The Power of the Strawmen

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Most of the time, i simply disengage. If it's being done on purpose, then you're kind of hopeless. You might restate your argument, am, but don't go too far off track. As soon as you start trying to attack the straw man, you are kind of sunk. Then nobody's in to your actual argument any more. They're just listening to you flail and try to fight against something that you didn't even say. And there's no point in that. So sometimes just backing off and letting people think what they think is better than defending yourself.

When confronted with dogma-threatening, worldview-menacing ideas, your knee-jerk response is usually to lash out and try to bat them away, but thanks to a nearly unavoidable mistake in reasoning, you often end up doing battle with arguments of your own creation.

Your lazy brain is always trying to make sense of the world on ever-simpler terms. Just as you wouldn’t use a topographical map to navigate your way to Wendy’s, you tend to navigate reality using a sort of Google Maps interpretation of events and ideas. It’s less accurate, sure, but much easier to understand when details aren’t a priority. But thanks to this heuristical habit, you sometimes create mental men of straw that stand in for the propositions put forth by people who see the world a bit differently than you. In addition to being easy to grasp, they are easy to knock down and hack apart, which wouldn’t be a problem if only you noticed the switcheroo.

This is the essence of the straw man fallacy, probably the most common of all logical fallacies. Setting up and knocking down straw men is so easy to do while arguing that you might not even notice that you are doing it.

In this episode, you’ll learn from three experts in logic and arguing why human brains tend not to realize they are constructing artificial versions of the arguments they wish to defeat. Once you’ve wrapped your mind around that idea, you’ll then learn how to spot the straw man fallacy, how to avoid committing it, and how to defend against it.

• Show Notes: http://bit.ly/1VN5PPP

• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/youarenotsosmart

• Donate Directly through PayPal: https://www.paypal.me/DavidMcRaney

SPONSORS
• Trunk Club: http://bit.ly/1Sp2wZj
• The Great Courses Plus: http://bit.ly/26kDXpU
• SquareSpace: http://www.squarespace.com - Offer Code SoSmart

Patreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart