Brilliant Expostulation By Neil DeGrasse Tyson Concerning The Scientific Method, Peer Review, And How Scientifically Untrained People Often Get Things Wrong While Being Absolutely Convinced They're Right

Snopes Guide To Logical Fallacies

Logical fallacies are behind many of the harmful misunderstandings, rumors, and conspiracy theories our newsroom investigates

https://www.snopes.com/collections/logical-fallacies-explained/

Alan Archibald

How we can know enough to honestly think we're right, but not no enough to realize we're wrong.

Such brilliance!

And such brilliance applied in such comprehensive detail.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson does an illuminating and detailed job explaining "how science works."

Correlatedly, he analyzes how "Joe Rogan's guests" (and folks on on other social media platforms) tend to 1.) believe that they are right, whereas, in fact, 2.) have their heads firmly ensconced in The Dark Place.

If you know someone -- perhaps a hydroxychloroquine advocate, or a self-professed expert who trashes the benefit of vaccines -- AND this same person has established himself/herself as an "authority," beware of all the "Logical Fallacies," but you might start with The Furtive Fallacy or the belief that aggregating confirming evidence enables one to disregard disconfirming evidence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furtive_fallacy

Or, as often happens, these armchair "experts" say something like: "the best people tell me that blah, blah, blah" or, "look at this piece of evidence that disproves the mountain of peer-reviewed evidence that the earth is round," or, "it's fake news," or "it's Deep State Manipulation."

When these warning lights and alarm bells are triggered, be very wary.

But if you really want to cut to the chase rather than coddle your simpleminded, logically fallacious errors, watch Neil DeGrasse Tyson hold forth in the video clip below.

Sheer Genius!

0:06 / 16:29

Efrem Edwards

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Physicist Neil Degrasse Tyson checks Actor Terrence “Say mayne” Howard lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uLi1I3G2N4

Alan Archibald

If you want to dive even deeper into logical fallacies and how easily people who are not scientifically trained "get things wrong," google, "logical fallacies used by conspiracists."

Fran Lebowitz makes the bold claim that "people love to hate more than they care about their own personal wellbeing."

Whether or not that statement can be proven true, I note that untrained armchair pseudo-scientists love their comforting ignorance more than they love Truth.

And personal hypothesis is that they do love their ignorance more than they love Truth.

But even so, I will suspend my final judgment until well-designed studies prove the point - at least within acceptable statistical limits.

Alan: By way of a companion piece postscript, consider this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTChrirK-hw

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