Events

Yesterday, I attended my first professional NFL game* at Chicago's Soldier Field. I can't complain about the view: The Bears did not play their best, but I had a great time at the game. And after, I got to walk in sticky August weather with a stadium's worth of people to the Red Line, which everyone loves after 11pm. I'm being unfair. The tickets came from last April's Apollo After Hours, via a generous donation from one of our members and a lucky bid on my part. And now, I've been to a professional NFL...

That Sgt Pepper taught the band to block a street in London: It was on August 8, 1969, that the band snapped the photo that would change Abbey Road’s future forever. The following month they would release an album named after the northwest London street where it had been recorded, and that album’s iconic cover would seal the street’s fate. A photo of the Fab Four crossing the street in tidily-arranged profile made Abbey Road the site of the most famous crosswalk in the world. In terms of traffic...

Continuing my series on logical fallacies, we come now to "non causa pro causa," or false cause. Post hoc ergo propter hoc "After this, therefore because of this." The argument attempts to attribute cause to the thing that happened before. (See, also, "correlation is not causation.") This is essentially where superstitions come from. Example: "I've created a million jobs since I'm president," a politician claimed after six months in office. It turns out, that job growth was consistent with (but slightly...

A diverse flock this afternoon: FedEx will sever ties with Amazon as the latter builds its own logistics operation. Jennifer Rubin complains about the inanity of intra-party debates that miss larger issues. The #MeToo movement has changed the way film studios direct sex scenes. Alex Pareene expresses frustration with Washington reporters not talking about the blatantly obvious reason the president has gone after politicians of color. CityLab has a primer on the history and language of municipal zoning...

As I continue my series on logical fallacies, I'd like to note cartoonist Scott Adams' latest blog post. For years, Adams has talked about how people see what they want to see in the president's speech and actions, but only he and other Trump supporters deal with reality. He claims that people who believe the president is a racist are hallucinating, and that the media perpetuate this hoax. The post contains extensive demonstrations of many, perhaps all, of the fallacies the complete series will discuss....

Continuing to look at material fallacies, we come to one of the most misunderstood and one of the most common. Petitio principii "Begging the question" does not mean that a question is hanging in the air, waiting for someone to ask it. (That's "raising the question.") It means that an argument rests on itself, as a foregone conclusion. As Aristotle defined it, "Begging or assuming the point at issue consists (to take the expression in its widest sense) [of] failing to demonstrate the required...

Last week I identified and demonstrated seven fallacies of irrelevant conclusion, by which a person tries to win an argument using language that has nothing to do with the point being argued. Those fallacies actually fall under the larger heading "material fallacies." A material fallacy makes an error of argument, in contrast to a formal fallacy which makes an error of logic. Before I get into specific kinds of material fallacies, let me describe the basic principle of syllogism. A syllogism has a major...

French inventor Franky Zapata piloted a jet-powered hoverboard across the English Channel yesterday, covering 32 km in 22 minutes, including a refueling stop on a boat: Mr. Zapata’s first attempt to cross the English Channel had been intended to commemorate the 110th anniversary of the first flight between continental Europe and Britain, made by the French pilot Louis Blériot. “What I have done is a lot smaller, but I followed my dream, and that’s huge,” Mr. Zapata told the BFM TV channel. His device, a...

No one really knows where the term "red herring" came from, though some speculate it came from the idea that drawing a fish across your path would confuse the dogs tracking you. In epistemology, a red herring is an: Argumentum ignoratio elenchi Literally, an "argument of ignorance of the grab," or an argument of irrelevant conclusion that doesn't fit into the other categories. A person using a red herring will attempt to draw the argument away from anything relevant with a distraction. For examples, I...

Twenty-nine people died and 52 were injured in two mass shootings yesterday. Years of lying about the second amendment to encourage gun sales, and buying votes not only for legislation but also to confirm judges (including on the Supreme Court) have led to this. I believe Wayne LaPierre, the head of the National Rifle Association since 1991, is the person most responsible for our current firearms laws. So far in 2019, he bears substantial responsibility for the 252 mass shootings that have taken 281...