Hey everyone, so I’ve been doing a fair share of debunking lately, and I feel compelled
to mention a trend I’ve been noticing in the comments sections of those videos, primarily
from people who are angrily defending the things that I am debunking.
They like to accuse me of using logical fallacies, and they like to list those fallacies by name,
but in doing so they demonstrate that they have no idea what those fallacies actually mean.
It’s gotten really bad, I have to point this out several dozens times per day, so
I decided to make a brief video focusing on the handful of fallacies that are most frequently
cited incorrectly and explain what they mean.
Here we go.
First up, there is suddenly an epidemic of people using the phrase “ad hominem”.
I have no idea what happened, but just a couple months ago, everybody on the internet starting
using this phrase regularly, where previously almost no one did.
People who say this think that it means an insult.
Obviously this isn’t accurate, because insults are not logical fallacies.
If you walk up to someone on the street and say “Hey you ugly jerk”, that’s not
an ad hominem attack, that’s just being mean.
In actuality, ad hominem, which is short for argumentum ad hominem, is a rhetorical strategy
that involves focusing on an aspect of someone’s character as a means of debasing their argument
rather than focusing on the substance of their argument.
For example, if I was in a debate with Steve, and I said “Well obviously Steve thinks
that way about ethics, he has brown hair.
Brown-haired people are always wrong, so Steve is wrong.”
Or, if I said something like, “Well what does Steve know about economics?
He’s unemployed, and also doesn’t have many friends.”
Or if I said, “What can Steve possibly know about America?
He’s Bulgarian”.
Or if I said “Well Steve got a DUI in 2005, so why should anyone listen to him?”
You see?
It’s a logical fallacy.
It’s an attempt to discredit someone’s argument based on fallacious reasoning that
fixates on unrelated and irrelevant circumstantial details surrounding the opponent.
So when I debunk con men like flat earthers or electric universe pushers or young earth
creationists, and I say that they are con men, or uneducated, or unqualified, these
are not “ad hominems”.
They are statements of fact that are specifically related to the claims those people are pushing.
Pointing out that someone is actively deceiving people for money is a statement of fact.
Pointing out that someone possesses no degrees or professional experience in an academic
field in which they profess expertise is a statement of fact.
It is not a logical fallacy of any kind.
The next most commonly misused term is a straw man, or a straw man argument.
Those who misuse this think it just means “a bad argument”, or that it’s just
something you can say in response to any argument you don’t like.
In actuality, a straw man argument is one in which someone puts up a false representation
or extreme distortion of their opponent’s argument and deconstructs that, rather than
what their opponent actually proposes.
So it’s a way of misrepresenting your opponent.
Some con men can be very devious with these, such as young earth creationists who deliberately
misrepresent biological principles to convince uneducated people that science is wrong.
So when I take things that con men say and explain why they are wrong, this is not a
straw man.
It’s me explaining how con men are lying and manipulating their viewers.
Some people so thoroughly don’t understand this, that they will accuse me of straw manning
on a video like my response to the globebusters, which is literally me playing clips of them
saying things, and then deconstructing the things they themselves said.
Directly quoting someone is the antithesis of a straw man, so people who use the term
in that context clearly don’t know what it means, they are just parroting a phrase
they heard like a toddler mimicking its parents.
Next up, argument from authority is tossed around a lot.
This is usually used by science deniers who are denying science in favor of some crackpot,
blissfully unaware that they are themselves committing the argument from authority.
An argument from authority is when someone says, well this person is a doctor, so they
must be right about this miracle cure.
Or, this person is a physicist, so they must be right about this thing in space.
The main reason this is a logical fallacy is that humans can be liars.
Some people present themselves as doctors or physicists, but aren’t.
Wearing a white lab coat while you make YouTube videos is just a way to make people think
you know what you’re talking about, and it works really well, because YouTube is full
of frauds dispensing advice on medicine and nutrition which just consists of a flashy
narrative that people want to hear, which is gobbled up by thousands of suggestible
people who then defend their source using an argument from authority.
This is precisely why citing scientific consensus is NOT an argument from authority.
If every single chemist alive agrees on something about molecules, it’s because that’s how
molecules work, which is demonstrable by the fact that we do chemistry.
Molecules have specific behaviors, chemists study those behaviors and apply them, in ways
that are irrefutable and intelligible to any undergraduate student studying the subject.
The same goes for any other field of science.
Science is just things that we know, and there is no central authority figure.
It’s a body of knowledge.
The irony is that the person who thinks the fake physicist on YouTube is right because
they are a physicist, should be a hundred thousand times more likely to listen to the
hundred thousand real physicists that collectively say something different.
But people who think this way do not regularly apply logic to their worldview.
And then to wrap things up, though it’s not technically a logical fallacy, I am endlessly
amused by people who use the phrase “cognitive dissonance”.
This is mainly flat earthers who heard the term once, think it just means being dumb,
and then diagnose everyone that debunks them of experiencing cognitive dissonance.
What this term actually means, is the state of having specific beliefs or behaviors that
are highly contradictory.
An example of this would be a fundamentalist Christian who preaches about forgiveness and
loving your neighbor but then turns around and actively hates pretty much every group
of people that’s different from themselves.
Or, a science denier talking about how dumb science is on technological devices that are
built on the scientific principles they deny.
It does not apply to people who understand science and use their understanding of science
to demonstrate the illegitimacy of pseudoscience.
So that’s it.
One day I hope to do a whole playlist on philosophy and logic and perhaps there we can really
dig into the whole list of logical fallacies, which is very long, and learn about them in
a more academic context.
But for the time being, if you are the type of person that likes to interject this terminology
in conversation or in a YouTube comment, please, please learn what they mean and use them properly.
Until next time.