I find myself cringing regularly at the level of logical
sophistication evident in common interactions in our society. It seems like we are working diligently to
eliminate logic and replace it with “winning” and “feelings,” to the point to
where absolutely flawed, illogical arguments are being followed up with
“BOO-ya!” as if they were so logically sound that no response is possible.
It irks me to no end.
I saw a perfect example last night, in an Allstate Insurance
Commercial. The commercial shows a man
and woman sitting at a table in a café, and the woman, obviously perturbed,
starts by saying “So, you’re telling me that men are superior drivers to
women?”
He had obviously opened his mouth and said something stupid
only seconds before. The man nodded in
agreement. The woman continues, “then
how did I just get this Allstate bonus check, which they send me for every 6
months that I don’t have an accident?”
At this point, I usually say something along the lines of
“WARRRGARBLGARLBLARRGH!” because the vast, empty stupid of what she just said
invades my brain and causes me to lose my ability to process language for a short
period.
The sad part is that a lot of people, and I would venture to
guess the majority of people, see nothing wrong with her argument. They would argue that the fact that she gets
a bonus check or being a good driver would reinforce an argument that she is
not a bad driver, and would therefore tend to negate what he said.
But that isn’t responding to what he actually said. He said, and I quote “Men are superior
drivers to women.” He did not say “women
are bad drivers.” He did not say “women
are bad enough drivers that they would not be able to get an Allstate bonus
check.” He said “men are superior
drivers to women.”
If you’re still not getting my meaning, let me try something
out on you here. Stay with me. I’m going to make a statement, and we’ll work
together to figure out what conclusions it would be reasonably logical to draw
from it.
“Dale Earnhardt is a superior driver to Richard Petty.”
This, you’ll notice, is the exact same sentence that the man
stated in the commercial, only I’ve substituted “Dale Earnhardt” for “Men” and
“Richard Petty” for “women.”
In my sentence, the silliness of the conclusion that the
woman came to becomes more evident.
Does anyone care to argue that Richard Petty is a bad
driver? Of course he wasn’t a bad
driver. Richard Petty was one of the
best stock car drivers in the history of the sport, and to say that he was a
“bad driver” would be ridiculous. That
still doesn’t change the fact that my sentence, as written above, could be
argued to be perfectly true. Dale
Earnhardt, in a lot of people’s estimation, and by a lot of quantifiable
metrics, WAS a better driver than Richard Petty.
It is completely possible, then, to be perfectly good at
something, and even exceptional at it, and still have someone else that is
better at it than you. See how the two
things are totally different? See how
saying “X is better than Y” doesn’t mean that Y is bad? Y might still be totally awesome; the
sentence is merely saying that X is better.
Saying “monster trucks are better than jet boats” doesn’t mean that jet
boats suck. It just means that as
awesome as jet boats are, monster trucks are even better.
Got it?
So when the woman uses the fact that she got a bonus check
for not getting in an accident for the last 6 months as “proof” that the man’s
hypothesis that “men are superior drivers to women”, can you see why that is
absolutely ridiculous? Can you see the gaping
flaw in her logic? He says “men are
better drivers!” and she responds “Women aren’t bad drivers! See!
I’m a woman, and I got a bonus check for being a good driver!”
His immediate response should be “I never fucking said that
women were BAD drivers, you moron! I
said that men were BETTER drivers than women.
Those are two different things!
Please tell me that you aren’t so stupid that you can’t understand
that?!”
I see this sort of flawed logic all the time. The logical fallacies surrounding this poor
logic all have names, but I am not interested in giving a lesson on those. You can see these logic flaws in almost every
part of society, but no segment of society is worse about it than the political
arena.
When I say “I do not believe that the federal government
should be involved in welfare or entitlements, and I think that the State
governments should distance themselves from those, also,” DO NOT respond with
“Why do you want poor people to be on their own and not get help?” without
expecting a huge ration of snark and belittlement to come your way. Saying that the government should not be
involved in helping the poor is not the same thing as saying that we should not
help the poor. The flawed logic in
making that conclusion is so obvious that a child could see it, and yet I get
people from the supposedly “intellectual” class making that argument to me
almost daily, in essence making the already discredited argument, themselves,
that humans are incapable of acting in any way outside of government.
When I say “men and women are not the same,” someone gets
all pissy because I’m a misogynist, male supremacist who thinks that women
should be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen making me a sandwich, because
that person is too ignorant to understand that saying two things are different
is not the same thing as saying one is better than the other. The willful ignorance of that lack of
understanding is embarrassing, yet they display it proudly and call it “Grrrl
Power!” as if being an uneducated, illogical buffoon is something to be proud
of.
The part that gets me the most is that I really don’t think
that most people are actually stupid enough to fall for this crap, if they
actually took the time to think it through.
I just think that people have become so careless and imprecise in the
way that they operate, given this very forgiving, civilized world that we live
in, that it doesn’t occur to them to even think about it.
So they watch a commercial where a woman commits a blatant
straw-man fallacy and think “Oh, snap, she sure told him!” instead of shaking
their head at the man for not taking the opportunity to calmly destroy her
argument and then sanitize everything that it touched on the way down, for fear
that the stupid might be contagious.
Now to prove my point, cue the commenters that are going to
come on here and start arguing with me about how men really aren’t superior
drivers to women, because there was this one time….
Yes, I googled to see if anyone else had pointed out this fallacy. Yay logic.
ReplyDeleteExactly the same thing I did. The commercials these days, are out of control with their social brainwashing attempts.
ReplyDeleteGaagh. So surprised, sadly, that ad still runs.
ReplyDeleteMy wife keeps running over stuff in the parking lot. She does not get checks from AllState.
ReplyDelete