I just participated in the first W3C Authentic Web Mini Workshop¹ hosted by the Credible Web Community Group² (of which I’m a longtime member) and up front I noted that our very discussion itself needed to be careful about its own credibility, extra critical of any technologies discussed or assertions made, and initially identified two flaws to avoid on a meta level, having seen them occur many times in technical or standards discussions:
1. Politician’s Syllogism — "Something must be done about this problem. Here is something, let's do it!"
2. Solutions Looking For Problems — "I am interested in how tech X can solve problem Y"
After some back and forth and arguments in the Zoom chat, I observed participants questioning speakers of arguments rather than the arguments themselves, so I had to identify a third fallacy to avoid:
3. Ad Hominem — while obvious examples are name-calling (which is usually against codes of conduct), less obvious examples (witnessed in the meeting) include questioning a speaker’s education (or lack thereof) like what they have or have not read, or would benefit from reading.
I am blogging these here both as a reminder (should you choose to participate in such discussions), and as a resource to cite in future discussions.
We need to all develop expertise in recognizing these logical and methodological flaws & fallacies, and call them out when we see them, especially when used against others.
We need to promptly prune these flawed methods of discussion, so we can focus on actual productive, relevant, and yes, credible discussions.
#W3C #credweb #credibleWeb #authenticWeb #flaw #fallacy #fallacies #logicalFallacy #logicalFallacies
Glossary
Ad Hominem
attacking an attribute of the person making an argument rather than the argument itself
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
Politician's syllogism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism
Solutions Looking For Problems (related: #solutionism, #solutioneering)
Promoting a technology that either has not identified a real problem for it to solve, or actively pitching a specific technology to any problem that seems related. Wikipedia has no page on this but has two related pages:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_instrument
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_fix
Wikipedia does have an essay on this specific to Wikipedia:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Solutions_looking_for_a_problem
Stack Exchange has a thread on "solution in search of a problem":
* https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/250320/a-word-that-means-a-solution-in-search-of-a-problem
Forbes has an illustrative anecdote:
* https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephanieburns/2019/05/28/solution-looking-for-a-problem/
References
¹ https://www.w3.org/events/workshops/2025/authentic-web-workshop/
² https://credweb.org/ and https://www.w3.org/community/credibility/
Previously in 2019 I participated in #MisinfoCon:
* https://tantek.com/2019/296/t1/london-misinfocon-discuss-spectrum-recency
* https://tantek.com/2019/296/t2/misinfocon-roundtable-spectrums-misinformation
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#fallacy
#statstab #295 The Fallacy of the Null-Hypothesis Significance Test
Thoughts: "the [..] aim of a scientific experiment is not to precipitate decisions, but to make an appropriate adjustment in the degree to which one accepts, or believes, the hypothesis"
#NHST #Bayes #ConfidenceIntervals #pvalues #significance #testing #hypotheses #likelihood #critique #fallacy
The Grey Scale of Politics
Why we need to move away from either/or thinking:
https://tiereddemocraticgovernance.org/blog_details.php?blog_cat_id=21&id=400
The old and the new #mechanism - part 2
- Explanation attempts for the understanding of the #reductionistic and #positivistic world view -
In this 2nd part of the article, in my opinion, the #complexity of #biological #systems is taken into account and in this respect the #mereological #fallacy in the old #mechanistic #world #view, that the whole is always more than the sum of its parts, is referred to as a #construction #error in #reductionism.
More at: https://philosophies.de/index.php/2022/01/07/der-alte-und-der-neue-mechanismus-2/
"Common sense" is what you invoke when you cannot support your beliefs with either "real arguments" or "real data."
Common sense is the noise that comes out of you when all you've got is the vague sense that you must be right--somehow?--but even *you* don't know why you think that.
Common sense is a slogan for shutting down arguments without having to know or prove anything.
It’s a great time to brush up on our logfals.
The #Autonomous #Vehicle #Fallacy
"Cities aren't loud. Cars are loud."
« False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil. »
― Socrates
· https://poligraf.tumblr.com/post/769241233671487488/false-words-are-not-only-evil-in-themselves-but
#STARTREK #LogicalThinking #72 - STAR TREK Logical Thinking #72 - Genetic #Fallacy (Fallacy of Origins)
結合の誤謬 (Association Fallacy) を犯しやすい人を一人観察しただけで，全ての人が結合の誤謬を犯しやすいと推論してしまう結合の誤謬
#ChayaRaichik and #JoelBerry are flaming heaps of human garbage who insist that #tolerance means tolerating their intolerance.
This is a #fallacy that ultimately means bigoted, destructive pieces of shit must be accepted and tolerated so they can spread their #hate free from #moderation. I hope the worst life has to offer lands on their doorstep every day they continue to plague this planet with their existence. Tolerate that.
#LibsOfTikTok #HateMongers #bigotry
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2024/12/libsoftiktok-banned-from-bluesky-after-just-9-days-on-the-site/
A marvellous video from the team @deutschewellerss which talks about the primary energy fallacy, and how replacing combustion with renewables results in a huge reduction in total energy requirements.
Every thermodynamics lecturer should include this in their lectures, especially giving students the challenge of thinking about what noun never gets mentioned in the entire discussion. #energy #transition #fallacy #climatechange https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVJkq4iu7bk
Oh man...I can already see the claims of companies getting so and so more productive and "streamlining" processes thanks to #AI, while it'll turn out that:
Yes, companies will have gotten more productive.
And no, it's not _directly_ because of AI - it's because employees have inadvertently produced a lot of documentation in the hope of "feeding" the AI, while, by documenting things properly, they'll have actually helped humans doing a better job.
Supervised self-driving #vehicles are a #fallacy. Normal #drivers can not do that. We can't watch a computer for hours, weeks, then be ready within a second to take over. Moreover, how can we be useful when we take over if we haven't been #driving much lately?
Sure, commercial airline pilots can be in a similar situation. But they have extensive training, including simulators. Such training is very expensive, unaffordable for private car drivers. And pilots have a lot more time to react.
#FSD
A good source to expand your knowledge of fallacies and manipulative argumentation is this one:
Natural is good.
Hurricanes are natural.
Therefore, .......................................
#LogicalFallacy lesson 1
#Ad_hominem:
When someone attacks the person and their traits instead of addressing the argument, it's known as an Ad Hominem fallacy. This is a #fallacy because attacking the person does not discredit or invalidate their argument.
Example: "Your takes on the dangers of monopolies is invalid because you're a socialist"
@arstechnica Naive view of #information #fallacy.
It’s well documented that more speech does not have to lead to more good speech, but most often leads to bad speech crowding out the good.
This has happened several times in history when new information technologies were introduced. We tediously developed ways to limit speech so truth & good speech again were favoured.
It’s a Silicon Valley mythology, a self-serving faith serving business interests.
https://gimulnaut.wordpress.com/2024/09/29/silicon-valley-mythology/
Another aspect of debt,
considered as an information technology,
is that if affects the information environment of the borrower.
If you are managing a company which has borrowed money,
making your payments becomes one of the survival conditions for that company.
At low levels of debt, generating short term cash flow is one priority among others,
but for a highly indebted company it becomes a signal which swamps all others.
You might want to change the world, but if you don’t meet the coupon payments, you’ll never get the chance to see if your other strategic priorities would have worked.
Consequently, a company with lots of debt cannot help but have a bias toward the short term.
Which might be considered problematic,
as the last few decades in the Western capitalist world have seen the rise of an industry
(leveraged buyouts, or “private equity”)
which has made it part of its fundamental operating strategy to load companies up with debt.
Considered in this light, debt is a technology of control as well as of information
– it’s a means of exerting discipline on management teams who might otherwise be tempted to follow priorities other than short-term financial returns.
This is, as far as I can tell, the real meaning behind the populist critiques of “#financialisation” in the economy.
There’s really nothing particularly bad about the growth of the financial sector,
even to the extent that it’s outstripped the growth of the “real” economy.
Quite simple mathematics ought to be enough to convince us that as the economy grows,
the number of links and relationships between producers, consumers and investors will grow at a faster rate,
and so you’d expect the parts of the economy in which decision making and information processing take place to grow faster than the “real” economy.
It’s the same logic by which the brains of primates take up proportionally more energy than those of rodents;
finance is part of the real economy, just like the cerebellum is a real organ.
What’s bad about “financialisation” is neither more nor less than the over-use of debt.
Modern corporations do often behave badly,
and they make systematically worse decisions than they used to,
this isn’t a delusion of age.
They do this partly because they have outsourced key functions
(cutting themselves off from important sources of information),
and partly because their priorities are warped by the need to generate short term cash flow.
Both of these problems can in large part be traced back to the private equity industry,
working either as a direct driver of excess leverage,
or as a constant threat which makes managers behave as if they were already subject to its discipline.
#Management #science and #cybernetic #history is all about things which began as solutions, 
then turned into problems because the world changed.
Once upon a time, back in the 1970s,
private equity and LBOs were the solution to a problem of lazy, sclerotic incumbent management teams,
self-dealing and failing to make tough decisions.
But it’s now the 2020s, and private equity may itself be the biggest problem in our global information processing system.
The way that corporate history progresses is that we try to keep up with the ever-increasing complexity of the world, 
and then when this is no longer possible, we have a crisis and reorganise.
We’ve had the crisis
– or perhaps we are still going through it
– and now it’s time to think about how to reorganise.
(3/3)