Logical fallacies and rationalizations, cont.

I recently came across this post, which reminded me of the logical fallacies and rationalizations discussion. The post discusses a vicious murder, but also touches on the very core of the subject we discussed, with a bit on "affecting change" and getting set in your ways, traditions and taboos.

Now, disengaging from the act of murdering three girls for "free will", which naturally, is difficult to do (as if we don't, it will hijack the discussion immediately)--this post has a very interesting first paragraph:

"Whenever you hear someone defend an action with the excuse that "it is our custom," "it is traditional," "we've always done it that way," "it is written so in our sacred texts," or variants thereof, slap 'em down and spit in their eye. Those are not excuses for anything but the perpetuation of bad old dogma rather than taking the useful step of actually thinking about causes and consequences fallacious shortcut that allows ancient evils to thrive."

Affecting change and getting movement in groups is a special interest of mine. The examples given above are the illiterate answers someone may give as to why they should or shouldn't do something (except for the "because it's written" which is a whole other unrelated concept).

More literate answers do exist when you speak with intelligent people, and then there can be several reasons why they hold to their beliefs, legitimately. These taboos came from somewhere and some of them were even a Very Good Idea™ at the time. Noticing things we know to be evil no longer are is difficult. Further, our beliefs are still what in many cases defines any group and shouldn't always be abandoned just because they are not necessarily reflecting reality.

Example from my life in computer security:
Sharing virus (computer) samples is considered "evil" and irresponsible by the Anti Virus industry, for reasons ranging from fear of spreading them to helping the criminals, or giving them feedback on what we know (not to mention losing a competitive edge).

And yet the landscape changed, these are everywhere nowadays so the criminals don't need "our" samples, while many defenders do--desperately--and have no "legal" means to get the same information. Yet, is it wrong for professional anti virus researchers to view such sharing as evil?

Getting set in your ways as well as following established taboos are quite fascinating in how they form and how they can be broken. Usual annoying disclaimer: nothing is ever black and white... blah blah.

The rationalizations mentioned, however, are another facet of the same thing we discussed earlier, I think?

Gadi.

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Logical fallacies and rationalizations

Recently I formalized some thoughts on the subject rationalizations people use and excuses they invent. More specifically my goal was to come up with a list of low-level basic rationalizations used when they are shown something they believe in to be false (a failed psychic, cult divination gone wrong, etc.).

These are thoughts underlining possible basic components, not a thesis.

The point behind this exercise is not to psychologically explain why people react this way, but to find the similarities and trends in logically false and vague/impossible to prove generalist statements (meaning irrefutable statements) people use at such times.

I started off with the following list, and emailed it to the skeptics mailing list for input:

1. X is just testing our faith
2. It is us who misunderstood the meaning
3. We did get Y as X saw fit, it's just that X doesn't cater to our wants
4. We have done something to anger X
5. We have not been worthy enough
6. Z has not been worthy and ruined it for the rest of us
7. Humans are fallible/one can't always be right/X is off his/her game

Karen Daskawicz, a skeptics contributor shared a similar automatic response some folks use, but not immediately related to what I was seeking. Further, she concentrated more on religion vs. science which was not what I was looking for. Still, it was interesting:

I'm not sure if this is the sort of thing you're looking for, but one that I've heard a lot:

"Science doesn't know everything."
or (variation)
"Science has been wrong before."

[I cut her explanation of why this is a logical fallacy from this post, but it is available online]

Larry Huntley responded:

While I don't disagree with what you say here, it looks like the OP was looking more for rationalizations/reasons that people of faith would use when asked questions like "Why did allow your partner to die of Alzheimer's? You were both very religious; surely you prayed to him to make her well, didn't you?" and "Why was almost the entire congregation of the church wiped out by lightning strikes during the ice cream social Sunday night?" or "Why were all our mud-brick pyramids destroyed by flooding?"

Moving away from religion, which is not different than any other aspect of human life in having some less than intelligent followers in the mix of its members (and, yes, sometimes uses such tricks to convince the masses to convert), Wally Anglesea brought us back on track:

Well, speaking from contact from ex-cult members of my local doomsday cult,

Many have expressed the belief that "he was genuine when we were in (including receiving messages from heaven), but at sometime during the period, he went wrong, and the messages were coming from the other place.

Weird, I know, but it's how they rationalise their original positions.

At this point I was able to see some underline concepts behind the different rationalizations. While imperfect, the following cover most of these:

1. Blaming self (wasn't worthy, angered X, blind to it, etc.)
2. Blaming others (weren't worthy, angered X, bling to it, etc.)
3. Claims of misunderstanding (did in fact happen, works in mysterious ways, power temporarily off, date/meaning was mis-interpreted, etc.)

Some rationalizations seem to combine several of these.

Thoughts anyone?
Can you think of any other rationalization I skipped or basic components I missed?

Gadi Evron,
ge@linuxbox.org.

Follow me on twitter! http://twitter.com/gadievron