OrionWorks wrote:
PS: Yesterday in the mists of observing the whiteout I noticed
several of my colleagues at work (who are of the conservative
persuasion) who appeared to be positively gleeful. I gather that
yesterday's winter demonstration was proof, from their POV, that
Global Warming is nothing more than a crock hatched by the liberals,
that Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" crusade is a bunch of hooey.
Typical amateur mistakes. Very annoying. See:
Biased sample
Hasty generalization
Misleading vividness
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies
I don't mind extreme left-wing or right-wing arguments, but it
bothers me that people are so uneducated they make logical errors and
they don't ever realize it. It bothers me even more when they are
educated, they do realize these are fallacies, but they say them
anyway to deceive the public. You hear a lot of that during election campaigns.
My sense is that people at both political extremes tend to do this,
but I may be making a Hasty Generalization error.
Many cold fusion papers have logical errors. Before you even get to
the data and equations, you can toss out the paper because the basic
reasoning is wrong. This is true of some pro- and some anti-cold
fusion papers. I think in the old days scholars and educated people
were more rigorously trained in basic logic, and less inclined to
make such errors, but perhaps that is a romantic illusion about the past.
- Jed
