The Fine Art of Baloney Detection (1995) [pdf]

https://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/lehre/pmo/eng/Sagan-Baloney.pdf

by sherilm • 2 years ago

54 11 2 years ago

stelliosk• 2 years ago

Baloney detection kit is great. Taking it a step further, "Attacking faulty reasoning" by T.Edward Damer is a great book.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacking_Faulty_Reasoning

bibelo• 2 years ago

The price itself is baloney. 160€ on Amazon

vo2maxer• 2 years ago

$6.33 with free shipping in AbeBooks and that’s no baloney.

dang• 2 years ago

The Fine Art of Baloney Detection (1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21073726 - Sept 2019 (27 comments)

jonathankoren• 2 years ago

"Demon Haunted World" is such a great book. It was the first book that told me it was not just okay not to be believe, but not believing was in fact Good™.

arduanika• 2 years ago

There was an interesting counterargument on an old blog. If you can look past the uncivil language in the title, the author makes some good observations about how "baloney detection" tends to show up in the wild:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140219225908/http://plover.net...

A snippet: "In the real world, it's not sufficient simply to identify a fallacy in an argument. You've also got to think why the fallacy is a problem in that particular instance, and what consequences it could have for the rest of the argument; often it will have less consequence than you might think. If you think you've dismissed an opposing argument just because you think you've seen a fallacy, then you're deluding yourself."

I never found out who this "plover" author is, or why they took down their blog. Maybe someone here knows more.

Modified3019• 2 years ago

The plover site has a variety of authors under it's umbrella. The entries under http://web.archive.org/web/20140220201235/http://plover.net/... were by Stephen Bond: https://www.ifwiki.org/Stephen_Bond

Plover.net itself seems to be run by [David Cornelson](https://intfiction.org/u/davidc/summary). The site may be an evolution or reference to the old [Plover-NET BBS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plover-NET).

autoexec• 2 years ago

If you think you've dismissed an opposing argument just because you think you've seen a fallacy, then you're deluding yourself."

That'd be the "fallacy fallacy" aka "argument from fallacy" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy). A fallacy might not make someone wrong, but it does call their reasoning skills into question and can suggest that they're trying to manipulate you.

DiscourseFan• 2 years ago

Most of the time, when someone trying to show logical inconsistencies (and this is only my observation), they either a) don't understand what the argument is about, and try to apply "logical" conditions to the discussion, or b) they are talking about the phenomenological world of programming and the compiler won't run.

That second example should really, I think, demonstrate how silly the first case is. Because just as in programming, our arguments in the rest of the world always follow a certain contextual logic and order that can't be extracted from its social and material history; often, putting that history into question requires defying that logic, and whatever defies logic is oftentimes only intelligible within that logic as unintelligible, as "baloney," "fallacious."

Its just as they say, the Shaiva Monists, that nobody ever has a false perception of reality--or rather, false perceptions are always already at some level true perceptions of the world, the only false perception is to think there are any. In order for people to "make mistakes," you'd have to accept that the "mistake" itself was not already part of the process of the truth unfolding.

jgalt212• 2 years ago

It seems that the VCs know this, and invest only in those who fail the test.

tabtab• 2 years ago

IT Fad Detection Kit: https://www.reddit.com/r/DilbertProgramming/comments/q3k1cb/...

The Fine Art of Baloney Detection (1995) [pdf]

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