Discovering Intellectual Dishonesty – Part 2/10

January 27, 2012

The goal of this series of posts is to help others learn how to recognize faulty reasoning and the use of misinformation designed to mislead. The key word here is “help” because this isn’t a class. However, there will be embedded videos with links to sites and books that may better educate about intellectual dishonesty.

The book description of Crimes Against Logic by Jamie Whyte [formerly a lecturer in Philosophy at Cambridge University where he earned a Ph.D. in philosophy], says, “In the daily battle for our hearts and minds–not to mention our hard-earned cash—the truth is usually the first casualty. It’s time we learned how to see through the rhetoric, faulty reasoning, and misinformation that we’re subjected to from morning to night by talk-radio hosts, op-ed columnists, advertisers, self-help gurus, business ‘thinkers,’ and, of course, politicians.”

If you watched the embedded video in Part One, “Introduction of Fallacies” by Kevin deLaplante, the Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Iowa State University, you may remember that he talked about what a fallacy was and provided more than one example. He said, “A fallacy is a bad argument. What makes it bad is certain GENERAL FEATURES that characterize arguments of this TYPE, and arguments of this type can often be MISTAKEN for GOOD arguments.” He then used the following example.

1. Computers are products of intelligent design.

2. The human brain is a computer

Therefore, the human brain is a product of intelligent design.

However, because a computer is designed by an intelligent designer, that does not mean the human brain is the product of intelligent design. In the Part 1  video, Professor deLaplante teaches how this logic is a fallacy, provides examples and says people need to be trained to recognize these fallacies.


Confirmation Bias the the Evolution of Reason.  Source: The Critical Thinking Academy

When Sid said, “You can bar me from commenting. All hopeless CCP apologists are censors. It’s inevitable that you would try something like that. You lack the intelligence to argue, so you ban.” Source: in the comment posted January 13, 2012 at 09:02

Sid’s opinion is an example of the same logical fallacy that Professor deLaplante warns us about in “Introduction to Fallacies” in Part 1.

If we break down the logical fallacy in Sid’s reasoning, you will discover a similar pattern.

A. Lloyd censored Sid from commenting on this Blog.

B. People that censor lack intelligence to argue.

C. All hopeless CCP apologists are censors.

A + B + C = D

D. Therefore, Lloyd is is a hopeless CCP apologist that lacks intelligence to argue, which is why he banned Sid from commenting on this Blog.

However, that is not the reason why some of Sid’s comments have been deleted from this Blog — it has to do with Sid’s use of  logical fallacies and his intellectual dishonesty during and after the debate as you shall discover.

In addition, I have never apologized for anything Mao or the CCP may have done since 1949. Anyone that knows the difference between an explanation supported with valid evidence from reliable sources and the definition of an apology would know this isn’t the case.

Another way to discover Sid’s intellectual dishonesty is to compare what he writes to other arguments. To start, I suggest reading the Letters section of Foreign Policy magazine and compare the style of those arguments with Sid’s alleged intellectual dishonesty.

In fact, if Sid had avoided using logical fallacies to support his argument, some of his comments wouldn’t have been deleted.

Continued on January 28, 2012 in Discovering Intellectual Dishonesty – Part 3 or return to Part 1

 

Meet the real Sid and learn about him from his own words and the opinions of others

 

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Discovering Intellectual Dishonesty – Part 1/10

January 26, 2012

I discovered something important the day a Vietcong sniper came within a skin’s thickness of hitting and possibly killing me. I realized that I should never stop learning. Later, I learned that it doesn’t matter how many years we spend in school or how many degrees we earn—we will never know everything, and that it is okay to be ignorant and learn from our mistakes.

My latest lesson in life started in November 2011 when I agreed to debate another author on this Blog. He wrote a scathing book condemning Chinese culture, and I disagreed with his biased opinions.  In this series of posts, I am sharing the lesson I learned from that debate and the mistakes I made.

Instead of using my opponent’s name, I’m going to call him Sid. If you are interested in reading the actual debate, there will be embedded links in this series of posts that will lead you to it [as there is in this sentence]. When Sid and I started arguing about China, I didn’t know there was a philosophical school of thought that has studied logical fallacies for decades. I didn’t know there were books on the subject and university courses.

Since the debate, I’ve learned about the different types of logical fallacies, and Professor Keven deLaplante says there are more than 100.

One Good Move.org says, “The idea of logic is truth preservation. What that means is that if you start with true beliefs, your reasoning will not lead you to false conclusions… most people have non-logical reasons for believing the things they do… So use reason with caution, and if you really want to persuade someone of something, remember that compassion, honesty and tact are as important as logic.”


Introduction to Fallacies – Hosted by Kevin deLaplante, the Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Iowa State University.  Source: The Critical Thinking Academy

Before this series concludes, you will discover that Sid knew about logical fallacies and took advantage of my ignorance. I will also cover some of the most common logical fallacies that lead to intellectual dishonesty, and I will be using examples from the debate I had with Sid and comments he left or attempted to leave on this site since the debate.

I have never taken a debate class. I have never read a book on logical fallacies, and this is nothing to be ashamed of.

However, when I was earning a BA in journalism (1973), I learned how to write an honest and proper Op-Ed piece. Due to that, I was aware of a few logical fallacies to avoid such as cheery picking, ad hominem, and red herring — but not in depth. No one formally taught me how to recognize these logical fallacies [or what to do when I did], but I knew it was intellectually dishonest to use them in an Op-Ed piece to influence people, and I recognized their use by sales persons, politicians or political talk-radio hosts.

Then in December 2011, Sid and I launched a twelve-part debate on this Blog about China, which was the beginning of my education about intellectual dishonesty and the use of logical fallacies—an alleged con artist was my teacher, and I was his victim. As you will see, Sid eventually came to hold me in contempt.

Continued on January 27, 2012 in Discovering Intellectual Dishonesty – Part 2

 

Meet the real Sid and learn about him from his own words and the opinions of others

______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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The China-India Comparison with Lots of Facts – Part 5/5

January 4, 2012

China, unlike India, has managed to contain unrest caused by such groups as the Falun Gong [cult] and the Tibetan and Islamic separatists over the objections of Western human rights activists that cannot stand how China manages these challenges.

Due to what many in the West call brutal measures, harmony and economic progress continue as planned for the vast majority of Chinese.

In addition, in rural China, “Living standards soared in the early 1980s—average incomes doubled in both the cities and the countryside, while there was a boom in both food consumption and the availability of consumer goods.” Source: Socialist Review Index.org.uk

“Growth in (China’s) peasant income, which had reached a rate of 15.2% a year from 1978 to 1984, dropped to 2.8% a year from 1986 to 1991. Some recovery occurred in the early 1990s, but stagnation of rural incomes marked the latter part of the decade.” Source: Asia Times

In fact, the last five-year plan is extending electricity to rural China and subsidizes the cost of appliances for rural villages once the electricity is turned on.

For an example of China’s continued progress, Tom Carter, one source for this post, is currently living in a small rural village in the tea-producing region of China near Hangzhou and has internet access from a village of twenty people.

I agree that India has the potential to equal or match China, but I doubt that will happen in the next few decades due to the economic long-term problems that India must overcome.

I don’t know where Manjeet Pavarti lives, but I suspect it isn’t outside of the gleaming glass and steel cites such as New Delhi, Mumbai or Bangalore.

People living inside these economic growth bubbles may have no idea how serious it is outside and probably don’t care or India would be dealing with these challenges as China has been doing since 1949.

India became a democracy in 1947, which means it has had more than sixty years to solve these problems, while China has had less than thirty since 1982 when the republic wrote its new constitution, took a seat at the United Nations in 1971 [replacing Taiwan] and joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.

It is ironic how the West seldom hears about India’s problems but always hears about every bit of negative news that happens in China, which is often distorted.

Return to The China-India Comparison with Lots of Facts – Part 4 or start with Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Note: This revised and edited post first appeared on October 22, 2010 as India Falling Short

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The China-India Comparison with Lots of Facts – Part 4/5

January 3, 2012

POVERTY & THE MAOIST REVOLT – Foreign Policy magazine reports that rural poverty in India is turning a Communist Revolt in to a raging resource war. “For India this is no longer rural unrest, but a full-fledged guerrilla war.”

“Economic liberalization has not even nudged the lives of the country’s bottom 200 million people. India is now one of the most economically stratified societies on the planet… The number of people going hungry in India hasn’t budged in 20 years.…”

“New Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore now boast gleaming glass-and steel IT centers and huge engineering projects. But India’s vaster hinterland remains dirt poor—”

The World Hunger Index [GHI] says, “India is home to the largest number of poor in the world. The latest estimate suggests that over 400 million people live below the official poverty line… Given the nature of rural Indian economy all shades of poverty can be found in India—from moderate under-nutrition to extreme starvation.”

In fact, while China’s Communist Party and Mao are often accused and criticized for killing or allowing millions [estimates range from 16.5 million to 45 million based mostly on inflated numbers] to die of starvation in 1959 during the Great Leap Forward, “According to the 2010 GHI report, India is among 29 countries with the highest levels of hunger, stunted children, and poorly fed women.”

UNICEF reported in 2006 that, “10.9 million children under five die in developing countries each year. Malnutrition and hunger-related diseases cause 60 percent of the deaths.”

If “the Indian subcontinent has nearly half the world’s hungry people,” as Think Quest.org says, then about two and a half million children die from malnutrition and hunger related diseases annually in India equaling twenty-five million deaths every decade or about 130 million deaths since the 1959 famine in China. In addition, the Times of India reported, India tops world hunger chart.

Continued on January 4, 2012 in The China-India Comparison with Lots of Facts – Part 5 or return to Part 3

___________________________________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Note: This revised and edited post first appeared on October 22, 2010 as India Falling Short

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The China-India Comparison with Lots of Facts – Part 3/5

January 2, 2012

WATER — From National Geographic we have Mumbai’s Shadow City by Mark Jacobson—a slum holding 12 million people, who live in the middle of India’s financial capital.

Then there is Delhi with 17.3 million residents. One third of the city’s residents have little access to clean water. See Life in the Slums of Delhi, India

Foreign Policy magazine says, “In India, service delivery [of fresh water] will fall woefully short of demand in coming years across most urban infrastructure sectors.”

China, on the other hand, has long-term infrastructure projects and is drilling the world’s longest tunnel to carry water from the Yangtze River under hundreds of miles of mountains to reach Manchuria in the northeast.

Then in Tibet, China is building reservoirs to catch water from glaciers that are melting due to global warming while building villages to relocate Tibetan nomads who discover that the high altitude grasslands they once depended on to feed their herds has dried up and turned to desert due to lack of rainfall.

LITERACY — For a republic or democracy to thrive and survive the population must be literate to understand the issues and support a complex modern society.

However, according to India’s 2011 census, only 74% of India’s 1.2 billion people are considered literate in India —that means three hundred and twelve million people cannot read.

In China, literacy is more than 94% up from 20% in 1978.

What is taking India so long? It has had since 1947 to resolve this problem. What China accomplished in about 30 years, India has had sixty-four years to achieve as the world’s largest democracy.

“Adult literacy [in China]was given first priority in literacy campaigns [after 1976] designed to ‘sweep away illiteracy’ [saochu wenmang]. Because 80% of adults were illiterate, they were targeted as crucial for securing new China’s economic security.”

It may sound like a cliché, but being able to read is a form of power, and leaders know that literate and educated people have considerable influence. Source: China Philanthropy

The World Illiteracy Map says, “Illiteracy is one of the major hindrances that come in the way of economic growth. Literate manpower helps a country in developing.”

Continued on January 3, 2012 in The China-India Comparison with Lots of Facts – Part 4 or return to Part 2

___________________________________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Note: This revised and edited post first appeared on October 22, 2010 as India Falling Short

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