Question Everything

I started this blog as an outlet to express my opinions about the role of government and later as a means to explore sophistry in argumentation. I am shocked on a daily basis at the way in which media, politicians and pundits alike are disingenuous in their statements. I see displays of faux ignorance when the facts are contrary to narratives and inappropriate inferences drawn from statements by conservatives. An appalling example of this is a recent interview of Jordan Peterson by Britain’s Channel4 Cathy Newman. From the start the interview was adversarial and Cathy was out to “get” Jordan almost as if she was a big game hunter looking for a trophy for her wall. Jordan himself analyzed her performance in a subsequent interview where he noted that she restarted most of his responses as a straw man which she then burned in effigy. By doing this she was able to express outrage that seemed justified. Of course the result is that she didn’t interview Jordan Peterson at all and her either rouse to take him or her ignorance by failing to comprehend what he was actually saying meant she was doing battle with a mere projection of Jordan and not the man himself.

I found myself laughing at her and wondering aloud how someone portending to be an intellectual could not understand the arguments and make the null hypothesis fallacy as often as Cathy did. So what is the null hypothesis fallacy? It’s when infer a binary situation when it’s not clear that the situation is binary, for example if something is not white if you infer that it is black you have incorrectly inferred a binary because if something is not white there many other opinions of which black is one but without additional information concluding that it IS black would be inappropriate. Time and time again Jordan referenced the need for multi variate analysis to understand the impact of gender wage differences, the pay gap. Cathy couldn’t accept or understand that individual circumstances and individual decisions affect salaries and that gender alone is not a determining factor.

Now Cathy Newman is claiming to be harassed and she probably is being harassed. I suspect the harassment is less about gender and has more to do with her inability or unwillingness to listen to the answers her guest provided in the interview. I can only hope that Cathy Newman takes some time to reflect on her approach and decides that fact and evidence based reasoning is a better than fallacious arguments based on emotion and a desire to dominate others.

#strawman #Nullhypothesisfallacy