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Why do we ignore evidence, play the lottery, distrust people, argue endlessly, and think we have all the answers? Because we are human, and usually not all that logical. Cracked looks at five logical fallacies that make us think we are right when we’re not. For example, we often think we are seeking knowledge when what we really want is to bolster the viewpoints we already hold.
It’s called the argumentative theory of reasoning, and it says that humans didn’t learn to ask questions and offer answers in order to find universal truths. We did it as a way to gain authority over others. That’s right — they think that reason itself evolved to help us bully people into getting what we want. Here’s how a proponent puts it:
“‘Reasoning doesn’t have this function of helping us to get better beliefs and make better decisions,’ said Hugo Mercier, who is a co-author of the journal article, with Dan Sperber. ‘It was a purely social phenomenon. It evolved to help us convince others and to be careful when others try to convince us.’ Truth and accuracy were beside the point.”
And as evidence, the researchers point out that after thousands of years of humans sitting around campfires and arguing about issues, these glaring flaws in our logic still exist.
Apparently, being dominant is more adaptive for evolutionary purposes than being open-minded. Link -via Buzzfeed
There’s a classic logic puzzle in which a person must take a fork in the road, one of which is safe, but the other is a deadly trap. Two men guard the fork, one of which always lies, but the other always tells the truth. The person gets to ask one question in order to determine which path is the safe one.
Mathematician Raymond Smullyan has added another dimension to this puzzle. See if you can figure it out:
There are three guardians, A, B and C. Their names are Knight, Knave and Chaos. Knight always speaks truly, Knave always lies. Chaos tossed a coin this morning to decide whether today he would behave like Knight or like Knave.
Your task is simple: ask three yes-no questions, each of a single guardian, and determine which is Knight, which is Knave, and which is Chaos. There is, alas, a complication: the guardians understand English but will answer in the local language, in which “Da” means yes and “Ja” means no. Or possibly “Ja” means yes and “Da” means no – you cannot remember.
Link via Marginal Revolution | Raymond Smullyan
UPDATE 3/18/10: Here‘s the solution.
This article at Discover Magazine has nothing to do with the science fiction stories we are so familiar with. Author Sean Carroll looks at time travel as a physicist. He says if time travel were possible (and it might be), there would be no paradox, because we cannot change what has already happened. Ever. Then it gets weird.
Imagine that we have been appointed Guardian of the Gate, and our job is to keep vigilant watch over who passes through. One day, as we are standing off to the side, we see a person walk out of the rear side of the gate, emerging from one day in the future. That’s no surprise; it just means that you will see that person enter the front side of the gate tomorrow. But as you keep watch, you notice that he simply loiters around for one day, and when precisely 24 hours have passed, the traveler walks calmly through the front of the gate. Nobody ever approached from elsewhere. That 24-hour period constitutes the entire life span of this time traveler. He experiences the same thing over and over again, although he doesn’t realize it himself, since he does not accumulate new memories along the way. Every trip through the gate is precisely the same to him. That may strike you as weird or unlikely, but there is nothing paradoxical or logically inconsistent about it.
(image credit: Biwa Studios)
The human brain is quite susceptible to logical fallacies that can mess up our lives and our societies. One of them is probability.
Our brains are stupid when it comes to calculating probability. As a result, we all have this fuzzy idea that if something can happen, it probably will. And we think this, while having no idea what “probably” even means.
This is why millions of high school kids think they’re going play pro sports when they grow up, even though there are only enough available jobs for a tiny fraction of them. When the news says an asteroid may hit the Earth in the next 10 million years, people will watch the skies suddenly sure that an asteroid will hit that day.
Read about all five fallacies at Cracked. Link
Can you think logically? Take the armchair logic test! There are only 15 questions, and it doesn’t take very long -if you are logical! I scored only 87%, which disappoints me. Link -via the Presurfer
(image credit: Flickr user loquenoves)
