Week 8 Day 3 - Quantifier Fallacies and Cognitive Biases

Channel:

Bill Kerney

Subscribers:

2,640

Published on March 13, 2021 7:03:24 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgZak_MPtTg

Duration: 55:25

107 views

2

We talked about quantifiers before, and today talked about two fallacies related to quantifiers:


1) All or Nothing (aka Black and White) Fallacy - it is when a person makes an all or nothing claim when in reality there is nuance. Often done as part of a strawman. Person A: "I think that some X are Y." Person B: "Nani? How can you say that ALL X are Y!?"


2) Fallacy of the Middle - it is when you claim a position to be right because it is in the middle between two positions. Sometimes, after all, one position is simply correct. This is the fallacy I make the most, because for a lot of closely held beliefs in philosophy, there's usually good arguments or evidence for each side, so I tend to pick a position somewhere between the two points. However, just because a point is between two points doesn't make it right.


Examples: "All squares are rectangles" is simply a correct statement, and the right response to murdering everyone isn't to split the difference and murder only half of them.


Cognitive Biases - there's lots of them, but they can be thought of as mistakes the human brain makes out of the need to simplify the external world. Studying them will help you understand humanity, as things like in-group bias come up all the time.


Today we talked about Mind Reading, which is the notion that people often think they know what other people are thinking, when in reality all they have done is constructed a mental model of what is going on. If that mental model doesn't match reality, then they will often cause themselves problems.