s not the responsibility of the person who suffered the adverse health consequence to prove that it was due to the treatment, because this person – not having access to the data available, or potentially available, to the purveyor of the treatment – is in no position to furnish proof.
