Maggie's Farm

That's a term which has come into fashion lately, and it deserves to. Counterfactuals are a specific variety of BS, as our commenter notes.

The term can be used as a noun or as an adjective. The key to it is its conditionality (If...,then...might have...); the past subjunctive, combined with its lack of factual content. For example, "You bozo - you left a burner on. You could have burned down the house." Well maybe - but it did not happen. Thus no fact.

(An "indicative conditional," by way of contrast, is a past conditional which is founded on a real, factual consequence which occurred. For example, "If you bozos hadn't left the gate open, the dog would not have run into the street." Indicative conditionals are also debatable, due to their speculative nature, ie, cum hoc ergo propter hoc. For example, in my case, almost every time I water the garden, it rains afterewards.)

Counterfactuals are often used (abused) to make emotional arguments. "If the stimulus had been 3 trillion dollars, our unemployment rate would be 4%."

Free Dictionary offers this:

adj

(Philosophy / Logic) expressing what has not happened but could, would, or might under differing conditions

n

(Philosophy / Logic) a conditional statement in which the first clause is a past tense subjunctive statement expressing something contrary to fact, as in if she had hurried she would have caught the bus.

It's about the difficulty in knowing what you don't know, and the limits of self-observation. From this site (h/t, Coyote's Arrogant Ignorance):

…people who lack the knowledge or wisdom to perform well are often unaware of this fact. We attribute this lack of awareness to a deficit in metacognitive skill. That is, the same incompetence that leads them to make wrong choices also deprives them of the savvy necessary to recognize competence, be it their own or anyone else’s.

What's a "metacognitive skill"? It's about "the ability to reflect and assess ones' own thinking and understanding."

If I did not suffer from a mild case of Dunning-Kruger, I would not be able to post anything on Maggie's Farm because "I don't know anything, I never did know anything, but now I know that I don't know...":

"Cooperation" has been the mantra of the Kindergarten-minded in our midst for years. "Competition" is supposedly male, leads to Capitalism and war and other not-nice things, and is thus evil and a human trait which must be eliminated.

Of course, I have never noticed women to be any less competitive than men. Everybody enjoys a bit of the spice of competition in life, even when you lose.

Competition vs Cooperation a phony duality which, I assume, comes from some wacky ideology. Case in point: The Dark side of Cooperation.

Robin Hanson begins his piece of the above title, about "forager norms," thus:

Food isn’t about Nutrition
Clothes aren’t about Comfort
Bedrooms aren’t about Sleep
Marriage isn’t about Romance
Talk isn’t about Info
Laughter isn’t about Jokes
Charity isn’t about Helping
Church isn’t about God
Art isn’t about Insight
Medicine isn’t about Health
Consulting isn’t about Advice
School isn’t about Learning
Research isn’t about Progress
Politics isn’t about Policy

His conclusion: "We signal covertly and unconsciously because our ancestors were strongly punished for overt and conscious signals."

Signaling theory is interesting, but I do not accept the reductionistic notion that signaling is all that people do when they are together (I should say, neither does Robin H.).

At Chicago Boyz, Seizing the Opportunity to Destroy Western Civilization. A quote:

Narrative reduces personal experience to a linear progression where cause and effect seem to have a purposeful order. These narratives can then be shared with others, leading to the best definition of history ever: history is a fable agreed upon. Most personal narratives will never be the equivalent of the histories of Herodotus, Thucydides, or Gibbon; or even the fables of Aesop, La Fontaine, or Orwell. Most are simply humble habitual ways of thinking. As habits of thought, such narratives largely control how you react to unfolding events, whether it’s pricking your finger or waging a world war. 

Prof. Lindzen, in his talk at Fermilab which we posted yesterday, refers to the Prosecutor's Fallacy (aka Defender's Fallacy), which refers to a strategy of counting on a jury's inability to understand statistics, and specifically conditional probability.

Conditional probability is about the amount of linkage in events.

The simpest case: Given a red, green and blue marble in a bag, what are the odds of drawing a blue one after drawing a red one?

See the sad case of Sally Clark, who fell victim to the fallacy.

Ioannidis' Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. In his summary, he observes:

Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias. In this essay, I discuss the implications of these problems for the conduct and interpretation of research.

I had read his paper before, but it seems especially relevant now. h/t, Classical Values.

Name that fallacy.

I would expect better from those guys.

"We have a test for a rare disease (we’ll call it Jones Syndrome), and the test is 99% accurate, but it returns a false positive in 1% of those tested (that is, 1% of the time the test returns a positive, the disease is not present). If I test positive, what is the probability that I have Jones Syndrome?"

It's not a trick question, it's a question of simple logic - and that's why it's so easy to fool juries with this sort of thing.

OK, we'll add this data:

"How prevalent is Jones Syndrome, that is, what is the probability of my having it, irrespective of any test result? We’ll say that 1 in 10000 have Jones Syndrome, so your untested probability of having Jones Syndrome is 0.01%, or 0.0001."

Answer is below the fold.  Explanation at Right Wing Prof

Via Icecap:

Leading UK Climate Scientists Must Explain or Resign

By Jenniffer Marohasy

MOST scientific sceptics have been dismissive of the various reconstructions of temperature which suggest 1998 is the warmest year of the past millennium. Our case has been significantly bolstered over the last week with statistician Steve McIntyre finally getting access to data used by Keith Briffa, Tim Osborn and Phil Jones to support the idea that there has been an unprecedented upswing in temperatures over the last hundred years - the infamous hockey stick graph. 

Mr McIntyre’s analysis of the data - which he had been asking for since 2003 - suggests that scientists at the Climate Research Unit of the United Kingdom’s Bureau of Meteorology have been using only a small subset of the available data to make their claims that recent years have been the hottest of the last millennium.  When the entire data set is used, Mr McIntyre claims that the hockey stick shape disappears completely. (Yamal: A “Divergence” Problem, by Steve McIntyre, 27 September 2009)

Mr McIntyre has previously showed problems with the mathematics behind the ‘hockey stick’.  But scientists at the Climate Research Centre, in particular Dr Briffa, have continuously republished claiming the upswing in temperatures over the last 100 years is real and not an artifact of the methodology used - as claimed by Mr McIntyre. However, these same scientists have denied Mr McIntyre access to all the data.  Recently they were forced to make more data available to Mr McIntyre after they published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - a journal which unlike Nature and Science has strict policies on data archiving which it enforces. 

This week’s claims by Steve McInyre that scientists associated with the UK Meteorology Bureau have been less than diligent are serious and suggest some of the most defended building blocks of the case for anthropogenic global warming are based on the indefensible when the methodology is laid bare. 

This sorry saga also raises issues associated with how data is archived at the UK Meteorological Bureau with in complete data sets that spuriously support the case for global warming being promoted while complete data sets are kept hidden from the public - including from scientific sceptics like Steve McIntyre.

It is indeed time leading scientists at the Climate Research Centre associated with the UK Meteorological Bureau explain how Mr McIntyre is in error or resign. See post here.

Looks like they were cherry-picking data to get the results they wanted. Why?

Collect your best debating points here: Hawk vs. Dove on crime and punishment. Dalrymple.

As a retired prison shrink, Dalrymple knows whereof he opines. 

More fun with basic math today. Sam Savage on why we underestimate risk (h/t, Theo):

I do enjoy it when others do my work for me.

This piece, Putting Obama on the Couch (h/t, Cafe Hayek) offers a few of my favorite cognitive biases: Wishful Thinking, Planning Fallacy, Overconfidence Effect, Attentional Bias and Anchoring Bias.

A repost from 2007:

Today during lunch I read the piece by Tyler at Tangled Web about Dawkins, who is hopeful that a "final scientific enlightenment" will destroy religion on earth. Dawkins thinks it might require that elusive "theory of everything" to do the job.

Tyler correctly notes that the "theory of everything" will never address mankind's eternal questions.

Then I followed a link in one of his commenters to an essay by physicist Stanley Jaki, who makes the case that the "Theory of Everything" must be subject to Godel's Theorem. Very interesting essay, but I cannot cut and paste from it. Read it. He discusses Stephen Hawkings' epiphany, after many years of championing the quest, that a "theory of everything" is impossible.

Then I went over to Wikipedia to refresh my vague recollections of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, which has nothing in common with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. That Wikipedia entry was good, but there was some rough sledding in it.

And that led me to the entry on The Liar Paradox.

The Liar Paradox is the old "Nothing I say to you is true,"  and the many variations thereof.

Is the Liar Paradox a true paradox, or an artifact of symbolization? I think the latter, but that reveals my bias of expecting consistency from reality. If you're curious about the approaches to the puzzle, the Wikipedia entry seems to do a good job with it.

Thus passed a very enjoyable Tuesday lunch break for this dilettante. (The Escher image is perfect, Bird Dog - thanks.)

Update: Here's a piece that takes you deeper into the Liar Paradox. Thanks, BL

Cognitive biases aren't formal logical fallacies, but I put them in my Fallacy Collection anyway.

In one short post in the realm of economics titled When Stupid is Smart, Stumbling hits on a bunch of my old favorites: The Gambler's Fallacy, The Hot Hand Fallacy, the Focusing Effect, The Status Quo Bias, Wishful Thinking, and the like.

He makes the point, as we have done here in the past, that cognitive biases save time, and that sometimes a quick, suboptimal decision is better than a slow, perfect one. Sometimes.

It's a twofer from Humbug: Name That Fallacy! 

I have always been a fan of False Dilemma. It works like a dream on the naive. Perfect Solution is for children and utopians.

"Ever done the opposite of what the experts say?"

Our friend Stumbling hits a handful of fallacies in a piece on experts. One quote:

...herein lies the purpose of experts. It’s to reinforce these mechanisms, to help people avoid the uncomfortable facts that the world is uncertain, that mistakes are inevitable, and that we are not as in control of things as we think.

Blaming experts for being wrong is like complaining that the economy is not yellow. It’s a category error so howling as to be nonsensical.

Readers know that I am a collector of formal fallacies. I keep them on the mantle, well-dusted and polished. "Saving the Hypothesis" doesn't strike me as a formal, Aristotelian fallacy, but it surely is a common thing for folks to struggle to salvage a notion in which they are emotionally invested, regardless of new data. We all do that sometimes unless we catch ourselves BSing ourselves. 

Larry Anderson at American Thinker proposed this fallacy in relation to the Global Warming Climate Change whatever topic. One quote:

I distinctly remember the first time I had an argument with someone about "climate change."  It was a warm spring day in April of 1975. I was walking across the campus at Harvard headed for lunch. A fellow classmate (we were both juniors) ran up to me. He was really excited. He hollered out:

"Have you heard? The ice age is coming. They've proven it with computer studies at MIT."

"How did they prove that there is an ice age coming with computers?" I asked my friend.

"The planet is getting colder. They have the data.  And it is going to keep getting colder. They have these computer models --"

I stopped him right there. I knew enough about computers to understand that they were not up to accurately predicting short-term weather patterns -- let alone an ice age.

"No way. Computers aren't that powerful. "

"But they have the data and they have computers!"

"I know they do. But computers spit out whatever they are programmed to spit out. Load a computer with the data that the world has been getting colder; ask it what the weather will be tomorrow, and what do you think the computer is going to tell you? The world is getting hotter? If it does you'd better get a better computer. You hungry?" I replied and I continued on my way to lunch.

The original "climate change" hypothesis was that the planet was getting colder and that it would continue getting colder. That was a very simple hypothesis and was easily proven or refuted. Planet keeps getting colder = hypothesis correct. Planet gets warmer = hypothesis incorrect.

The world got warmer instead of colder. The "climate change" hypothesis was rewritten. This time the planet was facing a catastrophic meltdown. The world was not only getting warmer -- it was going to keep getting warmer at an ever increasing and life-threatening rate.

Think you're smart? That could mean that you are not. Always listen to different view before rejecting them. From a piece with the above title at Overcoming Bias:

...it seems clear that mostly what is going on is that we all misjudge our ability and task difficulty. 

You can say that again.