MONTHLY MULLING 💡
Logical Fallacies That Can Win You An Argument & Did Pirates Wear An Eye Patch?
Hi👋 Tapan here.
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Happy Sunday y’all!
I am enjoying the remaining sunny days in London before winter sets in.
Winters are dark, rainy, cold, and full of despair. Exciting 🥲
Currently,
📖 What I am reading: India that is Bharat by J. Sai Deepak
The book presents the religious and racial roots of colonialism and its impact on India, especially in the forming of the Indian Constitution. However, it reads like a research paper. Plus, a lot of his arguments feel like Hasty Generalizations (IMHO😅). I might be shelving this one soon.
📺 What I am watching: The Real Fight Over AI Art (YouTube) by Cleo Abram
Cleo is ex-Vox, similar to Johnny Harris. And in this video, she explains if artists should worry about DALLE and AI art. On one side, technological advancement helps humanity (think of printers, processors, computers) and on the other side, it might take away our jobs! An age-old argument.
Onwards 🚀
🧠 Do Not FALL For These
Me: I don’t understand the logic behind passing this law
Relative: Why do you hate your country?
Logical Fallacies are common, especially on Twitter. They undermine the logical validity of an argument.
By the way, the above example can be viewed as a False Dichotomy, you either support everything the Government does or you hate your country. It’s a common Logical Fallacy.
Here are other 4 common logical fallacies that you need to be aware of (or maybe use?😉)
🫵🏽 Ad Hominem: An ad hominem attack is an attack on the individual rather than the argument. Often called "mudslinging", using this fallacy the person instead of addressing the argument—its structure, logic, and merits— attempts to refute the opposition on the basis of personal characteristics.
Person A: … we need to cut Government spending on the military and focus on developing a better education scheme.
News Anchor: … are we expected to listen to something coming from a druggy who was called for interrogation on a drug bust?
🤷🏽♂️ Red Herring: A red herring is an argument that uses confusion or distraction to shift attention away from a topic and toward a false conclusion. Red herrings usually contain an unimportant fact, idea, or event that has little relevance to the real issue.
Person A: Government needs to do something about the conditions of the road in our city. They are pathetic!
Person B: Our soldiers have terrible roads but yet they are fighting for us. Terrorist attacks are not common anymore. Things have only improved since the new Presidency.
👨🏼🌾 Strawman: The straw man argument is appropriately named after a harmless scarecrow. Instead of contending with the actual argument, they attack the equivalent of a lifeless bundle of straw — an easily defeated puppet that the opponent was never arguing for in the first place.
Person A: Why isn’t the Prime Minister being accountable for the issues and doing press conferences with the media?
Person B: “You think our Prime Minister is scared? He gave the approval for the surgical strike on our enemies. You want millions in tax-payer dollars to be wasted just to answer dumb questions from you?”
🧑🏽💻 Appeal to Authority: The over-reliance on the perspective of an "expert" to support the legitimacy of an argument. The qualifications of the authority figure in the field of the question must be considered.
He is one of the best cricketers in our country and supports the passing of this bill. We should support this bill.
There are a lot of Logical Fallacies but these were the common ones. You can read a few others on my blog👇🏽
🏴☠️ Arrrr for an Eye
This is a really random pirate fact that I came across last week.
All pirates in movies and cartoons wear an eye patch. But why? There are two theories.
👁 Eye Injury: The first, most straightforward answer to this question is that the eye patch is used to cover an injury or disfigurement.
BUT it seems unlikely that every pirate had injured just one eye.
And that’s where the second theory comes into play.
☠️ Dark Adjustment: A pirate must have to constantly switch between an above-deck BRIGHT environment where navigation and sailing takes place, and a below-deck DARK environment where tending to the ship and supplies takes place.
The process of adjusting from a light to a dark environment is called Dark Adjustment and takes on an average of 25 minutes.
Wearing an eye patch means that when the pirate was above-deck, one eye was completely guarded against the light. When they stepped into the darker area under the deck, the patch could be moved to the other eye to look around.
A simple, practical solution.
BUT… wait a minute. These are just theories.
Apparently, there’s no historical evidence of them wearing an eye patch!
The only account of a pirate wearing an eye patch occurred in the classic novel Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson in which Captain Blackbeard wears an eye patch. This book had a huge impact on the general public’s perception of pirate lore, and the idea of the eye patch appears to have carried forward from his work!
🤴🏻All Hail The KING
Roger Federer 👑 retired last week. One of the greatest!
But what makes someone great? I don’t want to talk about obvious ideas such as hard work, practice, luck, and so on.
Let’s talk about the role of Social Facilitation.
In 1898, Norman Triplett conducted a study where he observed that cyclists who were racing against each other seemed to perform better than the ones who were racing a clock.
Social facilitation is a psychological concept relating to the tendency for the presence of others to improve a person's performance on a task.
It seems like the greats in a lot of sports have/had been competing with other sportsmen in their prime.
Nadal and Federer, Tendulkar and Lara, Messi and Ronaldo, LeBron and Curry, and so on.
The theory is that these athletes were already one of the best. But social facilitation i.e. competing with someone else in their prime might have pushed them to become one of the greats.
🎙COLD BREW MONEY
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