SanityProject

The zero-sum fallacy   Recently updated !

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged SanityProject on by

Authoritarian thinking of the right and left often relies on the assumption that “your gain is my loss.” The supporters of ICE think immigrants are taking jobs away from them. If enough people are deported, they think, there will be fewer people competing for the same jobs. The left’s version is that there’s a fixed amount of wealth to go around, and if the people who make the most are taxed heavily, that’s more money for everyone else with no downside.

These are both cases of zero-sum thinking. They assume that the amount of a resource, such as jobs or spending power, is a given and that the only question is who will get it. They think that taking resources away from others means more for them. In some cases, there’s a factual underpinning to that kind of thinking. The conservation laws of physics say we can’t create matter or energy out of nothing. The amount of air and water in the world is pretty much fixed. But most of the things we rely on are the products of human effort. Many didn’t exist till someone invented them.
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Sympathy and empathy

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged language SanityProject usage vocabulary on by

This is a post about word usage, not about the murder of Charlie Kirk, but it started from seeing a lot of online rage about a statement of his. According to Snopes, he once said:

I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that — it does a lot of damage. But, it is very effective when it comes to politics. Sympathy, I prefer more than empathy. That’s a separate topic for a different time.

It’s strange that of all the things he said, this should draw so much anger. If I were cynical, I’d say it’s because people saw an opportunity to pull the first sentence out of context and create a deceptive impression. In this case, cynicism is fully justified.

How much difference is there between sympathy and empathy, anyway?
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Reclaiming liberalism 2

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There’s no hope for a near-term turnaround in the US. If there were any decency left in America, Trump, Rubio, Homan, Leavitt, and the rest of the crowd would be climbing out of the Potomac, covered with tar and feathers. I’ve done what I can, pointing out one outrageous act after another. Nothing helps. The United States is a nation of cowards with a large minority that favors thuggish central rule and controls Congress.

Concentrating only on the short term leads to despair. Avoiding tyranny in the US — or recovering from it — requires understanding its causes and changing the intellectual climate. There can be a resurgence of the liberal ideal in America, but it will take time.
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Tech buzzword panic

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EFF has run a valuable campaign on the risks of leaking metadata to third parties. If you upload a photo to a public website, for instance, the file might contain information on exactly when and where you took the picture. A stalker can make use of the information, especially if you upload photographs wherever you go. If you make a phone call or text message, the associated metadata may get less privacy protection than the what you said or typed. The US government has claimed that warrantless searches of communication metadata, which might identify the sender, receiver, and time of a message, are OK. Unfortunately, this has led some people to think that metadata themselves (I’m standing by “data” as a plural) are evil.
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The false equivalence fallacy 3

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged logic SanityProject on by

Getting back to the inappropriate use of the term “Alligator Auschwitz,” I’ve noticed several cases on Bluesky where people have argued, in effect: The facility called “Alligator Alcatraz” is a concentration camp. Auschwitz was a concentration camp. Therefore the two are morally equivalent.

This is an example of the false equivalence fallacy. It claims two things are equivalent on the basis of some similarities while ignoring significant differences. Often, as in the present case, they’re differences of degree. Wikipedia gives the example: “They are both Felidae, mammals in the order Carnivora, therefore there’s little difference between having a pet cat and a pet jaguar.” It’s most likely to turn up in emotionally loaded comparisons. “Overstaying one’s visa and armed invasion are both illegal, so overstayed immigrants are an invasion force.” “Kissing someone without prior verbal permission and rape are both impositions on a person, therefore an unrequested kiss amounts to rape.” “A 5G phone and a nuclear reactor in meltdown both emit radiation, therefore 5G phones are a severe danger to anyone in the area.”
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Six rules for responding to bad ideas

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SciManDan has put up a video which everyone trying to debunk bad ideas should watch. Nominally he’s talking about Flat Earthers. A lot of his videos are on that subject; a friend of mine likes to watch them, so I watch them too. Really, though, the six rules he offers don’t apply just to answering people who think the world is flat. They apply to any bad ideas you’re trying to knock down: socialism, Trumpism, “greedflation” theory, Moon landing hoax claims, whatever.

Watch the video, but I’ll quote his six rules here, substituting “[bad idea]” for “flat earth” to show the generality.
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Idiots on the left and right

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged fake news journalism news SanityProject on by

Sometimes there is so much idiocy in the news that you have to unpack it layer by layer. This is the case with a statement which Florida governor DeSantis made and the way some people have described it.

In an interview, DeSantis said: “We also have a policy that if you’re driving on one of those streets and a mob comes and surrounds your vehicle and threatens you, you have a right to flee for your safety. … You drive off and hit one of these people — that’s their fault for impinging on you. You don’t have to sit there and just be a sitting duck and let the mob grab you out of your car and parade you through the streets. You have a right to defend yourself in Florida.”
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