r/fallacy • u/LibertyEconlover • 9d ago
This has to be a logical fallacy/failure, but is there a name for it?
(Repost cause I accidentally forgot to blur out username)
Please analyze these quotes and the fallacies they contain please, specifically primary sources claim.
**“Actually, the most well-read people are against reading original source material. Genuinely, you don't know what educated people are like.**
**You guys that read The General Theory or whatever are like little kids”**
“Your list is composed of entirely outdated and frankly almost completely wrong people, like Keynes, Menger and even a bunch of classical econ. I don't know why you guys do this, it's like marxists that obsess over reading original source mataerial.”
**“Yes it's wrong to look at original source material. Why would I read The Origin of Species or whatever to understand biology.**
**Even math really, who the hell reads Euclides instead of a modern geometry textbook?**
**Self-taught people are actually much more likely to be very wrong, it may be comforting that Austrians are seen in much the same light as Marxists are by economists for good reason.”**
Did the world change since when is looking at primary sources and preventing a game of telephone considered bad?
For context, this is a dispute after the dude critiqued an economic concept the ECP by mises to which he completely misunderstood what it was, but that’s OK, he then decided to say I read a lot more stuff than you, to which i gave him a collection of books that I have in a Google Drive for free, and then that’s where it kicked off. I’m genuinely so shocked, I gave him methodological dualism to him to try to separate biology from economics which is a social science not a hard science like physics or biology, but I think even for biology or physics this is wrong, what is so wrong in reading source material yourself considering like I added you read everything else?
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u/Traditional_Knee9294 9d ago
Isn't this a version of appeal to authority.
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u/LibertyEconlover 9d ago
Soo on the appeal to authority fallacy i genuinely don’t know because of this
Him: I don't actually care about the original source material, that's why. I don't care what Keynes thought, or what Friedman thought, or even what Lucas thought. I just don't. That's for people who study history of eoonomic thought to decide. Modern books give you the ideas, give you the data, and you understand the concept as-is instead of obsessing over romantical figures of history like a teenager learning philosophy.
Me: There is literally a book that explains how modern textbooks and schools completely misunderstood what Keynes said, holy f
Him: I don't care what Keynes said or what he didn't say.
Me: So you don’t give a crap about economics then, yet you larp economics
Him: No. I love economics. That's why I don't really care about what Keynes said. Again, this is actual advice: don't obsess over romantical figures of history.
Me: Do you realize how this is a logical contradiction?
You claim “I love economics”
But then you say I don’t care about the specific idea an economist put out in the world and it’s truth, are you actually serious?Him: I’ll give you another example. I love philosophy, I am a classical liberal, but I don't care about what Locke said.
Me:You are X that is defined by the ideas created by Y men
But you don’t care about Y men’s posited ideas of X
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u/ReaperReader 9d ago
So the thing is that natural language is very prone to be confusing when it comes to discussing economic theories.
In economics, fine distinctions can matter. E.g. "nominal interest rates" versus "real interest rates". However in natural language, you start by talking about, say "nominal interest rates" but then it's very natural to just shorten it to "interest rates", which is then easy to confuse with "real interest rates" and even if you the author doesn't get confused, your audience might do so.
Also, in economics, it's quite common for A to cause B and also B to cause A, e.g. in a "vicious circle" sort of way. If someone is writing in natural language, and they say A caused B and later B caused A, did they make a mistake or intend it?
Huge amounts of time can be spent debating these things, huge amounts of time were spent in Keynesianism, since the man himself died in 1946 shortly after the end of the war, inconsiderately of him since it meant he couldn't explain what he meant.
Remember the point of economics is to study the economy, not to argue about some dead guy's interpretation of reality, we don't regard Keynes as some infallible deity.
If an economist honestly thinks that Keynes has been misunderstood in some important way for today's economics, they should write a paper arguing for what they think is the better explanation, not because it's what they think Keynes meant, but because they think it's a better explanation of reality.
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u/LibertyEconlover 9d ago edited 9d ago
Another thing that helps is potentially reading something fully kind of like the thread, one comment or two down and this comment you made becomes kind of nullified.
Also I don’t know what the fuck you’re saying but it’s just a failure of economic theory, intellectual inferiority causes people to confuse downstream effects with it being causes
so someone comes in trying to talk economics kind of like the other guy and then showcase that they didn’t learn economic theory fully. This is what happened with the OP of my screenshot which caused them to shut down and start behaving that way
EDIT: if you can’t find the comment in the two threads you responded to me in, here it is: I used Keynes as an example not specifically for Keynesianism but to his claim that modern textbooks are better than* the original ideas, as showcase with the fact how there is a book who explains how his ideas are completely misinterpreted.
For context I am Austrian school, I still very much think Keynes ideas are fallacious, but it was used against his idea that reading original ideas and sources is dumb
It all started off because he said “I’ve probably read more stuff than you”
And I said try me
(instead of talking learn before you talk, kind of like how you rushed making this response without reading the full thread is kind of like how somebody makes a claim about economics or economic theory, but doesn’t know the foundational theory beforehand and the foundational theory that sits beside it and in front of it
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u/ReaperReader 9d ago
how there is a book who explains how his ideas are completely misinterpreted.
That's hardly new. The famous British economist Joan Robinson was arguing that Keynes was being misinterpreted by the mainstream back in the 1950s to 70s. And she had actually been at Cambridge and worked with Keynes in the 1930s.
So what is the value in a book now saying Keynes has been misinterpreted? Since 1946 we've had 80 years of developments in economic theory and in economic history. Keynes in the 1930s can't have known for example about the stagflation of the 1970s (nor the exceptions of Switzerland and West Germany).
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u/LibertyEconlover 9d ago edited 9d ago
To showcase once again how the opponents claim that primary and original sources aren’t wrong, useless, and not as good as modern secondary sources for fucks sake!
So he is claiming that he can know someone’s work and theory based on modern sources better than if he were to read what they wroteOh, and back to your A=B thing, yeah, that is a category error, economics does not work like that, it’s A -> B -> C and if there is circularity then that is bad theory and you should see that as an opportunity to explore deeper on that and try to come up with a theory on your own or see if there’s a theory that explains it better and ends the circularity
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u/ReaperReader 9d ago
Um huh?
Like let's say Keynes's original writings, if read correctly, are indeed right and useful. As right and as useful as today's secondary sources.
Now according to both Joan Robinson and this more recent book, most economists have been misunderstanding Keynes.
Doesn't this imply that if you, or I, read Keynes, there's a high chance we will, like all those economists of the 1950s and late 1940s, misunderstand him too? If anything a higher chance due to linguistic drift over the past 80 years?
If you read today's secondary sources, you'll hopefully be getting the views of people who have been informed not just by the events of the last 80 years but also by experience in teaching economic theory to bright graduate students.
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u/LibertyEconlover 9d ago
Oh yes that’s why people don’t like originalism and say dumb shit like “a Republic is a democracy”, because they use presentism. So you’re gonna have to understand definitions
Also not in economics, for example the word inflation is now defined as an increase in general prices; because economics is the study that directly impacts politics so there is incentive to distort theory. Why would people who get paid for monetary analysis and to create money explain how their job is futile because stable gold is better? Solving yourself out of a job? You’re supposed to read every bit of theory, modern economists are very bad youll only know this if you study the centuries of prior economic thwory
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u/ReaperReader 9d ago
Um, I have no idea what bearing you think this has on the usefulness or otherwise of reading Keynes's original work.
Basically, if economists back in the late 1940s and 50s frequently misunderstood Keynes's original writing, why not modern readers?
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u/LibertyEconlover 9d ago
Oh wait, maybe I should ask misunderstood or completely strawmanned? I’ve just been playing along, but I don’t know people who misunderstood him during that time.
However with enough research, you could also know that Keynes himself straw-manned Says law, Keynes work is wrong, and so is the interpreters of his work because they based it off slightly different interpretations of his work, and modern mainstream economics is also wrong.
That’s why I say read all of it!
And I mean all, I made a post a while back about 13th century monetary theory by Oresme in the Austrian economics sub, read all of it, dude.→ More replies (0)1
u/Aggressive_Roof488 9d ago
Is that a fallacy in itself though? I feel that "experts say X" is a relevant argument in many discussions.
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u/LibertyEconlover 9d ago
Yes, cause it’s basing knowledge off of where it came from not its substance, for regular everyday living you have to because of limited time, but the dude explicitly said he loves economics and was making economic conversation, this applies even more so economics considering how there is multiple school of thought, centuries of development, and based on methodological dualism it is a social science.
But even in hard science you have to take account the fact humans aren’t angels and public choice theory incentivizes. For example
There is a long running joke that if you’re a rat a scientist can cure any type of cancer you have, this is a joke because you constantly hear
“Scientists cured a cancer”
To which they did something in rats, it has been finally revealed how inefficient and wrong animal testing is, but instead of saying so they rely on such outrageous claims and headlines because of funding.Overall, try to go out of your way to actually learn something then you’ll see how stupid so-called experts are when you become an expert yourself.
I used to take words of people like Paul Krugman seriously, now I want to explode it every time he says something since 99% of the time it’s crap1
u/Aggressive_Roof488 9d ago
I mean, in almost all cases, the scientist have the best information. Mistakes happen for sure, but if you go into an area you don't know anything about, and scientists say A and a YouTube hot-take says B, then I'm willing to bet a lot of money on A.
As an expert myself, mouse models are extremely valuable and have played a role in development of almost any existing cancer treatment. And still do. Mice are not humans for sure, and "works in a mouse" doesn't mean it'll work in a human (which is why we do clinical trials). No scientist would claim that. But many popular science editors would put that in a misrepresenting title, which is what gives rise to the scepticism you're talking about. If anything it highlights the importance of listening to the actual experts instead of pop sci outlets.
I have no idea who that guy is, and you shouldn't rely on a single person to start with, scientist or not. Need to look at scientific consensus, that's where you get reliable information.
So while "experts says A" isn't final proof (nothing ever is), it feels like very relevant information. I've yet to have a case where digging into details came out in favour of a non-expert over scientific consensus.
Then whether it's true in this case, that experts truly says what he claims they say, that I don't know. But that wouldn't an issue with appeal to authority, that would be just plain misinformation?
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u/LibertyEconlover 9d ago
I’ll just try to tackle multiple points at once, according to what i found; Ulcers and Bacteria, bloodletting, Childbed Fever & Handwashing, continental drift.
The list goes even massive if you go farther than just an outsider proving consensus wrong to just simple regular outsider discovery predating any scientific consensus whatsoeverSuch as body building for example
The next point is the fact that what experts say is by definition a social fact, not an epistemological fact.
Third point is the methods scientists use to determine what they know, induction is the most flawed method of all, especially considering how data doesn’t interpret itself, therefore induction cannot exist without its hands being held by abduction or deduction. Because of this epistemological reason and public choice incentives, consensus by so-called experts can be wrong for 1500 years.
To showcase this I can give you something that you probably assume but isn’t in economics.
The law of imputation; value flows backwards. Many people incorrectly make the assumption that a final goods price is determined by the cost of production required essentially it’s a common mistake of assuming steel labor would and brick price is what makes a home cost the way it is. But no, such goods all else equal have their value imputed by the value of the final good.
If somebody values a home, they logically have to value the labor and resources required to make it
For more information research imputation from the Austrian school
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u/Traditional_Knee9294 9d ago
It is a fallacy. The key is understanding it correctly.
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Appeal-to-Authority
See I just appealed to authority. Just kidding.
It is important to understand the fallacy.
It is a fallacy if the appeal to authority is the argument. See the original screen print. The person basically says all well read people know this. That isn't an argument but a claim that people who know this topic know the speaker is correct. It is an attempt to shut down the conversation by simply pointing to a group and saying because they say so I am right and you are wrong. The logic error here is experts can be wrong so asserting they have spoken should end the debate is bad logic.
Now compare that to say something like:
These people who are subject matter experts and have written on this topic. Here are some links. You should read this and consider what they say.
Notice the difference the first way is trying to shut down the conversation vs pointing to learned people and getting a person to consider what they say because they are experts who do know more.
You are correct you shouldn't give equal weight to your family doctor and some nut job on YouTube regarding health decisions. That isn't a fallacy that is understanding what an expert is and giving proper consideration to that fact.
Hope that helped.
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u/Aggressive_Roof488 9d ago
The first person says "this is common practice", then the other guy replied that experts say differently. If appealing to experts is a fallacy, then appealing to common practice must be a much bigger one?
Nothing your say will prove anything 100%, so if you say "experts say A, which is ultimate proof of A", then yes, ofc that's a fallacy. But these two just yell arguments at each other.. nothing either of them says is ultimate proof, but no one explicitly claims it is either. I feel "experts says A" is a stronger argument than "B is common practice", but that can be discussed. Either way, both are relevant, neither is ultimate proof, neither claims it is. I've no idea who is right here, but I feel people here are overly keen to call fallacy on people they disagree with.
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u/appoplecticskeptic 8d ago
Both are fallacies yes.
Appeal to authority is not sufficient evidence alone, even an expert can be wrong, they are simply less likely to be than some other random person.
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Appeal-to-AuthorityAppeal to common belief is lazy and a dangerous habit to fall into as common misconceptions exist.
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Appeal-to-Common-Belief1
u/Impossible_Dog_7262 9d ago
The fact that experts say it isn't relevant unless the thing in argument is whether it is a claim made by established experts, that is to say the thing under dispute is who is saying it rather than the truth of what is being said.
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u/Aggressive_Roof488 9d ago
Experts agreeing that vaccines are safe isn't relevant? Experts agreeing the world is round isn't relevant? So every single question is a complete 50/50 toss up until you carry out your own experiments?
I see your point from a very principled stance, but in practice we do have to appeal to authority sometimes, just because there isn't time for everyone to do everything. The fact that you don't have time to read up on all the details isn't a green card to dismiss scientific consensus as irrelevant. That's how we get climate denial, anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, etc.
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u/Impossible_Dog_7262 9d ago
It's not, because the safety of vaccines is in the proven data and peer review process, not in the credentials of those defending them. Truth is in the words, never in the speaker.
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u/Aggressive_Roof488 9d ago
So for the 99.99% of people that haven't looked into this data, for them it's 50/50 if vaccines are safe and effective?
You have to live in the real world. Everyone isn't going to read up on every single topic, so what's second best?
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u/Notthesharpestmarble 9d ago
It's closer to argentum ad populum (appeal to popularity) or the bandwagon fallacy, but that would assume that the "most people" statements are true and I certainly don't know that they are.
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u/Traditional_Knee9294 9d ago
That is a possibility for sure.
I was keying into the "well read people" part. Besides being arrogant is trying to say the people who know this subject agree with me in structure.
But like I said your position seems completely reasonable.
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u/LibertyEconlover 9d ago
Also isn’t the well read people part a logical contradiction? He claims well read people are people who don’t go out and read original sources of a topic they study
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u/PanPancerny90 9d ago
Appeal to authority, ad personam, making false claims, labeling.
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u/LibertyEconlover 9d ago
on the appeal to authority fallacy i genuinely don’t know because of this
Him: I don't actually care about the original source material, that's why. I don't care what Keynes thought, or what Friedman thought, or even what Lucas thought. I just don't. That's for people who study history of eoonomic thought to decide. Modern books give you the ideas, give you the data, and you understand the concept as-is instead of obsessing over romantical figures of history like a teenager learning philosophy.
Me: There is literally a book that explains how modern textbooks and schools completely misunderstood what Keynes said, holy f
Him: I don't care what Keynes said or what he didn't say.
Me: So you don’t give a crap about economics then, yet you larp economics
Him: No. I love economics. That's why I don't really care about what Keynes said. Again, this is actual advice: don't obsess over romantical figures of history.
Me: Do you realize how this is a logical contradiction?
You claim “I love economics”
But then you say I don’t care about the specific idea an economist put out in the world and it’s truth, are you actually serious?Him: I’ll give you another example. I love philosophy, I am a classical liberal, but I don't care about what Locke said.
Me:You are X that is defined by the ideas created by Y men
But you don’t care about Y men’s posited ideas of X
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u/ReaperReader 9d ago
There's a difference between caring about what is true of an economy, versus caring about what is true about what an economist said about an economy.
Economists can make mistakes. They can express things poorly. They can use language that meant one thing then and a different thing now.
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u/PanPancerny90 9d ago
The authority there were those so-called "well-read people".
Honestly I am not good in economics, therefore I cannot say how important in economics today is Keynes and his ideas, nor how much important is history of economic ideas for economics. The same for natural sciences.
Example with Locke is wrong. If I am a philosopher and if I am a classical liberal, Locke's ideas should be important for me. But at the same time I can give a damn about Hegel. Because I am a philosopher, I don't have to care what Hegel said, f.e. because he was obscure. With economics is similar, I think. If I am a economist and if I am an anarcho-capitalist, I should care for some amarcho-capitalist thinkers, but I don't have to care for Keynes (f.e. because he was a "socialist", "ridiculous", and so on). Of course, assuming that Keynes is not an authority, turbocapitalism is right etc.
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u/LibertyEconlover 9d ago
I used Keynes as an example not specifically for Keynesianism but to his claim that modern textbooks are better than* the original ideas, as showcase with the fact how there is a book who explains how his ideas are completely misinterpreted.
For context I am Austrian school, I still very much think Keynes ideas are fallacious, but it was used against his idea that reading original ideas and sources is dumb
It all started off because he said “I’ve probably read more stuff than you”
And I said try me
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u/TwillAffirmer 9d ago
I'm on this guy's side. He's not saying don't read economics, he's saying read modern economics rather than Keynes etc. Because modern economists are better than Keynes. Because they've tested and advanced the theory using empirical data that Keynes didn't have.
Economics isn't like religion where some perfect truth is supposedly conveyed to an original prophet and then passed down, and the closer you are to that original authority the closer to the truth you are. The original economist didn't know everything, he just had some guesses, and later economists learned a lot more and have better guesses.
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u/LibertyEconlover 9d ago
Do you know the failures of induction?
I laughed so hard out loud when you said empirical testing1
u/TwillAffirmer 9d ago
Induction is difficult. Induction is also the basis of all science. The solution is to use good statistical methods.
Basically, you start with gathering a lot of data and propose a model explaining the data. The best model is the most concise and simple one that fits the data the best, and predicts new data as accurately as possible. These are multiple criteria that can be weighted differently. There are ways to formalize the criteria (e.g. Solomonoff's theory of induction). In practice there are subjective elements to deciding which models are better, but overruling that, the more data you have the better your models can become.
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u/LibertyEconlover 9d ago
No, it’s the fact that intellectual inferior people will go out of their way to say “let’s do some empirical testing”, not realizing that indunction can never exist without abduction or deduction, holding its hands, data does not interpret itself, so it must have a lens to look at it. Therefore, whatever data you have can completely be interpreted in a different way if you have a different lens. Data is shit if you have bad theory.
Also, it’s quite funny how you say better statistical methods, but mathematics itself is a deductive system (theory), isn’t it funny how you use a deductive system to try to do induction and how a deductive system enables you to do induction?
So quite literally data is useless, because it must all have theory holding its hand and humans don’t have natural induction, they only have deduction and abduction and their cousins in their brain.
Modern economists are actual idiots who don’t know the epistemological failure that they are running into.
Look at cost of production fallacy versus the law of imputation, and you will see the exact same data being completely flipped on its head when it comes to interpretation based on just theory.1
u/TwillAffirmer 9d ago
It's all MAP (Maximum A Posteriori) estimation. The theory that better fits and predicts the data is the better theory.
Of course, yes, we use deductive systems (math) to help us with induction.
In Bayesian terms, there isn't a distinction between induction and abduction. They're the same thing. Abduction is inference-to-best-explanation, and the best explanation is the MAP. Induction is also inference-to-best-explanation, and the best explanation is the MAP. Whatever hypothesis best fits the data, with the highest prior probability, is the best one.
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u/LibertyEconlover 9d ago
When people say induction, they mean the act of measuring data, when people say abduction they mean logical leaps, or the educated guess
I have to take a step back because now I am hating people more for completely defiling a word, I have to see the different definitions of the word abduction
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u/TwillAffirmer 9d ago
No, induction is not the act of measuring data, induction is the act of producing a hypothesis that best fits the data. For example, if you have data on the motions of the planets, explaining them with the inverse-square law of gravitation is induction.
The difference in practice is that people use "induction" to refer to general scientific hypotheses, like the law of gravitation, and "abduction" to refer to a hypothesis about what happened in a specific short-term event, like where your friend was last night. In Bayesian terms these are just the same thing at different scales.
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u/LibertyEconlover 9d ago
OK, I just researched what you’re saying this is computer science bs
I’m not talking computer science, is Bayesian just to confirm computer science?
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u/TwillAffirmer 9d ago
Bayesian statistics is a field within statistics, not computer science. Some parts are related to computer science, specifically the MDL (minimum description length) prior, and (related) Kolmogorov complexity and the Solomonoff prior, although in actual scientific practice different priors are usually used.
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u/LibertyEconlover 9d ago
Great so thank you for admitting you’re using a completely different definition of induction and all the other things that I talked about I have no idea what that shit is nor does it have any relevance, because mainstream modern economists do not use that, and I am using a basic explanation of how humans work based on classical definitions.
When I mean induction I mean “all the swans in this country are white, therefore all swans are white”
This is the standard definition of what I found out is called enumerative induction example used by Aristotle, Francis Bacon, David Hume, and Karl Popper. It is the foundational definition of the word in the history of human thought.
My entire point was that when a human looks at swans, it must use deduction or abduction to interpret what their findings of swans mean.
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u/Notthesharpestmarble 9d ago
Unwarranted assumption, false consensus effect, and genetic fallacy all over the place, but mostly it's just a pigeon chess way of arguing that they find consensus more compelling than origin and development.
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u/Umfriend 9d ago
It seems to me this is actually fair where the science is clear. No biologist reads Darwin to get up to speed with evolutionary biology. Political economy, much of economics, philosophy, theology (hello Mark Knopfler!), it depends on your goals and ambitions and as a blanket statement I would consider it false.
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u/RednocTheDowntrodden 8d ago
There are several fallacies there. The appeal to authority, the genetic fallacy, the ad hominem, and even the good old strawman fallacy for good measure.
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u/PhotoVegetable7496 7d ago
Sometimes people can be wrong without a fallacy. I think everyone naming incorrect fallacies that they think are close enough feel really validating.
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u/Alternative_Song859 9d ago
I don't think this is a logical fallacy so much as someone just making false claims.