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"Relying on an anecdote, arguing ad hominem — these should be mortifying." - Hallo friend WELCOME TO AMERICA, In the article you read this time with the title "Relying on an anecdote, arguing ad hominem — these should be mortifying.", we have prepared well for this article you read and download the information therein. hopefully fill posts Article AMERICA, Article CULTURAL, Article ECONOMIC, Article POLITICAL, Article SECURITY, Article SOCCER, Article SOCIAL, we write this you can understand. Well, happy reading.

Title : "Relying on an anecdote, arguing ad hominem — these should be mortifying."
link : "Relying on an anecdote, arguing ad hominem — these should be mortifying."

"Relying on an anecdote, arguing ad hominem — these should be mortifying."

Said Steven Pinker, quoted in "Steven Pinker Thinks Your Sense of Imminent Doom Is Wrong" (NYT), an interview with Pinker about his new book "Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters."

Then the interviewer asks him "Do you see any irrational beliefs as useful?" and he says:

Yeah. For example, every time the media blames a fire or a storm on climate change, it’s a dubious argument in the sense that those are events that belong to weather, not climate. You can never attribute a particular event to a trend. It’s also the case, given that there is an availability bias in human cognition, that people tend to be more influenced by images and narratives and anecdotes than trends. If a particular anecdote or event can in the public mind be equated with a trend, and the impression that people get from the flamboyant image gets them to appreciate what in reality is a trend, then I have no problem with using it that way.

Should we be mortified?

I'm sure Pinker could give a rational or rational sounding answer to the question whether he contradicted himself, but let me try to do it myself. You can wish people would favor rationality so much that they'd be mortified by reliance on anecdote and still notice, quite rationally, that as irrationality rages on in the human mind, it will, at least some of the time, drive people in the right direction. 

By using climate change as his example, Pinker is assuming the reader already believes what he believes and what he believes rationally, which is that climate change is indeed an immense problem and one that the less rational people have difficulty facing. So he likes that irrational thought — reliance on "images and narratives and anecdotes" — will work on these less rational people. We already know what we need them to think and that their minds don't work right, so it's okay — it's rational — to do what's necessary to get them to think what it's good for them to think. In that sense, propaganda is rational.

I'm not agreeing with all that, just sketching it out as a sympathetic reader after I flagged a seeming contradiction. 

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Said Steven Pinker, quoted in "Steven Pinker Thinks Your Sense of Imminent Doom Is Wrong" (NYT), an interview with Pinker about his new book "Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters."

Then the interviewer asks him "Do you see any irrational beliefs as useful?" and he says:

Yeah. For example, every time the media blames a fire or a storm on climate change, it’s a dubious argument in the sense that those are events that belong to weather, not climate. You can never attribute a particular event to a trend. It’s also the case, given that there is an availability bias in human cognition, that people tend to be more influenced by images and narratives and anecdotes than trends. If a particular anecdote or event can in the public mind be equated with a trend, and the impression that people get from the flamboyant image gets them to appreciate what in reality is a trend, then I have no problem with using it that way.

Should we be mortified?

I'm sure Pinker could give a rational or rational sounding answer to the question whether he contradicted himself, but let me try to do it myself. You can wish people would favor rationality so much that they'd be mortified by reliance on anecdote and still notice, quite rationally, that as irrationality rages on in the human mind, it will, at least some of the time, drive people in the right direction. 

By using climate change as his example, Pinker is assuming the reader already believes what he believes and what he believes rationally, which is that climate change is indeed an immense problem and one that the less rational people have difficulty facing. So he likes that irrational thought — reliance on "images and narratives and anecdotes" — will work on these less rational people. We already know what we need them to think and that their minds don't work right, so it's okay — it's rational — to do what's necessary to get them to think what it's good for them to think. In that sense, propaganda is rational.

I'm not agreeing with all that, just sketching it out as a sympathetic reader after I flagged a seeming contradiction. 

Thus articles "Relying on an anecdote, arguing ad hominem — these should be mortifying."

that is all articles "Relying on an anecdote, arguing ad hominem — these should be mortifying." This time, hopefully can provide benefits to all of you. Okay, see you in another article posting.

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