Last week in this space I described the reaction of my Facebook tribe to my shocking conclusion that too much of SNAP (food stamps) benefits are being spent on soft drinks and that the soda pop category could easily be excluded from SNAP without harm to any human beings. (See I Need A Drink.)
After the column appeared, and I posted a link to it on my Facebook page, the feedback loop began all over again — both on Facebook and on the ArkansasBusiness.com website. I haven’t changed my opinion about the value of soda, but I have had a rich opportunity to observe several logical fallacies used by seemingly rational adults.
At this point, I would like to call your attention to an exceptional service to mankind performed by people named Jesse Richardson, Andy Smith, Som Meaden and an Australian graphic art studio called Flip Creative. These are the humanitarians credited with creating, and making available for free download at YourLogicalFallacyIs.com, a poster describing two dozen common logical fallacies that are cluttering up debates on issues important and trivial. I find myself referring to it often — and finding myself guilty now and then.
The most common logical fallacy that I observe, both online and IRL (“in real life”), is the straw man. Maybe that’s why it’s listed first on the poster titled “Thou Shalt Not Commit Logical Fallacies.” A straw man, as described on the poster, is “misrepresenting or exaggerating someone’s argument to make it easier to attack.”
A perfect example was a comment posted on my column on our website: “I continue to snicker at the thought that you actually believe that if you change the law, all these recipients will start to eat brussel sprouts.” I never thought that. I never said that or anything remotely like that. What I said was, if SNAP benefits could no longer be spent on nutrition-free sodas, “almost any other food purchase would have more nutritional value.”
Other logical fallacies that were dragged into the Great Soda Debate were what the poster calls “slippery slope,” “bandwagon” and “appeal to emotion.” The slippery slope fallacy asserts one event, which may not be unacceptable, will necessarily lead to another very undesirable thing, so the first thing must not be allowed to happen. The bandwagon fallacy uses popularity as validation. An appeal to emotion is just that — replacing compelling argument with an attempt to manipulate emotions — and I know I’m guilty of that one myself (mainly in response to ad hominem fallacies, which are personal insults in place of facts).
Sometimes there seem to be hybrids, like suggesting that my desire to see soda excluded from SNAP will inevitably lead to even more (slippery slope) and far crueler (appeal to emotion) punishment of the poor. There definitely are people out there who are eager to make life more miserable for people who dare to be poor — “We should be paying for beans and rice and rice and beans and not a whole lot else,” read one heart-warming comment — but I’m not among them. I tried to head that off by declaring, clearly, “I do not resent SNAP beneficiaries. I do not want to punish them.”
I noticed President Trump using an “anecdotal fallacy” to bolster his otherwise unsupportable belief that millions of fraudulent votes were cast in the November general election. It was a second-hand, or maybe third- or fourth-hand, story about a German-born golfer who was not allowed to vote in Florida while other people who appeared to be non-native were allowed to cast ballots. The golfer Trump mentioned, Bernhard Langer, is a German citizen who knows he’s not eligible to vote, so the anecdote the president cited is so factually muddled that it can’t be considered evidence of even one case of voter fraud, much less a national scandal.
Anecdotes can be very helpful in describing and understanding a widespread phenomenon, but extrapolating from a sample of one is a logical fallacy.
Trump has also misrepresented the conclusions of a Pew Charitable Trust study on outdated voter registration to support his claims of widespread voter fraud. But that’s not a logical fallacy. That’s just saying something that isn’t correct, and because he has been repeatedly corrected, I have to assume that it’s deliberate. There ought to be a name for that.
If you disagree with me about SNAP and soda, feel free to let me know. But I’m not likely to respond unless you come up with a novel and fallacy-free argument in favor of taxpayer subsidies for a nutrition-free product that is sucking up five of every 100 SNAP dollars and contributing to obesity and diabetes.
Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com. |