
An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments - jamesbritt
http://www.bookofbadarguments.com
======
salmonellaeater
Several of the fallacies remind me of the ESP example from "Queer Uses for
Probability Theory" [1][2]. Arguments often involve trusting that the
proponent is not lying or misleading us, especially when there is a need for
experts to interpret complicated data. You might have two initial hypotheses:

    
    
      * H is false
      * H is true
    

When some actor A introduces new evidence in support of H, there are
additional hypotheses that must be introduced:

    
    
      * H is false, and A is lying
      * H is true, and A is telling the truth
      * H is true, and A is lying
      * H is false, and A is telling the truth
    

Any evidence that A introduces in support of H equally supports the first two
new hypotheses, while any evidence that A introduces refuting H supports the
last two. The result is that, depending on your priors on H and on A's
trustworthiness, A's evidence might never be able to convince you that H is
true. This means that logical fallacies such as the genetic fallacy are not
applicable when there is expertise involved.

If we were all experts or had unlimited time and access to the same
information as an argument's proponents, then the genetic fallacy would be
hugely useful. With real-world constraints on time and information, it's
almost always impossible to evaluate an argument separately from its
proponent's commitment to truth.

[1] [http://omega.albany.edu:8008/ETJ-
PDF/cc5d.pdf](http://omega.albany.edu:8008/ETJ-PDF/cc5d.pdf) [2] Previous HN
discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7929203](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7929203)

~~~
rprospero
You brought back flashbacks on a frustrating afternoon spent trapped with a
masters student in philosophy. I was a physics grad student at the time and he
was quite keen to share with me his brilliant advancement of quantum theory.
He'd essentially stumbled upon the idea of local hidden variables. I explained
to him about Bell's inequality and the experiments that followed.

His eyes lit up as he condescendingly explained to me that I had committed the
fallacy of argument from authority. I hadn't PROVED that his system was wrong.
I had merely stated that the natural world did not agree with his system. All
I had done was show that the universe disagreed with him on quantum mechanics
- there was no evidence that the universe was right and he was wrong. There's
no reason to assume that the universe gets all the laws of physics right.

By the end of the afternoon, I'd managed to get him to firmly agree that no
dog has four legs. His logic:

All cats have four legs. Therefore, anything that isn't a cat doesn't have
four legs. All dogs are not cats. Therefore, all dogs do not have four legs.

I pointed out that it was fairly obvious that there do exist dogs with four
legs and that the argument was obviously fallacious (specifically at line 2).
He chided me for making an Argument from Consequences. Just because his proof
that no dog has four legs forces me to abandon my belief that I've encountered
dogs with four legs doesn't mean that his proof is wrong. I must simply get
used to accepting that I miscounted the number of legs on every dog I've ever
met, no matter how unlikely that may seem.

You probably assume that this guy was trolling me. Heck, if someone told me
the story, I'd assume that same as well. Unfortunately, he was deadly serious
and was exuding a palpable excitement as he made increasingly brilliant and
counter-intuitive discoveries during our discussion.

To any philosophy students who wonder why your major has such a dismal
reputation, despite having the highest GRE scores of an undergraduate major
and producing some truly interesting students, the answer is Greg.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Reminds me of [0] and [1]. Quoting from the latter:

 _I 've seen people severely messed up by their own knowledge of biases. They
have more ammunition with which to argue against anything they don't like. And
that problem—too much ready ammunition—is one of the primary ways that people
with high mental agility end up stupid, in Stanovich's "dysrationalia" sense
of stupidity._

[0] -
[http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Dangerous_knowledge](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Dangerous_knowledge)

[1] -
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/he/knowing_about_biases_can_hurt_peo...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/he/knowing_about_biases_can_hurt_people/)

------
TheZenPsycho
"this book is aimed at newcomers to the field of logical reasoning"

What I find in practice with these (quite popular) lists of logical fallacies,
is that they are usually written with the assumption that the reader is
already familiar with the fundaments of logic and is able to correctly apply
them.

This work is no different. While I do enjoy the style of the illustrations, we
already have a glut of these things skipping to the juicy parts. What we don't
have is approachable, accessible works, free of unexplained jargon, that
explain for instance, what exactly a "premise" is. How to decide whether a
piece of writing or speech contains an argument. How to correctly identify the
conclusion of an argument, and connect it with its premises. And so on, for
all the list of things that are usually misunderstood about these lists of
"fallacies" by people who are… reallly.. genuinely new to logic.

~~~
Kluny
Agreed, this is not a book I would recommend to someone who is guilty of bad
arguments, in the hope that they would learn from it. It's dense and requires
the reader to fill in a lot of gaps themselves.

------
DanielBMarkham
Since this is the nth time I've read lists like this on HN, I feel like there
should be a standard disclaimer here.

The author starts down this road in his introduction: _the rules of logic are
not laws of the natural world nor do they constitute all of human reasoning._

Yep, and it's worse than that. Life is not a formal system where the quality
of an argument is in any way associated with whether or not it should be
heard. That sucks, but that's the way it is. Many terrible arguments are for
things you should do. Many seemingly perfect arguments are in support of
horrible things.

Human conversation is around persuasion. What these tools of rhetoric give you
is a good way to identify cheap ways used to persuade folks -- and call them
out on it. It doesn't prevent them from being used at all. In fact, every
argument that's not about formal systems has some sort of fallacy as part of
it. At the end of the day, you're sitting around weighing the imperfections of
each side. And, because the quality of the argument doesn't really reflect the
quality of the position being argued, putting too much work into this is a
fool's game.

I love these lists, because they show people how others can manipulate them.
For the same reason, I think folks should be exposed to a course or two on how
legal arguments are made. I see a lot of lawyers on TV who are ready and
willing to take any side of any argument -- and convince 90% of the folks
watching that they're right. If we want a functioning democracy, we need to
fix this.

But for technology folks who tend to think of things in boolean terms, we
should remind ourselves that human issues are not geometric proofs for which
we are searching for fallacies in an attempt to get the right answer. Instead
it's a much tougher situation than that.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
>Many terrible arguments are for things you should do. Many seemingly perfect
arguments are in support of horrible things.

That mixes up the quality and sophistication of the arguers with general
validity.

The problem is more that decision-making - especially political and economic
decision-making - isn't evidence-based.

The fact that economists and politicians use rhetoric instead of reason
suggests that you can't have a workable democracy without evidence-based
policy.

I'd go further and suggest that knowingly lying to or misleading the public
should be a serious crime punishable by jail time.

Lists like the one in this book aren't enough, because so few people
understand there's a problem.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
You have a lot of explaining to do to yourself. I would start with the
question "What is the difference between evidence and conclusions?"

Eventually you should move on to the Bayesian/Frequentist definition of
Science, but I'd start with the problems with empiricism. Maybe go on to the
problems with induction after that. Might want to ask yourself why so many of
the most brilliant people in history believed wrong things.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
'Epistemology - we've heard of it.'

Are you saying that science should never be used to guide policy, because
scientific conclusions are always debatable?

As it happens they are - for varying values of 'debatable.'

When you get a reasonable level of informed consensus - preferably one that
has a reasonable chance of being undistorted by commercial interests - the
debatability stops being interesting or relevant.

The problem isn't that conclusions aren't certain.

The problem is that political decision makers believe their personal opinions
about policy and outcomes are at least as valid as those of full-time PhD-
qualified professional researchers.

And voters believe them. Because rhetoric.

You don't need to know who Thomas Bayes was to understand how this leads to
policy disasters.

You don't even need to believe that experts are always right. You just need to
understand that they're more likely to be right than an amateur with a sharp
suit, a financial sponsor, and a strong opinion.

------
dammitcoetzee
What I would have liked is a book that presented the bad arguments in a
neutral and fun way so that I could recommend it as a neutral and fun way to
learn about these things for anyone. A sort of coffee book primer on logical
fallacies.

What I got is a bunch of back-handed cartoon insults towards the groups the
author dislikes.

Still nicely done though, and the pictures are great.

~~~
MartinCron
_What I got is a bunch of back-handed cartoon insults towards the groups the
author dislikes._

You over-sensitive liberals just need to grow a thicker skin...

~~~
nmrm
This comment is fairly comical, since most of the groups singled out in the
book are typically associated with conservative politics (religious arguments
are singled out several times, for instance).

I agree with grandparent for pragmatic reasons -- suggesting this book to a
religious friend could easily be misconstrued by said friend as a back-handed
insult.

~~~
MartinCron
"fairly comical" is a good expression for a joke that just didn't land.

------
darylteo
| This tiny print serves no purpose, but to make this book seem like an actual
book. In printed books, one usually sees a large block of tiny print on the
first or second page followed by terms like © 2013. All Rights Reserved. So
and so. Printed in the United States of America. The publisher may also
include prose to deter would-be pirates. No part of this book may be used or
reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. That is
typically followed by a line or two about the publisher, followed by a
sequence of numbers.

lol

------
rfrey
I liked that what is often invoked as "Appeal to Authority" is here called
"Appeal to Irrelevant Authority".

I probably liked that because appeal to authority is the one I get called out
on most often, and now I can post a link in reply, from a Real Logician.

Which would be begging the question, of course, but at least I'd be mixing it
up a bit.

~~~
innguest
It would not be begging the question, it would _raise_ the question "does it
make sense to quote the author of a book on logic to support an argument about
logical fallacies" and the answer for that seems to be 'yes' (as he's a
relevant authority in this case).

~~~
pessimizer
Begging the Question: A well-known authority on logic has assured me that an
appeal to an authority relevant to the subject being discussed isn't a logical
fallacy.

------
lafar6502
Many people use such flawed logic not because they're clever, but because they
arent very good at reasoning and will accept anything that matches their
beliefs as truth. Discussing anything with such people is a waste of time.

~~~
coldtea
I find those "logical fallacies" lists more naive and inapplicable in any
intelligent conversation compared to regular bad reasoning.

"Logical fallacies" are not formal logic, and when we're discussing we are
forced to make tons of assumptions that are not "logically" guaranteed.
Conversation and assessement of a complex reality has far more nuances than
what can be handled with a "fallacy list".

The "ad hominen" for example is a very useful guide, because in real life, WHO
says something tells us a lot about their motives, interests, possibility of
hiding the truth etc, that merely WHAT they say.

Same way, "appeal to authority":

    
    
      A is an authority on a particular topic
      A says something about that topic
      A is probably correct
    

It might be a "fallacy" as far as absolute logic goes, but with the time
constraints we have to make decisions, and not being able to master all fields
and be able to check the veracity of facts in physics, medicine etc ourselves,
it's a very useful guide. When I'm bleeding to death and enter the ICU, I'll
sure trust the doctor as "probably correct"...

~~~
pessimizer
>The "ad hominen" for example is a very useful guide, because in real life,
WHO says something tells us a lot about their motives, interests, possibility
of hiding the truth etc, that merely WHAT they say.

A good argument made with bad intentions is still a good argument.

>Same way, "appeal to authority":

This book uses "appeal to irrelevant authority" aka "my dad says you're
wrong."

~~~
nmrm
> A good argument made with bad intentions is still a good argument.

I agree with your parent here, though. There's almost always a good argument
for any given thing, and often several.

It's sometimes useful to be able to say "yes, there is a huge pile of good
arguments in favor of X here. And I don't have time to address each one. But
it's important to note that the author of this pile of good arguments stands
to make a great deal of money if people believe X, regardless of its truth."

It's kind-of like how you rarely trust the implicit or explicit claims in
super long infomercials, even without examining the veracity of the evidence
for the commercial's claims, or taking the time to think up counter-claims.

~~~
pessimizer
>There's almost always a good argument for any given thing, and often several.

And if there aren't better arguments for the other things, then those are the
things that should be done. If you're telling me that there are almost always
equally good arguments for every possible choice in all decisions that are
made, I'm disagreeing with that. If that's not what you're saying, I don't
know what you're saying.

>It's sometimes useful to be able to say "yes, there is a huge pile of good
arguments in favor of X here. And I don't have time to address each one. But
it's important to note that the author of this pile of good arguments stands
to make a great deal of money if people believe X, regardless of its truth."

It may be important to note, but it's not argumentation. If it's a good
argument, accept that it's a good argument and move on. Just because people
have a financial interest in an outcome doesn't mean that their arguments for
that outcome are tainted in some undetectable way that can't be revealed by
examining the argument itself. The personal stake in the outcome could have
been initiated by a belief in the validity of the argument, rather than the
opposite.

>It's kind-of like how you rarely trust the implicit or explicit claims in
super long infomercials, even without examining the veracity of the evidence
for the commercial's claims, or taking the time to think up counter-claims.

You don't need to attack the person making the argument or the medium
delivering the argument in order to question its premises.

~~~
nmrm
> And if there aren't better arguments for the other things, then those are
> the things that should be done.

As a tangential but related point, I think this can be a very dangerous
position.

Arguments aren't created in a vacuum, and neither is the lion's share of what
makes an argument "good". This is true even discounting the fact that the
dominant measure of argumentative quality is largely a function of persuasion.

Producing arguments takes a lot of work and money. That's basically the only
reason think tanks and law firms exist. It's also where a lot of marketing
money -- political or otherwise -- gets spent. Having _really good arguments_
for something mostly indicates you've invested a lot of time, money, or both
into constructing those arguments. (edit: note that this is _not_ an indicator
that the thing is actually true, which is the root of the problem).

edit: sometimes, as in science, the motive can be fairly pure. In those cases,
even though lots of money is spent constructing the arguments, we can still
very much trust the veracity of those arguments.

Sometimes, as in the case of many (not all) think tanks, somehow every
argument and study produced always re-entrenches and provides support for a
pre-existing viewpoint. I'm therefore far more inclined to view these with
suspicion, which is really an ad hom but imho justified.

~~~
coldtea
> _I 'm not sure what all of this means. The arguments I'm referring to are
> formal operations on premises. Premises are the environment that arguments
> live in, and that's not a vacuum. One party claims to be right, states its
> premises, and how those premises lead to their conclusion. Attacking that
> argument means pointing out flaws in the reasoning or the premises._

In real life premises are also part of the argument. Aside from mathematics
and logic exersizes, there's no discussion that doesn't involve persuassion
and arguments about the very premises (and on multiple levels).

That's one of the reasons that the pure mechanistic check of the
operations/conclusion part that logical fallacies provide is very nearly
useless.

And of course the "checking the premises" part is not mechanistic (that
another problem with the formal check), and could also go ad-infinitum. For
example, in a moral issue, the premises depend on your values, not some
objectively verifiable external truth. On issues of personal interest, the
premises depend on what benefits whom. Etc. On political issues the nuances
and justifications for the premises are so rich that it's not even worth
trying...

~~~
pessimizer
Premises are not part of the argument, they're assertions that the argument is
based on. The argument is how we get from the premises to the conclusion.

If we don't simply agree on the premises, an argument has to be made to
support the ones we don't agree on, and that argument will have further
premises. If we don't agree on those premises, an argument has to be made to
support the ones we don't agree on, and that argument will have further
premises.

Eventually we agree on premises, and work our way back up.

>the pure mechanistic check of the operations/conclusion part that logical
fallacies provide is very nearly useless.

I think that it's the _only_ important part of evaluating an argument. So our
premises differ. If further arguments that you plan to make rest on the
premise that the mechanistic checking of the chain of reasoning from premises
to conclusion of an argument is very nearly useless, I may be able to
recognize the soundness of this hypothetical argument, but never the validity.

> in a moral issue, the premises depend on your values, not some objectively
> verifiable external truth.

That I claim to have a moral value is an objectively verifiable external
truth.

>On issues of personal interest, the premises depend on what benefits whom.
Etc.

When?

>On political issues the nuances and justifications for the premises are so
rich that it's not even worth trying...

Isn't the entire political process an act of trying?

~~~
nmrm
> Premises are not part of the argument, they're assertions that the argument
> is based on

You kind of answer yourself by identifying the fact that premises are often
called into question during the course of an argument:

> If we don't simply agree on the premises, an argument has to be made to
> support the ones we don't agree on, and that argument will have further
> premises. If we don't agree on those premises, an argument has to be made to
> support the ones we don't agree on, and that argument will have further
> premises.

Your parent's argument was that this can go on forever, and never really
grounds out, which demonstrates the flaw in the "argumentation is reducible to
mechanistic checking" mentality.

I pretty much agree with your parent, because you can see it even when you go
all the way to the ground. A lot of evidence cannot get better than
statistical, and statisticians sometimes argue about the best way to approach
their field. Even for non-statistical arguments, there's some old beef in
mathematics about aoc.

But even for most issues where these foundational questions aren't relevant,
doing enough work to formalize arguments is intractable.

> That I claim to have a moral value is an objectively verifiable external
> truth.

That's not very useful when we're trying to make a moral decision and have
different competing values. Most political discussions are utilitarian with a
mix of various moral imperatives (e.g. optimize well-being, but abide by the
constitution's letter and intent).

> Isn't the entire political process an act of trying?

I think he meant it's not worth trying to treat the arguments as chains of
reasoning working from a closed set of premises.

Although I agree that the political process in most places could benefit from
a bit more logic, it's worth noting that the political process is the act of
trying to get power, not trying to reason soundly :-)

------
honzzz
I like the book, especially images. There is one weird thing though - the text
in images is written in capital letters except the letters 't' and 'f' \- it
was really surprising to me how distracting it was. Maybe it's just me but
this made the text really difficult to read - every time I encountered one of
those letters my brain just stopped.

------
chippy
I enjoyed the text and the cartoons, although the reflection detail of the
characters in the eyes (The triangular bit) was a bit offputting to me. Let me
try to explain. This was because the reflection was relative to the direction
of the head, rather the direction of the light. Sometimes if the head was
sideways to the viewer, the reflection triangle actually bisected the eye and
made it look as if the character had two eyes. in each socket

Edits - there is another thing I do not understand. The breadcrumbs in the top
left. Are they breadcrumbs? The > implies direction. Are the middle categories
sorted? Is it a list of categories without hierarchies?

Informal Fallacy › Unwarranted Assumption › False Dilemma

All pages have Informal Fallacy.

~~~
stronglikedan
> All pages have Informal Fallacy.

Not 34. ;-)

------
baddox
I got a kick out of this line on the first page, about argument from
consequence:

> One should keep in mind that such arguments are fallacious only when they
> deal with propositions with objective truth values

------
fiatjaf
The world is missing a way to judge who is right or wrong in discussions,
because sometimes there are things a lot wrong, but even then people are
unable to perceive them.

------
bshimmin
This looks like it would be a nice book to put on a coffee table. Alas, it
appears it's not available as an actual physical book.

~~~
okize
[http://www.amazon.com/An-Illustrated-Book-Bad-
Arguments/dp/1...](http://www.amazon.com/An-Illustrated-Book-Bad-
Arguments/dp/1615192255)

~~~
bshimmin
Thank you! Am I an idiot - is this linked someone from the .com site?

------
zhte415
The sideways scrolling seems not to work in Firefox (I'm using Linux/Mint).

~~~
cube00
Working on Firefox on Fedora, I don't think it would be a distribution related
issue, are you using the latest version of Firefox? On Fedora at least it does
not update until done by the system package manager (ie. no silent updates
like Windows)

------
dj-wonk
The composition / decomposition cartoon needs a caption. Suggestions?

------
iopq
I wish the images would be self-explanatory without the chapter.

------
tpeo
The "argument from fallacy" is sadly missing.

