The strawman fallacy.

[InDarkestNight]

I will admit, I'm not totally sure this should go into the 'debate' board. I was actually originally planning on putting this in the off-topic board, but honestly looking over both I feel that this is actually the more appropriate board for this.

 

I was inspired to make this post after someone on the skyrim board accused me of making a 'strawman fallacy' for providing a counter-example. I explained that's NOT what defines a strawman fallacy. I tried to explain it myself, but later while looking it up on youtube I found a phd philosopher who explained it far better than I did:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfil34ayaEU

 

I would like to also reveal my own thoughts on the subject. A strawman fallacy is a rampant problem in discussions these days (along with many others, I do plan on making threads about other common fallacies, including ones arguably more common than this).

 

A common example of one is when someone tries to refute a person's claim by instead arguing that they are unreliable. Let's say Bob claims that the sky is blue. Another person, let's call him Billy, then tries to refute that by claiming that Bob is a liar, and that this proves that the sky is NOT blue. Of course, in reality whether or not Bob is a liar has no relevance on whether or not the sky is blue.

 

You see this a lot with science, where people try to refute scientific findings by claiming that scientists themselves are unreliable. Yes, they can make mistakes, and they have many faults, but that's normally not relevant to most scientific claims. Particular its not hard to find evidence for climate change all around us. My own area has been suffering from increasingly longer droughts with every passing year, which the local farmers claim has been devastating to them. The years between us actually getting snow here has been gradually increasing. When I was growing up in the 90s, we got snow about every 3 or 4 years. That gap has been gradually increasing, and its now been more than a full decade since we saw snow. People are seeing animals moving further north to areas where they normally aren't. People however still refute climate change by saying that scientists can't be 100% trusted. That may or may not be true (more on that later), but that doesn't refute all the evidence we can see all around us. Of course, climate change deniers make many more arguments than that, but those aren't the topic here.

 

Another common example is when people accuse someone else of taking an extremist position even when they refute it. The video I linked has an example of that, so I won't re-iterate it. I find this form rather annoying since of course in reality, few people are extremists; most people are actually centrists (even if they do lean more towards one party than the other). Point is, its rare for a person to 100% agree with ALL the tenets of their political party.

 

To me, this also overlaps with some other types of fallacies. One is the genetic fallacy, where the veracity of a claim is refuted by attacking the character of the person that made the claim (such as refuting that the sky is blue by arguing that Bob is a liar). This is something that comes up A LOT, and too overlaps with another logical fallacy.

 

The next one I would like to bring up is the Appeal to Authority argument. This is a sort of reverse of the genetic fallacy, where someone defends their claim by arguing that an expert also supports it. This is possibly one of the most rampant ones because our institutions actively encourage it; the insistence on citing sources is itself an appeal to authority argument. In fact, it didn't even originate from the academic community. In reality, it originated from 'Antiquarians'. They were a movement in the late 19th century who tried to fight back against the movement to limit intellectualism to certain individuals. They were self-taught historians mostly, thus the name. However, they did run into a problem in that they questioned their own veracity since they didn't have access to the same resources or training as the experts. Many took to citing experts to legitimize themselves, arguing 'well, since this academic supports it too, it must have SOME veracity'. That movement has long since died, but their practice of citing sources lives on, despite it not being hard to find holes in it.

 

Now I would like to bring up the reliability of experts. As I said, they can't always be relied upon. They are all human and they make mistakes. Also, scientific theories are constantly being updated and replaced, so just because experts are saying something NOW doesn't mean its necessarily true. This is a real problem in the New Age community, where they like to base their religious beliefs on scientific findings and then proceed to hold on to them even long after they're refuted within science. Also, experts can be prone to intentionally misleading. A good example of that is the DOTA player called Miracle. He's one of the top players in that game (or at least, was years ago). He also runs a youtube channel where he shows his games. However, curiously, his videos are all of losses, and in all his videos its obvious he's intentionally throwing his games. For instance, one I saw he was playing as Juggernaut against opponents who had 3 hard carries. Now Juggernaut reaches his peak in power in the mid game, while hard carries reach in the late game. Also, he was playing his team's carry, so they had no late game characters of their own. The opposite team being half late-game characters meant that their early and mid game was really easy. What you should do in this situation is to try and win the game before your opponents can 'come online'. However, he did that do that. Part way through the mid game he instead started killing generic mobs in the jungle, and did that for the rest of the game completely disregarding the gains the opposition was making. Once it got to late game, they then steamrolled his team since they had 3 late game characters and his team had none.

 

Why would he make such a stupid mistake? Having played both the original dota and dota 2, I can say that this is a rampant problem in the dota community. Many pros intentionally try to thwart new players from learning just to minimize competition. In dota 1, it was common for them to kick people who had to download the map, making it hard to get into a game. Also, if you were doing badly, they would use a hack to cause you to disconnect from the server, which also prevented you from saving the replay. This made it night impossible to learn; you couldn't get far in games and you couldn't save them for further analysis. When this was brought up, people openly admitted this was intentional; they didn't want you to learn because you would be future competition. This is actually what Miracle is/was doing with his channel. Being a high ranking player, he knew people would be looking up videos of his games to learn from him, so he uploaded videos of him doing stupid stuff to keep this from happening.

 

The point I'm trying to make here is that experts can be inclined to intentionally mislead. Miracle is just one example of that. This tends to happen a lot in competitive fields. Sadly, this also happens far too often in science. There IS money in making scientific claims, so its not unusual for scientists to play dirty to get their theories accepted. The cost is also high if you support one disproven theory; you'll have all your credentials taken away and be forever barred from practicing science ever again. This results in many problems within the industry that many scientists are complaining about. People often continue to push for theories even after they're disproven just because they have a financial stake in them. In particular this was a really rampant problem in archaeology in its early years (often now called 'the bone wars'). That's long passed, but many of its faulty findings are still a part of archaeology today, and scientists are still trying to weed all of them all out. Its also a rampant problem in other sciences; it even has a name: the founder effect. Its when they try to test a long held theory, only to find that it actually wasn't true in the first place. Time and time again they find that many of their supposedly oldest and central theories were actually based on faulty research, which is obviously creating quite a problem.

 

On top of this, there's also the rampant problem of scientific education, which is deliberately misleading. Everything they teach you up to at least an associate's degree is actually complete BS, and they don't start telling you what they actually believe until it becomes obvious you're going to get a job in the sciences. I admit, I don't know why they do this, but one possible theory is to keep their expertise limited to themselves for the sake of financial gain. Its not unusual for experts to do that; scribes throughout history have tried to keep writing from spreading to the common folk just so they could keep their jobs. Egyptian scribes even made their system as convoluted as possible just to increase the barrier to entry.

 

This is all why an appeal to authority argument often fails. Yes, experts know better than common people, but that doesn't make them a reliable source, and either way even the smartest people on earth can be wrong.

 

If anyone has anymore to say on this topic, I would love to hear it. Besides further expanding my knowledge, I was hoping perhaps this could lead to better debates on this board. Here's hoping for replies, or at least someone learning something from this. More will come either way; at the very least people are going to be reading these even if they get no replies, so good is still being done either way.

 

Thank you for reading this post that turned out far longer than I planned. I'm done now, bye.

Edited October 17, 2023 by InDarkestNight