I sometimes think that I could devote the entirety of The Glittering Eye to pointing out the fallacies in arguments in editorials, op-eds, articles, and other blog posts. The favorites these days seem to be anecdotal evidence (a form of cognitive bias), guilt by association, non sequitur, and the ad hominem fallacy. There really is no lack of targets.
I’ve avoided that because I’d really prefer to be for things than against them but it’s mighty tempting.
Just as an example when I looked at the NYT opinion page this morning it opened with an editorial criticizing the possibility of responding to a cyberattack with nuclear weapons. Flexible response has been a component of U. S. defense posture for a half century. It’s not some revolutionary new invention of the Trump era. If they oppose the use of nuclear weapons under any circumstances or oppose the use of nuclear weapons other than as a response to a nuclear attack, that’s what they should say.
Interestingly, when I returned to the page a little later, I couldn’t find the editorial. Maybe they put it back up on the grease rack.
Maybe it’s the internet. It’s awful easy to slap down an opinion, push the ENTER key, and transmit your quick thought to a website. Or, with software, transmit your thought as email to 90 million people carefully sorted for gullibility. And there are three or four billion people — millions more every day! — who have such quick thoughts and such a great willingness to distribute them …
Back in the days when you had to use the US mail and postage stamps and typewriters, and you had to hope your spelling and your reasoning would pass muster at the Saturday Everning Post’s correspondence editor so it could reach the world, there was an expense of time and money involved in disseminating your opinions. Now it’s cheap and easy, and we see a lot more not-so-clever notions, and it’s hard to separate the sprinkling of really good ideas from the flood of banal ones.
I sort of wonder … maybe an economist could sling some numbers about … there’s a cost to communicating ideas. figuratively if not literally. There’s a cost to gathering in ideas and grading them and letting them percolate in one’s mind. I wonder if we’re actually better off communicating and thinking about varied ideas today then we were 50 years ago?