Why do I do it?

It's a question I ask myself a lot, why do I spend a large chunk of my time writing a blog which is read by very few? One reason I like to tell myself is to improve my writing, although I'd be hard pressed to notice a difference. I'll keep on that one.

Another reason is to record my thoughts for myself. That was my original idea, after finding my memory was like a sieve. I would find myself having regular deja vu, re-"discovering" things. Having the words on the internet somewhere doesn't always directly help, but the act of writing itself seems to cement things in my mind a little better.  I suppose I can read back over what I have wrote, but I rarely do so, and when I do, it only reminds me how little I knew. So perhaps that's a plus, instead of telling myself that I did know something in the past, it tells me "yeah, you are making progress/you used to be an ignorant twat." To go even further off course, one day I'll read this and maybe think the same, how meta (okay, reading over that already makes me think that).

It also acts as a kind of filter, when thinking of a large idea I can lose track of the details. Getting it down on paper helps to lay it all out and potentially simplify it. Most of all I find it helps to make me notice when it's bullshit (which is why I have lots of unpublished and abandoned posts that you can't see).

This blog also allows me to properly set out what I believe for future reference. I think it is important to be able to call up previous conclusions, along with what should be reasonable logic to base then upon. And so in a slightly meta sense, I want this post to lay out my ideas about what this blog achieves and its limitations. I think I have covered what little it achieves, next, the limitations.

Many of my posts are about religion, this is mostly due to the fact that I come from a deeply religious family, and this is the best place to vent these. This has always been the case, but this blog is the only place that won't tire of my tirades. I think I may have exhausted the patience of most of my friend groups in this regard. Either my friends are all Christian and I don't want to offend them or they are strong atheist and they already know. I suppose I'm a little late to the atheist party, which means I'm still working through the arguments.

I'm not an expert on anything I talk about, I write almost completely on things other than maths, which is the only thing I can vaguely call myself an expert on. Furthermore, I don't spend enough time researching, they are predominately my thoughts. They aren't completely unresearched but not to the level I would expect of a professional blogger/journalist.

Fallacy fallacy and the big picture

The fallacy fallacy, apart from being a little more meta than its cousins, essentially boils down to this: the existence of a fallacy in an argument does not make the conclusion false. This is quite a straightforward fallacy once you have your head around it, essentially, an argument can be complete rubbish and/or the premises false, and the conclusion correct. To give a flippant example:

All envy is purple, therefore 2+2=4.

In reality, the fallacy is naturally more subtle. An argument is often a large set of premises and lines of logic, naturally, one line could be wrong but the argument could still stand on just one line of argumentation. If you're reading an article and the writer makes an error in an argument, we are often more dismissive of the surrounding arguments and general point. When a mistake spills overs from an arguments, tainting our opinion of the writer and in turn the article, you could argue that it is an ad hominem. Of course, I would like to stress again, this is a decent heuristic. If I read about a guy trying to prove gay marriage is morally wrong because of how magnets work; I am going to completely disregard everything else he says there.

To stretch the spirit of the fallacy a little further, we often mistake flaws in a system for conclusive evidence the system should change. Law is a common example. People will point out one example of a miscarriage of justice and declare the whole system to be wrong or requiring change. In reality, law, a reflection of the complexity of human interaction, is also complex. To change a law to fix that perceived mistake, could produce net negative effects. The fallacy fallacy here is that we are misjudging the complexity of the situation, systems and arguments do not rely on one logical support. Of course, even one miscarriage of justice is worthy of consideration but it must be taken in context.

In a small meta twist, I would like to highlight a nested fallacy fallacy when considering fallacies (buffalo buffalo buffalo...). When we highlight fallacies, we can react to them by doing the opposite, which although may be the correct direction is not necessarily the right amount. The proper reaction to error is not to do a big jump in the other direction, but to reconsider that area of thought.

Sometimes, when an error is found, the conclusion is still completely correct. Although it is a decent heuristic to then consider the argument weaker, an even better reaction is to completely reconsider the whole argument, system or methodology to get the bigger picture.