I love how I’ve gained this reputation with you However I don’t actually have any special or long-standing expertise with fallacies, I just had the patience some time ago to trawl through lists of fallacies to give me sufficient context to go back through them at later dates to find the name of a fallacy that I’ve identified with sufficient success. I’d like to think that this speaks for some natural abilities of mine, but probably speaks far more to the lack of effort by others
Not having a go at you by the way, you actually seem to be interested and looking into getting to the same point and probably beyond - clichés about how long it look to build Rome applied just as much to me as they will anyone else, the important thing is another cliché about it never being too late to start something.
Anyhoo. The first and last formal fallacies listed on wikipedia are the Appeal to Probability and the Modal fallacy - either would seem to apply to the “potentiality = certainty” fallacy you mentioned.
I love this point you’ve made about every Venezuelan not being an expert in economics by virtue of being Venezuelan - it’s very similar to scientists often being taken as authorities on all aspects of science when in reality they are most often only experts in specific fields of science. It probably takes anyone here less than a second to think of an American who is by no means an expert in economics by virtue of being American. Why doesn’t this apply to Venezuelans and Venezuela? Hell, who is an expert in economics? If there was such a thing, you’d think that somewhere there would exist at least one economy out there that was more robust than the mess you see all over the Western world, which is at least informally alleged to practice “the most” expertise in economics in the world, going by how economically developed it is relative to the rest of the world. Clearly it’s possible to have more economic expertise than others, and in practice people who are native to the economy in question are more likely to have more expertise than others, especially than others who are native to very different economies. However, the economically educated are probably more likely to have more expertise than someone with less economics education even if they are native to the economy in question, and even if it’s of a different type to the one that the educated person is native to. Obviously there’s the problem of who determines who has more economically educated, especially when said education is informally attained. If I am to understand that the person in question is Pedro, it’s quite clear that he has a significant economic bent, and honestly - even if he has attempted to educate himself economically, I see no sign from what I’ve read of him showing any objectivity of the kind that an economically educated person would normally be inclined to demonstrate.
In terms of fallacies, he would appear to be a “False authority” and I believe it is known as the “Genetic Fallacy” that is being commited when assuming something like a Venezuelan is an expert in Venezuelan economics by virtue of their Venezuelan origin. Obviously there is more than one relevant term in “Venezuelan economics”, and probably many other implied points of relevance that need to be considered when determining the validity and authority of someone’s arguments on such a subject.
In researching the above, I came by this fantastic term, Bulverism whereby one assumes a position to be wrong before explaining why it is wrong.
“Socialists think they deserve to be not be poor, and this is why” appears to be driving implication behind this thread - and honestly a great many threads including one I’ve recently been wasting a lot of of my time on. I’d even go as far as saying Bulverism is one of the sources of today’s mutilated political discourse.
So on the subject of Bulverism, I think you’ll find very few Socialists saying this. What you will find instead is a great many anti-Socialists saying that this is what Socialists “would say if they were more honest”.
The crucial distinction is the frame of understanding that differs between such highly charged topics of debate like this one. Determining one within the frame of another gets to this kind of misunderstanding and accusation that we see all the time now. It gets nowhere because nobody is making an honest effort to understand the other: the effort is instead to ridicule the other from the personally preferred ideology - imposing a psychological motivation onto another that would have to be the case if they held their position based on one’s own paradigm instead of based on their own paradigm.
All one ends up doing through this practice is explain the reason why one is personally unable to appreciate another type of thought. As such, you only harm yourself and show yourself up in your attempt to do that to others.
This is why I mentioned the retributive moral framework. Socialists tend to be a bit more utilitarian in their moral framework, which has just as much danger in it than the individualistic framework of those who are more in support of the status quo or variations thereof, than they are in a more fundamental shift in the status quo. By Utilitarian, I mean the primary reason for Socialist sympathies being in what seems to work best at the group level more than the individual level, but not necessarily in sacrifice of the individual level as is the interpretation of those with more Capitalist sympathies. Neuroscience would appear to indicate a correlation in the Socialist framework with theory of mind, and in the Capitalist framework with risk/reward. As such the Socialist sees the Capitalist as lacking in empathy, and the Capitalist sees the Socialist as underhandedly corrupt. If you think a Socialist is operating in terms of their personal risk/reward, then of course you see the ends of more equality as some people getting more than they put in which is an offense to Capitalist sensibilities. Conversely if you think a Capitalist is operating in terms of theory of mind, then of course you see the means of less equality as some people losing out more than is best for the group as a whole, which is an offense to Socialist sensibilities. Capitalists tend to see competition as best for the group as a whole and Socialists tend to see cooperation as best for the group as a whole.
Ironically, the above requires sufficient theory of mind since I am attempting to bridge the gap between not only two tokens of minds, but two types of minds altogether. So it’ll be interesting whether it’s easier for a Socialist mind to appreciate, or whether it won’t appeal to either type? Let’s find out.
I wouldn’t mind a copper atom every time someone mentioned venezuela without knowing what he’s talking about.
To finish on a light note, I wouldn’t wish for this measure of copper because it takes about 10^5 atoms to reach the width of a human hair, and that’s just a line of atoms with only the width of 1 atom. Try 10^10 times someone mentions Venezuela without knowing what they’re talking about to get only a flat cross section of a human hair, and 10^15 to get a small grain of copper. That’s 1 quadrillion mentions