Transcripts
1. Introduction and welcome to this logic and logical falacies course: Welcome to this course on
logic and logical fallacies, which is a subset of philosophy. I'm excited about this course
because if you were to learn this content in
a university setting, which is usually
where it's taught. You may come across it in a math class or advanced
mathematics class, or philosophy in both cases. And I've taken it in both cases. It's boring because there's not enough application
to real life. And even if your
philosophy teacher, the math teachers forget it, they hardly apply
it to real life. The philosophy
teachers try a little harder to bring it closer
to life and they do, but still quite inefficient. Why? Because there's still only using the philosophy part
of formal logic, but in real life, which is going to be part of
the focus of this course. Logic actually is, has a
minor role because most of our premises are driven by emotion and by imperfect
input from our senses, from our knowledge
that is faulty, which we actually don't
know where the folds are. All the premises when
you're in a manicured, in a vacuum setting, in a philosophy or
a math setting, everything is a perfect setting. You can have assumptions,
but in life, all the assumptions are wrong
and most of the things we know are true even
is largely wrong. And that makes things so
hard because in real life, our brains, they
oscillate in two ways. We're either using
that old brain, which is great for 3
thousand years ago, wherever we are avoiding lions and tigers whom I
jump out of the bush, or we're totally addicted to technology and our brains
are the brains of addicts. Whereas the middle,
whereas normal, this is all relevant for today. Why is it relevant? Well, there are all
kinds of organizations, people who want us to do
what's best for them. Click on my link. Buying my product, votes for me, whoever, and whatever,
the news, the politics, the marketers, they all want you to do what's
best for them, but you have to do what's
best for you naturally. So this course is going to
give you the tools to decide for yourself to not get
fooled by cheap tricks. And there are plenty of areas where our
brains just break. It doesn't even know. But once you go through this, some of the content in
the course, you'll see, oh my god, there's these
mistakes I've been making. They are so simple, but without realizing it, it's really hard to
know your blind spots. So that's why this
course is exciting. My name is Alex is gonna clinic and I'll be
your instructor. I sincerely appreciate
the time and trust you're putting into
me in this course and I'll do whatever I can to make sure you've got a lot of
value from this course, starting with answering 99% of student questions
within 24 hours. So now that you know
how the course is gonna be like what you'll get from the course a
little bit about me. Let's begin.
2. Inductive and deductive reasoning: With this video, Let's begin
looking into logic and reasoning and start to look into deductive and
inductive reasoning, which are two ways to
come to a conclusion. First, deductive. That is when you start
with a conclusion and you find arguments
to prove the conclusion. You might say, dogs
are better than cats. And you will start to find arguments why dogs
are better than cats. The problem with this
line of reasoning is that people are typically subjective and
biased and they look for points to support
that conclusion. If you already formed in
your mind the statement, dogs are better than cats, you're much more likely
to find reasons why dogs are better than cats rather than why cats are
better than dogs. On the other hand,
the other kind of reasoning is inductive. You don't start with a
foregone conclusion, but you worked from
the bottom up. If you want a challenge
the same issue. You ask, what is
better dogs or cats? When you ask what's
better dogs or cats, you're gonna work
from the bottom-up, you'll ask questions, well, what does it even
mean to be better? Well, there are different
breeds of cats and dogs. They're not all
evaluated the same. And you have this really
rational approach and build up
arguments from there. It will require a
lot of patients, but it's more rigorous. And for most people
in everyday life, I find that it's a lot
less prone to error. Of course, you can still add your subjective biases
into arguments, the arguments you want, but it helps to not start
with a foregone conclusion. Now, would thaw
esophageal discipline? Ideally, you will end up with the same
conclusion in the end. But in most cases people do not If they think about
the same things, but compared their deductive
versus inductive reasoning. To get to that conclusion
on to address that problem, they'll find inconsistencies and discrepancies in the results, which actually will highlight
where their biases are. We're not gonna get into biases now, but if in this video, the takeaway is now you know how to reason and
get to conclusions, deductive reasoning and
inductive reasoning. Very necessary tools for logic.
3. Ad Hominem: With this video,
Let's begin talking about logical fallacies,
inconsistencies, and bad practices, sometimes in your own logic and sometimes
in conversational logic. And we'll start
with the first one. That very common thing that
is so easy to fall for, It's called the Ad hominem. This is essentially attacking the person instead
of their argument, you should always attack the
argument, not the person. This is very common and you see this all the
time on social media. People attack other people, not their points of view. So if somebody says, I think XYZ, The person B says, for whatever reason they
might say they're evil, stupid, ignorance, just
militias, bad person. Sometimes people will make
reasons like you're too young, you're too old, You
don't understand. You don't have the education. Many things too rich to poor, to privilege to
whatever people attack the other person,
not the argument. In philosophy and logic, you have to focus
on the argument. The person is only
a distraction. They can be separated
from the argument. And if you do this, you should stop doing that. And if you see other
people doing this, it's prudent to correct them because they're
missing the point. The point is the argument
now the other person. And by shutting up
the other person, you can basically give
them to be quiet. But the arguments that
they made still stands. And ad hominem is kind of like bullying. We don't
want to do that. We want to be rational
and open to ideas, even if we don't necessarily
agree with them, we have to respect other
people's ideas and doing the ad hominem
prevents us from doing so. The worst thing is that it harms the person who
does the ad hominem. It harms them more than anyone. Just helps to shut up everybody who has a
different opinion and reinforces their own
entrenched opinions which could be wrong. And the people who would
have different opinion are helpful sometimes to help
us see another way, another side to the picture. Without that, it makes us
stubborn and entrenched in views that can become easily outdated or just wrong
from the beginning. The ad hominem is something
to really, really avoid. You shouldn't take it,
you shouldn't give it.
4. Surrounding yourself with similars: Another error that can skew our worldview is
something that I call surrounding
yourself with similars, which is exacerbated
by social media. Because on social media
we can decide who we follow and what
we're exposed to. We can completely shut off
what we don't want to see. If you pose a question, which is better, dogs or cats. Generally in the world, you might have a 5050 breakdown of people who like
dogs and cats. Or maybe it's a 4060,
It doesn't matter. But if you surround
yourself, if you like dogs, and you surround yourself with
dog lovers just like you, who you enjoy hanging out with, query, enjoy talking to. They will only reinforce
your opinion and you'll get a very strong resounding voice saying that dogs
are so much better. And everyone around you will say the same thing and repeat. And it will have a snowball
effect of new having an entrenched opinion and
an incorrect worldview. Over time, you'll reinforce
that with emotion. And because you're getting
social acceptance from that, all kinds of hormones
kick in that make you feel much better when he
talked to more dog lovers. And further reinforced the
fact that dogs are better, even though you might
have loved cats just as much if you gave
them an equal chance. Where we really need
is a balanced exposure and a balance of opinions, even if we prefer
one or the other, is just healthy for us, kind of like eating vegetables. But what social media
does is if you want, you can unfriendly
all the cat lovers. You can only join dog
community groups online. You can only watch
dog YouTube videos. And it will seem like the world is mostly made up of dogs. You can yourself kind of
pigeonhole yourself and your worldview in only seeing the world as you
sort of mold at it, not truthful to how
it actually is.
5. The twisted argument: Now I want to highlight
another logical fallacy called the twisted argument is it has a couple of problems.
We'll go over. If somebody says,
exercise is good for you. And another person says, Well, do you think I'm fat? Are they correct in assuming that you think
that they're fat? Them being fat or not is not the only reason you might say
exercises are good for you. You might be saying
that for many reasons because maybe you were
talking about yourself, that you think you're fat or
maybe you were talking about the mental health
aspects of exercise. Or maybe there's
some other reason. There can be many, many,
many potential reasons, many of which we
don't even realize. That person just logically
misconstrued and projected and assumed that you're
saying that they're fat, where they have no evidence
of that being the case. And you basically
there's tell them no, There are many reasons
why exercise is good. Not only because
you might be fat. So the two problem here is
there isn't a single cause, there may be multiple
causes of truth. And also in this case, it does not logically follow that the person
is saying exercises with for you is saying it
precisely because the first person is fat or not digest, not
connected, right? So essentially
there are twisting the argument where it
logically doesn't follow. That happens often in arguments when people want to switch topic or displays blame or do not want to address
the issue directly. Your job is to recognize that there's just
happened because you see the logical inconsistency and
politely called them out on that and explain that it doesn't follow for these
two main reasons.
6. Irrelevant argument: Now let's look at
another logical fallacy, which is called the
irrelevant argument, which is just a distraction. If you say something simple like exercise is good for you. And the other person says, Well, no, it's not. Hitler used to promote
exercise, so it must be bad. So there's a lot of things
wrong with that statement. The first thing, Hitler,
is a case study. A case study is just one person. It does not represent the norm. The second error is
that someone's opinion is irrelevant to the
truth of that statement. The third error is just an
absurd statement anyway. All it does, it doesn't logically follow and
adjust serves to distract. And you might start arguing
about the silliness of this point rather than your
main point in your job. If you notice this type of
distraction and irrelevant, the argument is to stop, stop this in the strikes
before it derails the actual debate and
bring things back to the debate because
this point did not have a place in the debate,
it should be discarded.
7. Argument from lack of knowledge: Now let's look at a
situation we're on. The argument is made from
a lack of knowledge. Let's say I made this statement
exercise is good for you. Well, I'm not an expert in
exercise amount of scientist, I don't know, biology
too deep extends. It sounds very plausible. And people are inclined to
believe that it's true. But it's an assumption
because I don't have enough deep scientific knowledge
to prove that it's true. So it's a plausibility, it's easy to fall for it. And of course, we fall
for it all the time. Most people don't
have enough knowledge to prove or disprove this, but it sounds good. It must be true. And
the other person says, Well, I can't argue
for or against it. I'm also not an expert. And if you make this argument
out of lack of knowledge, well, it's an unfair statement. It's an assumption and you can't prove it in the burden of proof is on the person
making the statement, not on the person trying
to disprove them. By the same token, if the original portion is
pretending to be an expert, they should be able to
explain the logic and reasoning in a way that
person beacon understand, instead of taking advantage of the fact that the
person B doesn't have the knowledge to argue
for or against it. If person a doesn't
provide enough proof than the arguments should be realized as uncertain and assumption. It can still be valid because
it can be self-evident. Some things are self-evident. You don't need to dig to the smallest molecule
of science to realize. Exercise is good for
you. It's self-evident. But at the same time, this self-evidence, this
should be a distinction. It's not fact that we can know. It's an, it's a
strong assumption we're making because
it's self-evident. And we can assume it's true. But at the same time, there's room for
this being false.
8. Case studies can be misleading: In this video, I
want to talk about a very common logical fallacy that is trusting anecdotal
evidence or case studies. You often see this when somebody is selling
something to you, convincing you of something, or is actually trying to
convince you of something. Like, for example, the news people give you
an outlier situation. Case study is only an example
of one thing happening. We tend to assume
that that's the norm, but that's a wrong assumption. But really the truth is
that it's only proof that one time like that
something happened like that. It may very well be that every case in the
world of such a thing happening when the other
way in case studies can be 99.99999% wrong. Just one example. It's not representative of
the overall truth. It's an outlier. It's not proof, it's
only an example. So your job will be to
balance it with statistics of more general, statistically
significant population. If you think, no,
this doesn't happen. Well, it does happen
all the time. For example, most intrapreneurs, they think their
business will succeed. Of course, they're
most businesses fail. But a lot of people, my clients, for example, they come to me
and they say, well if Zika, if Mark Zuckerberg
built a social network, I can build 12, or if so-and-so built a successful mobile
app, I can do too. I hope they can do too, but they're referencing case studies of
tremendous successes, like one of a kind
situations that are misleading where most
businesses actually fail. This also happens when the news, the news usually reports things that are very stark
and eye-catching, which is not typically
representative of life. Most life is mundane and boring. Nobody would watch those news. So they have to shock you, give you unique situations so that you would watch
because it's different. Also marketers, marketers use
case studies all the time. They say, my client
lost a million pounds using my a successful
weight loss formula, but that could be
just one person. So a lot of companies
and people use case studies to help to
convince others of something. But you have to be aware that case studies can be used
in very misleading ways.
9. Statistics vs. case studies: In this video, let's look at the role of statistics versus role of case studies to help us understand and make
sense of realities. And I'm going to use
one historical quote to highlight the issues
that are involved here. And it's gonna be a
quote from one of the most evil people in
history, Joseph Stalin. He has actually a quote
that is very popular. He said, one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.
What does that mean? Well, when you have one, that's a case study, it can give you a closer
sense of the detail. You can understand
what really happened. But when you just
look at one case, it doesn't have
statistical significance. And it can be very deceiving
because maybe that's the only case that ever
happened in the world. So it can be the most
deceiving thing ever as well. And people will always show
you case studies of things which may or may not be
representative of the norm. In fact, a lot of news when
they tried to shock you, they show you something
that's outside the norm. That's a unique case study
because it's noteworthy. You gotta be careful
of not being deceived. And be very careful of thinking that because
something is a case study, it's also a general
rule we often fall into that it's very
easy to fall into that, especially one of
you wants to believe that when it's comfortable to believe that the way to balance that is to
look at statistics, not the way most people do
with how most people do it. Most people skim headlines of sources that are just on social media,
not that credible. And they think, Oh,
yeah, it's a statistic. But really a lot of organizations these
days in governments, they keep actual real
statistics that you can publicly access on a lot
of different issues. There's independent studies
on a lot of different issues. Those are the more credible
sources to look into. Now, statistics tell
you the broader truth. But this connect you with
the reality on the ground. You lose connection
with the people, with the individual stories. And statistics can be
highly manipulated as well. If I tell you a statistic
that a player has 100 success rate in shooting
in games that his team wins. That sounds pretty good. Sounds like he's amazing. But because it's in games
that his team wins, his team may be
only won one game. And maybe otherwise if
he played 100 games, he'd be a pretty terrible
player like maybe just lucky. Statistics can also be
very much manipulated. And a lot of times we have to make sure that
they're generated by either correctly created
scientific studies or accurate polls. The source of them is also
should also be questioned. And when you try to form
your sense of reality, you have to balance
the understanding of realistic and
representative case studies and accurately
collected statistics. That's the best way to accept something as more or
less a truth in the world.
10. Blindly trusting old assumptions: In this video, let's
address the common issue of blindly trusting authority. And of course, most
of us will say, no, I don't want,
of course I don't. But it's impossible
not to trust all of it because it's comfortable to
just take existing truths. They can come from
parents, teachers, even celebrities, even doctors,
or established experts. They can be wrong, their
knowledge can become outdated. Their knowledge can apply
to different situations. There's all kinds of
ways they can be wrong. It's very easy to take authoritative sources as
sources of the truth. But we have to keep in
mind that everyone, first of all, has
their own biases. Some people are trying
to sell us something. Some people are trying to make us do what's
better for them, not what's better
for us necessarily. And sometimes people
just suggest things that we're good the way
they were done before. For example, when I'm doing software engineering and
software engineering, there's a lot of tendency to copy and paste old
code that works. But it's one of the
biggest fallacies and source of bugs in software engineering
because one piece of code that works
somewhere else, the copy and pasted, there may be some details
that don't apply to the new situations where your pasting it and you
introducing new policies, new bugs into that code
which has worked before. So you always have to
reassess and re-evaluate if we use that same example of the code cannot be
written better. Is there a new
technology that can accomplish the same thing
in a different better way? And there's a really
strong tendency for things that used to be true, to become false today. In every field. The way it started is
not the way it is now. It evolved and many
early assumptions probably became wrong over time. So we don't want
to do is sort of become dinosaurs
believing old things. And if we just accept
things as they are, because that seems like
an authoritative source, then we're setting ourselves up for actually believing
something that's not true.
11. Correlation does not imply causation: Now let's go over
another logical fallacy. This one, a lot of people know, correlation does not
imply causation. What does that mean? Well, if B happens after a, it's not a proof by
itself that a caused B. An example of that would be, let's say I drink green tea yesterday and today my
skin is way better. Does that mean that it was
because of the green tea? It can be, but it would
be too early to believe that MySQL may have improved
from many other factors. We don't know. Maybe it was just
a random chance. Maybe I got better
sleep that same day. Maybe it was my diet, maybe I got more sunlight. Ebay had less stress levels, maybe it was a 100 other things, or maybe it wasn't
any one thing, but a combination of things. You see, it would've been too premature to assume that it was because I drink green tea. You want to be careful
of that assumption? When some things are correlated, it doesn't mean that
one causes the other.
12. Wishful thinking: The next logical fallacy
is something we all fall into wishful thinking
or consoling ourselves. These are nice statements
like all people are good. Everyone wants love. Their generalizing statements. They don't take particularly
much thought to say. They're more just
wishful thinking and kind of protect us from thinking
about difficult things. It's obvious when
people will make such statements
that these kinds of statements can be
discredited because they're just statements
out of thin air. And often when people
make such statements, it can be self-evident that that person is saying it
didn't examine it that much. Because it's actually
really hard to examine such broad statements and
prove them logically. Usually if people are quizzed why they make
such statements, they give reasons
that are deeply insufficient to support
such broad statements. With these kinds of
statements really do is they protect us
from the challenge of thinking deeply about things or from having negative
thoughts about things. It's much easier to have pleasant thoughts and
not bother ourselves with these negative
potential things like the opposite of
all people are good. Nobody wants to
think about that. Even though a lot of these
wishful thinking statements sound nice and there's a tendency to want
to believe them. Really. It's just something
people make up. There's no logical
evidence to back it up. Most of the time.
13. Being uncomfortable with having negative thoughts: In this video, let's tackle a common pitfall that
some people fall into. And these are very similar to the people who fall into
the wishful thinking. This is avoiding confrontational
or negative arguments. So thinking things like, not all people are good and some people want
the worst for us. Maybe that's true in the world. But some people find those kinds of thoughts very hard to have. And they miss out on half
of the world's truth. It might not hurt them, maybe doesn't have a particular
impact on their life. They can just go,
they just go happily and merrily along
with their life. But philosophically, and if, if a person wants to really
think through the world, understand the world,
understand their thoughts, then they miss out on half
of the possible truth. They're just not giving
themselves the potential to access some ideas. That's the problem with this. You just have to look at
these without emotion and be brave because you own
the truth to yourself. Because you can't be afraid of thoughts that don't
feel good to have. Because if you let that happen, what's gonna happen is some
people will bully you. Because in the next video, what we're gonna do is we're
gonna look at a situation where other people bully the people who just want to have good thoughts into
agreeing with that. Because as soon as
they agree that pressure and anger is
relieved from the buoy, the buoys take
advantage of this. And since you understand
the wishful thinking and the voiding and now this avoiding
confrontational argument, Let's look at the next one where the people
who can only have pleasant thoughts and no
confrontational thoughts can get bullied
into other people, making them think what
they want them to think.
14. Non-confrontation and giving into bullies and threat of anger: Now that we went over the
issues with wishful thinking and being afraid of entertaining negative
and unpleasant thoughts. I wanted to give
you an example of how that puts us in danger of getting pressured,
threatened by bullies. And I'm going to give a
somewhat of a controversial, but a very stark example that I can think of
in recent years. And that is, do you
remember a few years ago there was a terror attack on Charlie Hebdo newspaper and there was a slogan afterwards,
just whoosh Charlie. And that's where they
published some cartoon. Suddenly Poe didn't
like the cartoon. And those people who didn't buy liquor to, and what did they do? They, they went into the newspapers headquarters and two guns and killed
a bunch of people. Before that, Charlie Hebdo
practiced freedom of speech, freedom of thought in any
thought was on the table, even negative thoughts
or grotesque towards equally with positive and
good and happy thoughts. Everything was okay. They were philosophically open. And that's one of
the great values of modern societies and also of people who are
intellectually curious. But after that happened, some other publications
around the world, of course, didn't budge, and they maintained their philosophical
integrity, their openness. But many publications
around the world appeased the bullies because they were afraid
of future threats. Of course they didn't announce, Hey, we're going to appease you, were going to stop publishing
controversial things, but they quietly stopped
publishing controversial things. So we lost a lot of freedom of thought, freedom
of expression. Because when freedom
of expression goes, freedom of thought
follows soon after because some things are
just no longer discussed. It's not on our radar,
we forget about it. And we lose a lot of philosophical integrity
and a lot of truth. If you think, well, this is just one big situation
that happened. While this actually
happens all the time. People often appease others before any threat or angry
or even happens because a lot of people who are naturally
predisposed to anger or naturally predisposed to using bully tactics are
pressuring others. They know that they can
get a lot just by bullying or pressuring others
because others just given because they don't
want to have the negativity. Who wants to be
pressured or bullied? Nobody, a lot of people
would give up a whole lot just to have that pressure
or bulli threats relieved. And that's what they do. And then the people
who get bullied, they learn that they're okay as long as they
appease the buoys. The bullies learned that they're doing great as long as
they keep bullying. And a lot of people who
are afraid of the bullies, they appeased the bullies, even at the thought of arousing anger before any
anger even happens. And so much so that
they just learned this and it becomes a part
of their natural behavior. So that if you ask
a lot of them, why are you appeasing such and such people
or person or group? They will they will honestly
say that they're not, because they don't
even necessarily realize that that's actually what they're doing because it just became part of their being. But now realizing this, you have to dig a little
deeper and see, okay, Any thought should be at
least potentially evaluated, it might get discarded. You don't have to
go with every idea. But at least we should
not be afraid of having thoughts because we want
to preserve that great, the greatest potential
of ideas out there.
15. Political correctness: Another potential
pitfall is using political correctness
in a 100% of our lives. Well, political
correctness is amazing for helping us not
offend others. It gives us guidelines with which to be sensitive
to other people. So it has tremendous
goodness to it. It also helps to protect organizations and
people from getting in trouble because it's sort of a guideline and it helps
people not get offended. She's all good so far,
The problem arises. This is a big one that you start to have disallowed thoughts, and these come with
a bullying threat. What happens if you step out of political
correctness in school, at work in your life, you're going to have
some adverse effects. And of course people avoid that. Nobody wants to have those threats, those
adverse effects. And so they start
not saying things. And those things that
you can say also soon after become things that
are not allowed to think, they become negative thoughts, thoughts not
accepted by society. And so we started to
have a smaller society. Then the other bad thing
is political correctness actually becomes a tool
to shut some people up. So some people start using more and more and more
political correctness no longer and not to offend or
four, it's good purposes. But actually to keep
some other people quiet, the very same people that do
not want to steer the boat, do not want to cause anger, do not want to get pressured, and certainly don't want to have bad things happen
to them at school, at work and so on and so on. In our society. I think it's easy to
observe that there's a proliferation of
this offended culture. Everybody's offended, everybody wants
political correctness. So it's used as a means
to achieve goals. Now, no longer the goals are sensitivity and just simple and just simply not offending, but to control the
overall discourse and the lines of
thought in a society.
16. Power of slogan: In this video, I wanted
to begin talking about the power of something
like slogans, catchy songs, cliches, hashtags, even memes, basically something
catchy that people just keep repeating to each other and playing over and
over in their mind. Because it begins working
like an affirmation. And this is also something that positions do all the time. They create little sayings, middle names for
things like memes. They may or may not be true, but they sound
plausible and catchy. And they're highly expressive. And they're fun to repeat. When you repeat something a lot, it becomes like an affirmation, which is something you tell yourself over and over and over, and then you begin
to believe it. If we think and say something often we
begin to believe it. And there's an extremely
famous historical quote by a very famous politician. If you repeat a lie long enough, it becomes the truth. You may or may not have
heard this quote before. It comes from a very
evil person, very evil. This is from the second Nazi
in command, Joseph Goebbels. It comes from people like that who were openly
talking about how to make people believe
what you want them to believe. The very same people
use the power of songs to manipulate
different messages. And if you think this
doesn't happen now, this happens now all
the time in politics, in music, in advertising,
in every field. Precisely because both
additions and marketers, they know the power
of catchy things in everybody wants you to believe something
that's good for them, which is not necessarily consistent with
what the truth is. Sometimes it doesn't
like when people try to sell you cigarettes
back in the day, Well, they needed to make you
think it's good for you in that example that
you don't use song, but that's just an example of how if they're trying
to sell things to you, it's not, it's not
necessarily good for you. So just be aware of any politicians, governments,
companies, marketers, organizations,
anybody selling to you of them using hashtags, cliches, catchy
songs and slogans to impose wherever they want people to think and feel onto you.
17. Can't disprove a negative: Now let's focus on this concept
in logic and philosophy. That there's this idea that you cannot disprove a negative. For example, if
somebody asks you to disprove that there
are no green people, to prove that there
is a green person, it will be very easy. All you have to do is find one green person and say,
there is a green person. But if there isn't,
one person says, disprove that out of the 6
billion people on Earth, There's not one that's green. It's impossible to disprove it because you have to literally
go through all of them. And maybe in the future
there might be one. So in precisely because at some point you may discover one, you can never fully disprove
that negative statement. If somebody makes an outline this statement like
this, and says, If you came this, prove
it, it must be true while the burden of proof is
not on you, it's on them. The argument you
can't disprove me, that isn't valid
and you can't let people make just outlined
their statements and Boolean or pressure
you into trying to disprove it because it's just
a it's just not possible. Which you have to do
is just say, hey, prove that there
is a green person. Finally one. Then I'll believe
it before that, we can disregard this argument.
18. Group belonging confusion: This video may be a
little controversial. It's about our
confusion about who is really our in-group and who
is really our outgroup. Because if you look at evolution and thousands of years ago, even other species, if you
look at monkeys, well, we have our monkey group from
our side of the mountain. And on the other side of the mountain there is
another group of monkeys. There are competitive
tribe in that sense, it's much easier to see
who's more on my team. In today's world,
it's a lot harder, but a lot of behavior
has to do with our biology and
psychology and evolution. Evolution is about survival
and passing on genes. A lot of behavior can be
explained through that. And everything that
I learned here, I actually learned from
one of the top experts in behavioral psychology and
biology, Robert Sapolsky. I took an online
Stanford course, this course right here
that you can also find. If you search for introduction
to human behavior biology, it's a Stanford course. You can see there's
26 videos and each video is about
one or two hours long. So it's essentially like
taking a college course. But this guy right
here, he's the top, maybe the top or one of the top world experts on
human behavior biology. Essentially understanding
human behavior biologically. If you don't have
the time to do that, Just watch my video
and I'll give you a few of the important takeaways. Because this is
quite an investment. It took me about 30 hours of actual listening time to
take the whole course. When we look at
things biologically, a lot of our behavior is about our survival so
that we can reproduce. And being in a group
that's safe helps our survival a lot in animals, groups are easy to
understand in humans, it's quite complex because we have a lot more
factors to go by. We look for and
confuse similarities. Generally in that course, they talked about a
lot of studies that show that people
like similar people, people with brown hair, when shown pictures
of other people with brown hair versus
other kinds of hair, show that they liked
people with brown hair. More. People who talk like us, people who liked things like us. We like them more. And it's very common. For example, let's say
you meet a stranger, you don't know
anything about them. But they were a baseball
hat that says Yankees. And you have a baseball
had that says Yankees. Well, you liked them because they're kind
of like the same as U. You have something in common. The challenge that
happens is that we have so many
points like that. For example, I like soccer
and I liked my family. If I meet a soccer fan, then we have
something in common. We can bond over that. But at the same time, what if my family member likes a different
team or rival team? Arrival team? If it was just rivals and
soccer, then we're rivals. We don't really like each other. But at the same time
it's a family member. I like family members
a lot and it becomes really easily
confused with humans. This behavior is
extremely complex because we have so many things
like a tribe of monkeys. They don't have soccer, they don't have hobbies. They just have family. And they understand the
monkeys that are next to them. They have few factors
to confuse them. We, on the other hand, have
an infinity of factors. We like baseball, we don't like soccer. We'd like swimming. We like don't like running.
We'd like reading. We don't like reading. I mean, there's a million things. Especially when
you get to topics that exacerbate these
issues like politics, which I'm not going
to get into here, but obviously, this
is quite divisive. So be aware that our brains are highly confused
over group belonging. And also people who need
to manipulate our brains. Deeply aware of that. Politicians, marketers, people who are selling to
us, anything like that. People who are trying to
convince us of things, anything like that,
you should be aware. Is there any group belonging confusion happening
here because obviously, people who want us to do what they need us
to do have to make us like them first and feel like we have
something in common. So what you have to be aware of, I think as a basic, this is obviously a
basic introduction that other courses
like 30 hours long. But as a basic, just
make sure that at least people aren't manipulating
this group belonging. And whenever they're trying to convince you or
make you do something.
19. Ontology, Epistemology, and bias: In this video, let's
take a look at a couple of fields
and philosophy and see how they
relate to our biases. There's one field called epistemology is the
theory of knowledge. How do you separate
things that you believe versus things
that are true? Where's the overlap? Because all the things
that we believe, we think they are also
at the same time true. But in fact, only some things we believe are actually true. We don't actually know what they are because we believe that they are true when
we're honest with ourselves that we believe
something is true. We think 100% of the
things we believe is true, whereas that's
actually not the case. That's the study
of epistemology. This is an entire branch and philosophy that has been
studied for 2 thousand years. So if you're interested
in this, you can look in this
further in this course. We can't really get into it. The other thing though that
I wanted to bring up is the another branch in
philosophy called ontology. And that's the study of
being, of existence, of what, what does it mean for something to be true,
for something to exist? And it might seem like abstract and silly questions
and yeah, maybe they are. But there's a very
famous philosopher, Rene Descartes, and he has a very famous quote
which goes like, I think therefore I am, some people think
that it means that because his thinking and
because of his intelligence, that's all he can be in. It's actually not. That is the question
that he posed as well. Sometimes I make mistakes. I look at the blue sky
and it looks blue, but then it's not blue. The air is wide, but
why is the sky blue? So there's all these things, but what do I really know? There's all these mistakes. So he attempted to take out everything that has a possible
flaw in knowledge. And he realized that
the only thing he can know is that when
he thinks he is, because there must be
something that's doing the thinking and he's
tripped out everything else. He says The only thing
I know is that I have to add something has to exist because something is
doing the thinking. And he has a very famous
book, the meditation, where the meditations where
he actually reconstructed the entire world based out of that one fact that one side
came in the first chapter, and in the ensuing chapters, he reconstructed the
entire world using logic and using what he knows and
building on top of that. Now of course, there are
some flaws in his thinking. A lot of people have poked
holes in some parts of it, but it's been around 500 years since he
wrote it and it's still widely taught in universities
and it's regarded as one of the seminal
works in these fields. And of course, a lot of people are still familiar
with that very quote. I think therefore I am, even though it's a widely
misunderstood quote. Now how does that relate to us? Well, we have to understand
strong belief isn't lowing. Also. To understand our biases, recall that all kinds
of emotions make us over correct to the
side of that emotion. If we're excited and we're
feeling enthusiastic, we're going to over
correct to the positive. We're gonna believe that
whatever we assume is gonna be greater than it's
actually going to be if we're sad or depressed, or if we're in a panic mode, then we're gonna
assume things are gonna be worse than
they're gonna be. Also one way to mediate that is to not make
decisions in the moment. Not to make compulsive or
impulsive decisions, but wait, wait until you can think
clearly and at least make more or less logical
thought out judgment. Because even in his book, The meditation's, Descartes
at some point says, Well, how do you go? The fire is hot. Put your hand in there and
you'll see the fire is hot. So some things we do have access to and we don't have
to be in our lives. We don't have to be as
abstract and asphalt, philosophically strict
as he is in his book. So some things we know it suits suitors room for common sense. Even though having said
that common sense, common sense can be
extremely flawed as well. So hopefully this gives you
a little bit of a framework with which to think through
issues of what we believe, what is actually true
and how to start to uncover and make sense of
what might not be true. Where made my, there'll
be some inconsistencies.
Alex Genadinik
