When Reasoning Fails, Disaster Can Follow

 Long ago, when the World Wide Web was still in its infancy and we had never heard the phrase "fake news" before, The Simpsons provided a good definition of specious reasoning.  After Homer brags about how there have been no bear attacks since the Bear Patrol was established, Lisa accuses him of specious reasoning.  Then she picks up a rock and suggests the rock prevents tiger attacks because there aren't any tigers around, are there?  Homer, of course not getting it, offers to buy the rock.

With the Internet, specious reasoning like this is pretty common.  Most of the time it's pretty harmless.  Like when someone says that the CW is up for sale because of its "woke" shows.  While this makes for a cute slogan, "Woke equals broke," it most likely is not true.  It's just taking two facts and assigning one as a cause and another as an effect, like Lisa with her rock.  Except for those who rant about "wokeness" and "SJW"s, this doesn't really pass the smell test because it completely ignores all the other factors, the largest of which is streaming services that have largely made broadcast TV obsolete.

Where specious reasoning gets dangerous is like with Covid.  You get people or groups who say horse medicine or drinking urine or some other crackpot cure "works" just because someone somewhere used it and didn't die.  The facts someone drank urine and didn't die from Covid are not necessarily related.  The same for Ivermectin or whatever other "cures" they've come up with.

A big aspect of the specious reasoning for Covid is what's known as "anecdotal evidence."  That's basically one or two people's experience with something.  Statistically the experience of one or two or even ten thousand people is not necessarily significant depending on how large the sample size is.  That's why actual FDA-approved medicines and vaccines (like the Covid ones) have to go through rigorous testing with large sample sizes.  

Anecdotal evidence is if someone says, "My uncle took the Covid vaccine and got blood clots."  Statistically that uncle is only one of millions of people who have taken the vaccine.  But you get people who weigh that 1 case in a million as if it's the only one.  On the flip side, I can say that all I got was a sore arm from the vaccine (and booster) but that's still anecdotal evidence.  It's not looking at the data in total.

Most of the reason the lawsuits about "the Big Lie" (ie voter fraud) were tossed is they didn't have anything more than anecdotal evidence to support them.  It was mostly a few people claiming they saw something.  Literally anyone can sign an affidavit saying they saw something; I could sign an affidavit saying I saw Bigfoot or a UFO.  That doesn't mean it's true.  Few besides other like-minded people are going to believe it without real proof.  That's the difference between "circumstantial" evidence and actual evidence on crime shows.  It's also why traditionally eyewitness testimony has been one of the least reliable forms of "proof" of a crime.

So you can see that sometimes poor reasoning leads to big trouble.  Other times it just causes us to say something dumb on the Internet.  Or maybe it causes you to buy or not buy a product.

The latter is something that does actually relate to books.  If you see a book that has a thousand good reviews (4 or 5 stars) and a handful of bad (1 or 2 stars) then you can probably assume the book is good--at least to the general public.  In the few bad reviews you might see someone whining about it being "woke" or "political" or whatever and you can probably take that as anecdotal evidence that can be ignored.

The point being whenever there's a debate about something, consider the evidence.  Is it real evidence or is it a rock to protect against tigers?