----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrew Fildes" <afildes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <olympus@xxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, December 28, 2007 8:19 PM
Subject: [OM] Re: OT - firewire
>
> Ah yes, the old 'Advantageous Real Estate fallacy'. :)
> The best defence against fallacious thinking is that sensible ways of
> thinking are often technically fallacious.
> For instance, David Hume pointed out that just because the Sun has
> risen every day in the history of the Earth, you could not argue with
> certainty that it will rise tomorrow.
If it didn't there would no subsequent arguing ...... well maybe for at a
day or two at the most before we all became ice cubes !
jh
> This 'Probability Fallacy' would have us accept that just because
> every business venture that Harry has started has gone belly up,
> there is no reason for us to refuse to invest in his next one. Yeah,
> sure!
> Of course, you could accuse said professor of the 'Fallacy fallacy' -
> the assumption that because the argument is flawed, the conclusion
> necessarily must be wrong.
>
> Many old and new high schools here named or renamed themselves after
> the street they were in or anything else that sounded nice and
> designated themselves as 'colleges' - this to compete with the
> private schools which had always done that. Consequently no-one knows
> where the hell they art. ("Box Forest College? Where the hell is
> that? You're joking, there hasn't been a Box tree left standing
> around there in fifty years!")
> Andrew Fildes
> afildes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
>
>
> On 29/12/2007, at 10:32 AM, Bob Whitmire wrote:
>
>> Somewhere I have a letter to the editor written by a community
>> college journalism class. More Latin than English, as I recall. The
>> professor, who loathed me and everything I wrote, did most of the
>> creative work, I'm sure. I was accused of most, if not all, known
>> fallacies. I believe they were listed in alphabetical order. <g> It
>> seems he was driven by an editorial I wrote taking the education
>> system to task. The basis of the piece was a new crest recently
>> unveiled by the college, in which it named itself, and included its
>> geographic location. The problem was this: The college did not exist
>> that the location where it placed itself, a tony, very upscale area
>> of the county. Rather, it existed in another area, mostly populated
>> by apple orchards and trailer parks. I recall musing as to how it was
>> that we should expect our students to do well in geography when our
>> community college didn't know where it was--or worse, knew where it
>> was and decided to be somewhere else without actually moving. (The
>> president of the college didn't like the editorial either. Apparently
>> he didn't think community college administrations should be the butt
>> of newspaper humor. I disagreed. There was no peace in the Kingdom.)
>
>
>
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