Don't Pattern Match Ideas

Pattern matching corrodes thinking

The fallacy fallacy fallacy

Around the 2010s, a popular belief among internet atheists was that the true sign of deep wisdom was having a long list of informal fallacies that you were ready to wheel out at any moment. When your wife proposes asking some locals if there’s a nearby MacDonalds, you’re ready to tell her that that would be the argumentum ad populum fallacy; when she says “that’s ridiculous,” you point out that that’s the begging the question fallacy; when she says “you always do this!” you note that this is a fallacious ad hominem. Where did she get her degree in informal arguing: clown college?

Such people were of the utterly risible view that a large portion of arguments for the existence of God contained some straightforward fallacy that could be clearly pointed to, thus debunking the argument. To this day, if you review YouTube comments beneath debates about, say, the contingency argument, half of them are roughly “this iz god of the gap fallacy. Even if true, it does not prove Christianity. debonk!”

Even putting aside the fact that the so-called God of the gaps fallacy is not a fallacy, and is really just a slur that people employ to demonize perfectly good inference to the best explanation, deductive contingency arguments employ nothing that could be plausibly claimed to be any sort of God of the gaps inference. Yet people have pattern matched “ARGUMENT FOR GOD” and given it the label “GOD OF THE GAPS,” making it completely impossible to ever convince them, as they regard every argument as fallacious.

My problem with these detailed fallacy lists is two-fold. First of all, they cause people to simply pattern-match arguments without really thinking them through. Rather than thinking through why natural does not equal good, when people hear others argue that we ought to do X because it’s natural, rather than think it through, they simply call it a fallacy—even if they can’t articulate why appealing to nature is irrational. It’s a cheap intellectual shortcut, whereby people don’t seriously think through ideas but instead just pattern match.

Second—and this is especially bad in combination with the first—most of the things that people call fallacies are, as normally employed, perfectly good forms of reasoning. For example, if you go to one of the true bastions of modern scholarship, yourfallacyis.com, nearly all the examples are either completely unhelpful or downright misleading. The second example, for instance, is the false cause fallacy. I suppose comitting the false cause fallacy is necessarily bad reasoning (false causes are by definition in error), but telling someone that the causal inference that they infer is false never advances the conversation. If a fallacy presumes that some inference is wrong without identifying the pattern of wrong inference that it is, then it is never helpful in advancing the conversation.

They list, for instance, the bandwagon fallacy, which apparently one commits if they “[appeal] to popularity or the fact that many people do something as an attempted form of validation.” Our wise sages over at yourfallacyis.com explain that this is fallacious because “the popularity of an idea has absolutely no bearing on its validity.
If it did, then the Earth would have made itself flat for most of history to accommodate this popular belief.”

But ironically, this is the conflating cause and evidence fallacy (see, I can also give mean names to forms of reasoning I don’t like). The fact that X doesn’t cause Y doesn’t mean that X can’t give you evidence for Y. A person might reasonably infer that a criminal committed a crime based on the fact that ten eye-witnesses reported that the criminal did, even though obviously if the eye-witnesses all agreed to lie, that wouldn’t change whether the criminal had committed the crime.

No one thinks that the fact that lots of people agree on something causes it to be true. But many people think that it gives evidence that it’s true. These people are, in fact, correct! Nearly all the things that are widely agreed upon—e.g. the fact that dropping a hammer on your toe is painful, day is brighter than night, and so on—are true!

Some of the supposed fallacies are even more ridiculous. For example, the ad hominem fallacy apparently occurs when you try to discredit someone’s argument by insulting them. The example that’s given is:

Example: After Sally presents an eloquent and compelling case for a more equitable taxation system, Sam asks the audience whether we should believe anything from a woman who isn't married, was once arrested, and smells a bit weird.

I submit that neither this nor anything else in the vicinity has ever happened in the history of the world. I can think of maybe one example anyone has ever done this in my life. Much more common, and what causes people to claim others have committed the dreaded fallacy is either:

1. Person A makes a point. Person B makes another point and insults person A (e.g. “the fact that you trust THAT study with a P value of .5 means that you’re a moron.”) Person A claims person B has committed the dreaded ad hominem fallacy. No. Being mean to someone isn’t a fallacy! It’s only a fallacy if it’s an irrelevant personal attack that you use to try to discredit someone’s argument. Of course, there might be cases where one mistakenly argues against the other’s reliability (e.g. “you’re ill-equipped to form true beliefs about anthropics because you’re not a philosopher but just a lowly blogging canine”) but the broad argumentative pattern isn’t fallacious.

2. Person A makes a point citing some source. Person B insults their source in a way that directly undermines their credibility (e.g. “you cite a study from Harvard medical school, but that study was commissioned by Dr. Andrew Evil who has said his goal in life is to design misleading studies that spread misinformation, every one of his studies that has been investigated has turned out to be wrong, and he has declared ‘the bad is my good, the false is my true.’”) This once again is not fallacious!

I’m having too much fun with this, but I’ll limit myself to just one more example, perhaps the most eggregious. One of the most ridiculous charges is that an argument commits the genetic fallacy, wherein you attack how some view was formed rather than the view itself. Our philosopher kings over at yourfallacyis.com give an example of such a fallacious inference:

Accused on the 6 o'clock news of corruption and taking bribes, the senator said that we should all be very wary of the things we hear in the media, because we all know how very unreliable the media can be.

This. Is. Not. A. Fallacy. If someone concludes something based on a source—e.g. the 6 o’clock news—and the source is unreliable, that obviously undermines the reliability of the conclusion! If the reason that you think that Tim is an axe murderer is because Andrew Evil, who takes the false as his true, told you so, then that serves to undermine your justification for believing that Tim is an axe murderer.

Pointing to other people having formed their beliefs in an unreliable way is no fallacy. By this standard, if someone thinks there’s a table because they see it, informing them that they ingested hallucinogens that make people hallucinate tables would be fallacious! Discussing of serious arguments like the evolutionary debunking argument always seems to get bogged down in these silly accusations of fallacy, because the author of yourfallacyis.com wanted to make a convenient bingo card that he could use to sneer when theists make arguments.

This is all that most fallacies end up being: a way for philosophically confused people to shut down their brains and smugly claim that their critics are dunces who can’t reason. When hearing an argument, the fallacy wielders try to pattern-match it to something they can use to dismiss it, rather than thinking it through. This is quite corrosive to public discourse, especially on the topic of theism.

Bingo

Scott Alexander has an old post complaining about ideology bingo.

In the olden days of the early 2010s—and to some lesser extent today—many people constructed elaborate bingo cards for things those who disagreed with them might say. This is, once again, a very effective way of shutting down thinking, replacing it with thoughtless pattern-matching. I’m going to quote a long bit of text, but it’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever read, so you’re all going to have to read it too!:

Let's look at the fourth one, "Anti-Zionist Bingo." Say that you mention something bad Israel is doing, someone else accuses you of being anti-Semitic, and you correct them that no, not all criticism of Israel is necessarily anti-Semitic and you're worried about the increasing tendency to spin it that way.

And they say "Hahahahahhaa he totally did it, he used the 'all criticism of Israel gets labeled anti-Semitic' argument, people totally use that as a real argument hahahaha they really are that stupid, I get 'B1' on my stupid stereotypical critics of Israel bingo!"

You say "Uh, look, I'm not really sure what you're getting at. I recognize that there is real anti-Semitism and I am just as opposed to it as you are but surely when when see the state excusing acts of violence against Palestinians in the West Bank we..."

And they say "Hahahhaha G1, I got G1, he pulled the old 'I abhor real anti-Semitism' line this is great, guys come over here and look at what this guy is doing he's just totally parroting all the old arguments every anti-Semite uses!"

So it may be scary when your opponent is unaware of your arguments, but it is much scarier when your opponent has a sort of vague dreamlike awareness of your arguments, which immediately pattern-match cached thoughts about how horrible a person you would have to be to make them.

But this is still not the scariest thing.

Because if your opponent brings out the Bingo card, you can just tell them exactly what I am saying here. You can explain to the pro-Israel person that they are pattern-matching your responses, that you don't know what strawman anti-Zionist they're thinking of but that you have legitimate reasons for believing what you do and you request a fair hearing, and that if they do not repent of their knee-slapping pattern-matching Bingo-making ways they are going to Hell.

No, the scariest thing would be if one of those bingo cards had, in the free space in the middle: "You are just pattern-matching my responses. I swear that I have something legitimate to tell you which is not just a rehash of the straw-man arguments you've heard before, so please just keep an open mind and hear me out."

If someone did that, even Origen would have to admit they were beyond any hope of salvation. Any conceivable attempt to explain their error would be met with a "Hahahaha he did the 'stop-pattern matching I'm not a strawman I'm not an inhuman monster STOP FILLING OUT YOUR DAMN BINGO CARD' thing again! He's so hilarious, just like all those other 'stop-pattern matching I am not a strawman' people whom we know only say that because they are inhuman monsters!"

But surely no one could be that far gone, right?

Listen:

"I'm not racist, but..."

If you are like everyone else on the Internet, your immediate response is "Whoever is saying that is obviously a racisty racist who loves racism! I can't believe he literally used the 'I'm not racist, but...' line in those exact words! The old INRB! I've got to get home as fast as I can to write about this on my blog and tell everyone I really met one of those people!"

But why would someone use INRB? It sounds to me like what they are saying is: "Look. I know what I am saying is going to sound racist to you. You're going to jump to the conclusion that I'm a racist and not hear me out. In fact, maybe you've been trained to assume that the only reason anyone could possibly assert it is racism and to pattern-match this position to a racist straw man version. But I actually have a non-racist reason for saying it. Please please please for the love of Truth and Beauty just this one time throw away your prejudgments and your Bingo card and just listen to what I'm going to say with an open mind."

And so you reply "Hahahaha! He really used the 'look I know what I'm saying is going to sound racist to you you're going to jump to the conclusion that I'm a racist and not hear me out in fact maybe you've been trained to assume...' line! What a racist! Point and laugh, everyone! POINT AND LAUGH!"

The ideological bingo card—particularly the one that comes equipped with a space for “stop playing your ideological bingo and just listen to the things I’m saying”—is the most egregious example of this but far from the only example. When effective altruists hear arguments for effective altruism, they almost always pattern match it as “something something utilitarianism,” and then bust out their talking points about utilitarianism being wrong—even when those talking points have nothing to do with effective altruism. This is why so many conversations about effective altruism get bogged down on extraneous, totally irrelevant tangents like whether you should push the fat man off the bridge.

I can never convince non-philosophers of either the anthropic argument or psychophysical harmony. While they somehow often end up convinced of the terrible moral argument, they’re never convinced by the good arguments. Non-philosophers don’t focus as intently on the details of philosophical arguments, so they always end up pattern matching it to some weird other thing, and giving a completely confused response!

Even I, in the days of my youth (~3 years ago), did a lot of pattern matching. I remember in the days when my mind was shrouded in darkness—i.e. I did not accept intuitionism—I had a sort of mental bingo card for intuitionism. When people would mention intuitions, I’d stop paying attention to what they were saying, and trot out my standard “don’t you know intuitions are wrong sometimes,” talking points. This was very silly, and resulted in a substantial delay in when I started seriously thinking through arguments.

This is bad! People shouldn’t do this!

I don’t have any grand takeaway from this, nor any particularly concrete advice about how not to do it. But it’s bad that so much of public discussion on topics of great importance involves people swinging at phantoms—tilting at windmills. When arguing with someone, really listen to the things they’re saying, rather than the things someone sort of like them said a decade ago that Hitchens had an ABSOLUTELY HILARIOUS quip in response to!