Tools

During the midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises last night in Aurora, Colorado, James Holmes, a 24-year-old neuro-science student opened fire, killing 12 and injuring 59 people.

The suspect threw a gas canister into the audience of the sold out show, who first thought it was a stunt related to the film, then opened fire on the audience with an assault rifle, a shotgun, and two pistols.

This was the worst mass shooting in America in almost three years.

This was the worst mass shooting in suburban Colorado in 13 years.

Logging into Facebook this morning I see this bullshit.

You know what? Col. Cooper is right. Guns have no moral stature. Neither does a guillotine. Neither does the executioners axe. Neither do iron maidens, nuclear warheads, thumb screws, hand grenades or napalm.

They're just tools. Tools that are used to hurt and kill people.

And we fucking worship them in this country. How sick is that?

I'm not mad at Holmes shotgun. I'm not even mad at Holmes. He's probably crazy. Maybe crazy in the 'political/religious extremist' sense, but still fucking crazy.

What I am mad at is a society that apologizes for it. A society that says "don't blame us for selling guns to a person that wants to shoot people." I'm mad at a society so fucking in love with violence, so infatuated with murder, that it honestly believes the solution to gun violence is more guns.

We need guns to protect ourselves from bad guys.

Bad guys like Trayvon Martin. Bad guys like the kids at Columbine.

You know why I don't own a gun? Because I don't want to kill someone. I don't even think I could.

I don't own anything worth murdering a someone over. And neither do you.

Who does that gun protect you from? Your neighbors? Your friends? The people you pass on the street everyday? Other Americans? Some boogeyman that lives in your head? Muslim? Rapist? Crackhead? Mugger?

You're a fucking coward. You and your gun.

Yeah, we're guaranteed the right to bear arms in this country. But you know what? At the time that was written there was a very real possibility that we'd be invaded. When was the last time America was invaded?

Unless you think your rifle can shoot down a nuclear missile, or scare a bomb out of hiding, then it won't fucking save you from anything.

We also have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Guns go against all three. Guns are the tools of murders and oppressors. Guns drive happiness away by turning everything and everyone into a threat.

Guns are the tool you buy when you're terrified. The security blanket of man-children, the sucked thumb scared infants attempting to convince themselves they aren't scared. Guns, kept out of terror, perpetuate it.

Do I think the right to keep arms should be taken away? No, of course not. But I goddamn will not respect any civilian that treats it like a duty that excludes all other rights.

Unrelated

I made a for real YouTube video. It is very ghetto, but I'm proud of it. Especially since I managed it with a budget of zero dollars.

It's basically a how-to on the order of operations.






Anyway, so that's a thing.

Critical Thinking: Pareidolia and Equivocation

For the first and second parts of this series, please go here and here.

For this installment, I'll be discussing the phenomenon of pareidolia and the equivocation fallacy.

Pareidolia

Pareidolia refers the phenomenon of humans' pattern recognition capabilities registering false positives.

And it is really common.

First, I'll talk about why pattern recognition is a good thing and how that probably came about.

Now, obviously, thousands of years ago life was much harder and much shorter for people. And for our ancestors, being able to recognize patterns quickly quite often meant the difference between life or death. A rustling in the grass might mean a rabbit, and it might mean a snake. Yellow and black stripes might mean a shade tree, and they might mean a tiger.

So it's easy to see why people that were good at recognizing these kinds of patterns and acting quickly on them would have had a tendency to survive more than those of us that weren't as good at deciding that every rustle in the grass means "SNAKE!" and every time black and yellow stripes appeared it meant "TIGER!" Since people that were better at pattern recognition were better at surviving, this meant that they lived longer, bred more, and passed the ability on through their offspring.

Today we can see that this knack for picking out patterns is just as active as ever, even though our day-to-day survival generally isn't dependent on it. Just look at the 'Face of Mars,' or some Rorschach Ink Blots, or the hundreds of people that have found the Virgin Mary in their food, or flying saucers, or optical illusions, or just stare at some clouds for a few minutes.

We're especially good at picking out faces. Especially especially where there aren't any faces.

In reality, there is no real reason to see a face in the above picture. But we humans almost always think 'friendly face' when we see two circles above a curved line.

And that would be a pretty obvious tendency to have, given how long it takes us to develop to maturity. It's a really simple pattern and would be really useful for a toddler to be able to identify if she were lost or distressed.

Now, here's where it gets interesting. We tend to assign intent to these patterns. We have a natural disposition for assuming that other people are somewhat like us: They behave a certain way, think a certain way, emote a certain way, and so on. And we do this on to animals as well.

Now, while it is fair to argue that most mammals do display some level of emotion and intellect, it certainly wouldn't be fair to say that they do so in the same way that humans do. But we think they do. If we didn't we may never have had a Mickey Mouse or a Bugs Bunny. Aesop's fables would have been much duller. On the other hand, our pets would probably be a lot happier with us if we weren't constantly torturing them by forcing them to wear clothes or pose for fucking pictures.

Even inanimate objects and events are assigned human characteristics. Thunder doesn't mean that the gods are angry. A tornado doesn't give a fuck about your house. The rain isn't aware that you just washed your car. A table never jumped out at anybody. But we act like they do.

So all of this leads us to constantly get correlation and causation mixed up and do things like think that a certain dance set to certain music will effect the weather, since it rained shortly after the last two times we danced. Mix this in with a little justification and some confirmation bias and suddenly we have rock solid evidence for the efficacy of rain dances.

And believe me, rain dances are no sillier than some of our other pareidoliac tendencies.

There's a school mysticism/pseudo-science known as synchronicity. Many, many people ascribe to it, even if they've never heard the word.

Synchronicity involves intentionally taking casually unrelated coincidences and assigning special meaning to them. Say, for instance, one morning I read "Youtube sensation converts to Scientology" on a website. Then that afternoon someone I don't know very well on Facebook asks "What do you know about Scientology? I was looking into it on Youtube." And then, low and behold, that evening I'm on Youtube and every other video seems to be mentioning Scientology.

Now, if I was as silly as I was ten years ago I might think this was some kind of sign that I should look into Scientology. Or maybe start a religion based around YouTube or social networking. But in reality, the things aren't related. Well, anymore than anything else.

It's just a coincidence.

But people get crazy dedicated to it, seeing significance in the colors of shirts people wear at the store, linking something someone says at a meeting to something that happened five years ago, finding a random New Age Happy Talk quote or their horoscope and forcing it to line up with their day.

But it's just coincidence.

And it builds all kinds of irrational beliefs and behaviors. Just because the third horse on the ticket won the race two times in a row doesn't mean that you've found the secret to making money on horse-races. Just because the fourth and eighth person on Chatroulette wasn't a naked dude jacking off doesn't mean the fourth person will always not be a lunatic pervert.

They will always be a lunatic pervert. Pissing Jesus, but will they ever.

Equivocation

Also known as the bait-and-switch, the equivocation fallacy is generally an argument or statement that involves intentionally using a term with more than one meaning. This generally looks something like:

• Man is the smartest creature on earth, and
• Man has conquered the earth, so
• Man, being the smart conqueror that he is, should have dominion over woman.

See what I did there? Not a great example, I admit, but I'm not nearly as good at being dishonest as I used to be. In the first two statements I used 'Man' in the meaning 'mankind' or 'homo sapiens'. But in the third statement I switched it out with 'man' in the sense of 'male human,' or 'fella'.

For an example of this fallacy performed on a level that probably qualifies as art, I'd suggest watching "Doctor" William Lane Craig debate the existence of God.

What Craig lacks in scholastic integrity and philosophical elegance he more than makes up for in invincible confidence and verbal hocus pocus.

Half his arguments are just eloquent this.

One of his strongest, or at least most often repeated, arguments is a bastardization of the Kalam Cosmological Argument. The Kalam argument, in it's purest form, goes something like

1. Everything that exists has a cause.
2. The universe exists.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Now, I personally have no problem with that argument since I don't really have a lot invested in whether or not the universe could be said to have been caused. The fact is we don't know. We don't even know what we don't know. Once we get to the point of the Big Bang then we don't even know if terms like 'time' or 'cause' or 'existence' have any meaning.

Now here's where the equivocation comes in on Craig's part. He asserts that God is the first cause. This would be God in the Deistic sense: a God that merely set the dials of reality, pressed the start button, and doesn't interfere in his creation.

And while I don't see the logic in assuming that God was the first cause of the universe, since there's no way to check, as arguments for the existence of God go it's one of the less retarded ones.

Craig then equivocates by drawing a wordy-ass line from God: Non-Interfering Force of Nature to God: Jesus Christ of the Bible. And while I am Straw-Manning him to an extent for the purposes of brevity, I'd invite you to check out any of his many debates on YouTube, as he gallops out the same five or six arguments in every one I've seen, then when his opponents can't address every subtle nuance of every argument to his satisfaction, he claims victory.

Or, if they do refute all of his points he merely rewords them slightly or changes the subject, and claims victory. Which is called a Red Herring, which I'll discuss later.

ANYWAY.

The point is, is that even if Craig had managed to prove the existence of a Deistic god, that in no way provides any evidence for the God of the Bible, and certainly not the Christian god, because those are two very different meanings of the word god.

Some more common examples of this include the word UFO, which can mean Unidentified Flying Object, of course, and Alien Spaceship. Saying "People see UFO's all the time, they've got one buried out in the Desert outside of Roswell that they reverse engineered to build modern computers," is equivocating.

Big Government is another one. Does that mean big as in 'powerful, centralized government' or big as in 'a government composed of many different people and view-points'?

And finally, my favorite: Faith. Which can mean anything from fidelity, as in "I will be faithful to my girlfriend," to reasonable expectations, as in "I have faith that my friend will pay me on time," to belief in an irrational, supernatural claim despite any evidence to the contrary, as in "I have faith that Jesus will arrive on December 21, 2012 and take all the good Christians up to Heaven." 

So those are a couple of things to keep an eye out for, both internally and externally.

From here on out I'll probably only be addressing one thing at a time in an effort not to spend five hours a day staring at this screen. But I'll probably look at the Dunning-Kruger Effect next and Red Herrings after that.

Critical Thinking: Straw Men and Confirmation Bias

Last time I talked some about the importance of checking the source when presented with questionable or sensational information. I also spoke briefly about the Slippery Slope/Just in Case Fallacies, and quote mined/cherry-picked information.

Today I'll talk about the dangers of confirmation bias and the Straw Man Fallacy.

Confirmation Bias

Simply put, confirmation bias refers to people's tendency to seek out and place special significance on information that confirms, reaffirms, or validates their preconceived assumptions, hunches or prejudices.

For a great example of large-scale confirmation bias we can turn to pop culture: The fucking 2012 Mayan Calendar thing.

For anyone that has been locked in a Siberian gulag for the past ten years, the Mayan Calendar Thing has been a widespread conspiracy theory based on the ancient Meso-American Long-Count Calendar. The calendar 'ends' on December 21, 2012. By 'ends' I mean 'starts over.'

Now, the Long Count itself is a truly amazing accomplishment of mathematics and astronomy. Especially when one considers that they used a counting system grounded in a base of 20 (and occasionally 18,) unlike the Western world which uses the base 10 decimal system we're all familiar with.

Their math classes were fucking hard, though.

But that's not what we're here to discuss. Someone, somewhere, decided that since the calender ends on December 21st, that must mean that the world will end on December 21. Which is about as infantile as assuming your parents stop existing when they leave the room. Especially when considering that the Mayan's themselves didn't appear to think anything of the sort. For the Mayans it appears that the completion of a count was a reason to celebrate, such as the Western calendar turning 2000 (minus the Y2K nonsense).

But due to Man's natural affinity for adventure and mystery and narrative, the idea caught on.

This is where confirmation bias comes in. If someone approaches this suspecting that something big may happen on December 21, then there will be no shortage of evidence and predictions to reinforce that belief.

Just for some examples of what this evidence might look like, check out http://2012apocalypse.net/.

We've got predictions from the Bible, the Qur'an, and Nostradamus. We have natural disasters, world leaders and great wars. But the thing is this: Those predictions are so vague that they can be retrofitted to match anything at any time. That's the thing about predictions like that. If I was to write something like

     And lo, a great Beast shall arise in the East bearing a black crown
     Elevated above mortals he shall be heralded as the flying god
     His sign shall be the flaming bull
     His name shall be Archangel, Edom, Moab
    The youth of the world will supplicate at His feet
     By this shall ye know Him

the ink wouldn't even have a chance to dry before people could start linking it to modern events.

The Beast was Michael Jordan, by the way.

Add to this the fact that no one seems to be able to agree what, exactly is supposed to happen on December 21st. An extinction level meteor strike? Reversal of the magnetic poles? WWIII? The return of the Ancient Aliens? Galactic Alignment? Global spiritual enlightenment? The Rapture?

The fact is is that there is about equal probability of all of these happening: slim to none. For some of the less unlikely ones, well, a geomagnetic shift could happen. Or rather could begin to happen, since the process might take up to 10,000 years to happen.

Meteorite? Well, while that's certainly something that could happen at some point, at five months out I'm pretty sure someone would have noticed something.

Planet X? There is no Planet X/Nibiru. That hypothesis relied on gravitational anomalies in our solar system. But these anomalies are far too small to account for a planet. Besides, it would probably be visible to the naked eye at this point.

The fact is, there are only two things we'll know for certain will happen on on December 21st: The Long Count will start over, and the people that made fortunes peddling 2012 conspiracies will begin formulating their excuses and looking for new lines of work.

The Straw Man

There's recently been a movement by the politically correct crowd to have this fallacy renamed the Non-Gender-Specific Straw Person Fallacy. This is because people are idiots and pussies.

If you're going to rename it to something somehow less offensive, then go with the Training Dummy Fallacy, since that's what it refers to. Or the Scarecrow Fallacy, since scarecrows are awesome.

I am your friend! Your soul is safe with me!

Anyway, the story is back in the day when soldiers trained for combat they used straw men to practice their swordplay/marksmanship on. These straw men were, of course, much easier to knock down than real combatants. As a logical fallacy it refers to the technique of taking the opponent's argument or stance, making a ridiculous or inaccurate misrepresentation of it, and attacking the misrepresentation, instead of the the actual argument.

For some great examples of this just take a look at the Great YouTube Theist vs. Atheist Debate, or Any Political Humor Page On Facebook.

 

The above meme has been making the rounds of Facebook lately, so I'll use it. Now, atheism is the absence of a belief in god. That is what it is and all it is. This straw man is great because it's actually a lot more complicated than the point it's supposed to be arguing against. Atheism does not address the beginning of the universe, if it even had a beginning. It doesn't address abiogenesis or evolution, and it motherfucking goddamn certainly does not involve magic. It is the lack of a belief in god. A= without. Theism= belief in god. Atheism.

If that meme wanted to be accurate it would say: ATHEISM: Because theists haven't met their burden of proof. Which, admittedly isn't as humorous.

This is a really, really pervasive technique. Especially on the Internet. Some examples can include:

• Prima: I think we should have stricter gun control regulations.
• Secunda: Why are you trying to take away my Second Amendment rights?

Or:

• Prima: I think hard work should be rewarded.
• Secunda:  So you think billionaires shouldn't be accountable to the law?

Or:

• Democrats want to turn our country over to Islamic extremists.

Or:

•  Mitt Romney wants to implement a system of serfdom and debtor's prisons.

So it's definitely something to keep an eye out for. Particularly when the party being Straw Manned isn't around to defend their stance. Additionally, some people can use it in much more subtle and convincing ways than I've illustrated here.

 Next time I'll be talking about Paredolia and Equivocation, some big-ass words that describe some simple-ass things.

Critical Thinking: Checking The Source

Note: The gray links go to relevant sources. The purple links go to ads.

Critical thinking is one of my favorite things. Seriously, I wish it would have been stressed more when I was growing up. And that's probably why I get so irritated when people don't do it.

I was talking to a friend, and she pointed out maybe I should write about it. Sort of a tutorial of how to detect disingenuous bullshit. Which was a brilliant idea.

1. Check the Source

Whenever I hear an amazing or shocking claim these days it has become second nature for me to ask "How do they know that?" and then try to find out. In fact, the habit has become so ingrained that I forget that just a few years ago I hardly ever thought that.

And it's great advice. Particularly with our media here in America, where the paranormal and pseudo-science is generally equivocated with actual science. I mean, if I go to the Documentary section of Netflix and see a documentary on the evolution of primates next to a documentary on Ancient Aliens, how would I be able to tell which one was a real documentary, and which one was paranoid, sensationalist bullshit cobbled together from broken parts? The gods of ancient cultures were really aliens genetically modifying and artificially speeding the development of humans? How do they know that?

Answer: Check the Sources.

Here's a good example that showed up on my Facebook wall the other day: Leaked Army Doc Outline Plans For US Re-education Camps.

Now, I've already mentioned how I'm not immune to bias, and I generally go into anything on InfoWars expecting it to be total and complete lunatic fear-mongering. And knowing that about myself I know that I can't just call bullshit and move on. So, What does the source have to say?

• Side note: Often these kinds of alarmist propaganda pieces won't even have a source. More on that later.

Alright, so what's the claim? The claim is that InfoWars has gotten its hands on a leaked Department of Defense document that "contains shocking plans for “political activists” to be pacified by “PSYOP officers” into developing an “appreciation of U.S. policies” while detained in prison camps inside the United States."

That's some scary sounding shit, right? Well, lets look at the document, which can be found here.
 
Now, that document is over 300 pages of military jargon. And who the fuck wants to wade through that, right? Well, lets see if we can find a summary.

And right here, in the Preface, it describes the purpose of this document, which is that it "provides guidance for commanders and staffs on internment and resettlement (I/R) operations." Now, internment and resettlement is an unpleasant reality of warfare. It's not always gonna be a nice thing, and nobody really wants it to happen, but it does. Civilians get displaced, prisoners get taken, and those prisoners can be on both sides.

Now, since these kinds of things are going to inevitably happen, wouldn't it be nice if there was some kind of uniform Field Manual that could be used so that everyone knows what to do and how to do it? I mean, we don't want to just execute a bunch of newly homeless civilians for living in the wrong place, do we? We don't want prisoners just vanishing in a puff of lost paperwork, do we?

And that's what this field manual is. It's a manual of what to do if and when these kinds of things happen.

The InfoWars article continues with some really misleading cherry-picking of information to make it seem as if "man-made disasters, accidents, terrorist attacks and incidents in the U.S. and its territories,” "may be performed as domestic civil support operations.” Which is really fucking misleading as these things go.

How do I know that? Well, I checked the document. Take the direct quote in the article, copy it, go to the manual, conjure our old friend ctrl+f (find,) and paste the quote in. Then it's merely a matter of reading the quote in context.

The section that the "may be performed..." quote was taken from was referring to "controlling civilian movement and providing relief to human suffering." Now, relieving human suffering seems pretty cut-and-dry, but what about 'controlling civilian movement?' That shit seems ominous as hell, right?

Well, not really. If there's about to be a firefight between two groups of lunatics with assault rifles you probably don't want children wandering onto the field. You also probably don't want possible insurgents or spies just wandering around the command post with a camera and a notebook.

Now for the most alarming part of the article, the claim that the DoD has "shocking plans for “political activists” to be pacified by “PSYOP officers” into developing an “appreciation of U.S. policies” while detained in prison camps inside the United States," that I mentioned above.

Okay, now that's a pretty good indication that this is an absolute Frankenstein of cherry picked quotes. The reason I think that is because instead of having "One long, unbroken quote that may give a clear understanding of what the manual actually says, like this," we have instead a "series of" short, "unrelated quotes," pieced together from different "parts of the manual" in an attempt to convey a very "different meaning" than was intended by the author.

And yes, I am picking on a conservative website, and yes, I do have a liberal bias in real life. But having said that, any time someone sees a quote arranged like this, there should be some red flags going off.

Now, the manual does provide guidelines that include Psychological Operations (PSYOP,) officers looking for insurgents, dissidents and malcontents that may try to organize and lead a revolt or cause disturbance while they are interred. Because those are things that might happen.

It is stretching credulity to imply that just because there may be a malcontent who may organize a disturbance while being detained, and that that malcontent may even be an American civilian on American soil, and may need "pacification programs using a variety of media. Music and news (from approved sources), I/R facility rules, and in-processing instructions are broadcast using facility loudspeaker systems augmented by loudspeaker systems organic to the tactical PSYOP detachment," this in no way implies that there is a plan to make this happen.

So, here's the conclusion I draw from this. InfoWars found a manual on what to do when both the military and Department of Defense are involved in an Internment and Relocation operation. The manual included guidelines for what to do in case this operation happens on American soil, as unlikely as that is. Infowars decided that since it could happen, that it will happen, and since it will happen, it must be part of a plan to make it happen.

 This is an example of the Just in Case fallacy, which was made by presenting a Straw Man of what the manual actually said. The case is made on the worst possible outcome, rather than the most likely. This is sort of like making a slippery slope argument like

1. Displaced Civilians are a reality of warfare.
2. Rules should be enacted to deal with such eventualities. 
3. The Rules should include domestic situations.
4. The Rules will be open to abuse.
5. The Rules will be abused.
6. Eventually, the Rules will be used to inter innocent civillians.
7. All dissent will be silenced via the Rules.

 and then cutting out steps 3-7.

Now, what do we do when a similar claim is made without a source? To give an example, I'll use a 'report' from Conservative Monster, a 'news' site that provides twitter-length news articles, such as

• "Russia and their Muslim terrorist friends in Iran will not be too pleased if Romney beats the Democratic voter fraud machine."

I'm not bullshitting when I say that that one sentence is the entire article.

"This seems so true!"

So, how do they know that?

Now, personally, I find it impossible that anyone would consider that a statement of prima facie fact. First of all, huh? Second of all, why would Russia and Iran be unhappy with Romney winning? Third of all, what evidence do you have of Democratic voter fraud? Fourth of all, what leads you to believe that Russia is friends with Iranian terrorists? Are you Facebook friends with Russia and notice Russia likes a lot of posts by guys named Muhammad SuicideBomb and Abdul FlamingMartyr? Fifth of all, if the Democrats have a 'voter fraud machine,' whatever that is, wouldn't that imply that they're using it to prevent Romney from winning? If so, how does Romney plan to beat the Fraud Machine? Throw a wrench in its gears? Hack its website? I literally have no idea what a voter fraud machine is or how it would be beaten.

The good thing about these kinds of claims is that since they're asserted without evidence they can be dismissed without evidence. This is popularly known as Hitchen's Razor, although I don't think it's officially recognized as a philosophical principle the way Occam's Razor is.

The bad thing about these kinds of claims is that they're such a pain in the ass to debunk or disprove. Since the author doesn't cite any sources or relevant studies we have no real idea where this information is coming from. Personally, I suspect paranoid delusion. But unless I'm willing to spend days and days searching for articles linking Russia to Iranian terrorists or finding out what the fuck a voter fraud machine is, and I'm not, then it's probably going to go unchallenged. Which is a shame, because some people will accept it as Gospel truth.

And I mean Gospel in the sense that even though it's provably insane and wrong people will still believe it.

Next time, assuming I don't lose interest like I usually do, I'll be discussing confirmation bias and maybe straw man arguments. Or maybe something else.