I’ve always been interested in the strange and often irrational things people take for ‘common sense’, especially when used as a means to persuade or to argue some point. The following link refers to a Scientific American review of the latest book from Duncan Watts: everything is Obvious: *once you know the Answer:
The Anti-Predictor: A Chat with Mathematical Sociologist Duncan Watts
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=duncan-watts-book
Duncan Watts tells a story about the late sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld, who once described an intriguing research result: Soldiers from a rural background were happier during World War II than their urban comrades. Lazarsfeld imagined that on reflection people would find the result so self-evident that it didn’t merit an elaborate study, because everyone knew that rural men were more used to grueling labor and harsh living standards. But there was a twist: the study he described showed the opposite pattern; it was urban conscripts who had adjusted better to wartime conditions. The rural effect was a pedagogical hoax designed to expose our uncanny ability to make up retrospective explanations for what we already believed to be true.
A big part of your book deals with the problem of ignoring failures—a selective reading of the past to draw erroneous conclusions, which reminds me of the old story about the skeptic who hears about sailors who survived a shipwreck supposedly because they’d prayed to the gods. The skeptic asked, "What about the people who prayed and perished?"
Right—if you look at successful companies or shipwrecked people, you don’t see the ones who didn’t make it. It’s what sociologists call "selection on the dependent variable," or what in finance is called survivorship bias. If we collected all the data instead of just some of it, we could learn more from the past than we do. It’s also like Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between hedgehogs and foxes. The famous people in history were hedgehogs, because when those people win they win big, but there are lots of failed hedgehogs out there.
This book is on my books to get list, and if you are interested in these sorts of questions, here is a taste of some of the egregious uses of statistics:
Abusing Math, Misunderstanding Statistics Redux
http://amscoextra.blogspot.com/2007/12/abusing-math-misunderstanding.html
Recently, two marketing professors, Joseph Simmons and Leif Nelson, discovered that baseball players with initials "K" tend to strike out more than other players and that students with initials "C" and "D" tend to have worse grades than other students. (For those not familiar with the significance of the letter "K" in baseball, it represents a strikeout on a baseball scorecard.) The professors saw this as evidence that people are unconsciously affected by their names. Several news outlets picked up on the stories (for example, ABC News and Fox News) and brouhaha ensued. Now, before we all change our names and pick out a new favorite baseball team, as with everything in life, we need to take this research with a grain of salt. It all comes down to what we mean by "worse grades," as the Numbers Guy from the Wall Street Journal pointed out in his article, Is a Carl Doomed To Be a C Student? We Don’t Think So. In the names study, a "bad grade" was 0.02 points less than everyone else. In other words, the researchers found that on average, Carl’s and Dianna’s have GPA’s that are 0.02 points less than a Joe or Uri, which is really not an important difference. The baseball study, on the other hand, reveals a more serious pitfall when doing statistics—it is basically a tool to help spot patterns in data, but the pattern does not necessarily prove that there is cause and effect.
With this covered, I may as well add in a link to a great site which lists (alphabetically) many of the fallacious argumentation methods:
A List of Fallacious Arguments
http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html
Here is a small sample of what this site has…
· Ad Hominem (Argument To The Man)
· Appeal To Anonymous Authority
· Appeal To Pity (Appeal to Sympathy, The Galileo Argument)
· Appeal To Widespread Belief (Bandwagon Argument, Peer Pressure, Appeal To Common Practice)
