IT’S NOT LOGICAL! PART 2

Hoping all of you had a safe, healthy, and enjoyable Independence Day holiday. Jolene and I took our dogs about 2 hours north of us into the woods of Baldwin, Michigan to a gorgeous little cottage on the Pere Marquette River for 4 or 5 days of relaxation, boating, nature therapy, and just some time away from civilization. A much-needed break from the day to day we all slog through. Its usually in those times that we have our best ideas, we come up with tweaks to our businesses, maybe some tweaks for our day to day lives, and, of course, eat way too much junk food, so it’s back to a ketogenic diet and kicking the workouts into high gear to beat the natural decline that is always on our heels.

Two weeks ago I did an episode on logical fallacies, those pesky little errors in thinking and reasoning that pop up fairly often that sometimes catch us off guard. They catch us off guard because they sound plausible and logical when you hear them. Somebody says, “The President thinks its ok, it must be ok!”, and we think, “hmmm, yeah, I guess you’re right!” However, we now know, if you listened to that episode, that that’s called an appeal to authority and is a logical fallacy. Just because somebody in an authority position says it does not mean its true.  Its an error in logic that tries its best to make something logical and plausible yet errs in the way its presented. Its simply a flaw in one’s thinking and the more of these logical fallacies you are aware of, and practiced in, the better you will be in spotting these often-elusive patterns in thinking. We got some really great feedback from some of you in the mailbag after that episode, so I figured I’d do a second episode and introduce you to a few more of the most common logical fallacies in everyday topics. I got turned on to logical fallacies many years ago while doing some research on another topic, and while studying writing techniques. I kept seeing that words ‘logical fallacy’ pop up from the authors and researchers in the form of, ‘hey, watch out for those logical fallacies when you’re digging into these topics’, so I decided to learn more about them and have been somewhat obsessed ever since. Something happens to your reticular activation system located in your brain when you’re made aware of something new. The tendency to see it everywhere is increased to the point where your recognition of that thing will become commonplace. 

You buy a Tesla and, all of the sudden, you see Teslas everywhere. It might seem at first glance that a bunch of people must’ve had the same thought as you around the same time as you and the bought a Tesla. A more logical answer is that your brain is now just primed to see more Teslas because you own one and you’ve been researching them for a while now. This happened to me recently because we have been searching for a speedboat. I’ve been researching boats, looking at features that I want, and digging through the marketplace to find something we think we’d like. All of the sudden, I’m seeing speedboats around every corner, sitting in driveways and people’s yards. I’m seeing boat dealerships that I never knew existed before and now boats are popping up everywhere! Do they really just pop up? Nope! They just popped up for me because my brain now has a higher sensitivity for noticing boats all around me. The same will be true for you once you start to study and learn what comprises a good and logical argument or form of reasoning, and what doesn’t. I can’t emphasize enough how valuable this study is for people because learning to recognize faulty arguments and reasoning gets you that much closer to being that much less wrong as you move through life. It helps you spot illogical or faulty arguments and, either help to correct them, or at least not get sucked in by them and subsequently make a bad choice based on faulty logic or a bad argument. The more of these logical fallacies you learn and study, the more you’ll start to see them everywhere! You’ll hear them daily on your favorite news channel, you’ll hear them on podcasts, you’ll see them in your own arguments, and you’ll start to see them in your business and industry. 

What I attempt to do with this kind of topic is give you some examples of how a particular fallacy is often used so that you can start to recognize it more often when you hear it. If I can, I’ll try to give examples from the appraisal and real estate industries so that you can potentially have an ‘aha’ moment where you go, ‘ahhhhhh, now I see it!’ This isnt always so easy since, by their very nature, logical fallacies can be sneaky and hidden in the language. But I’ll do my best. 

A brief recap of the first episode on logical fallacies, we covered the Ad Hominem, which is where a person’s character or personality is attacked, instead of attacking their premise or their logic. It’s essentially calling somebody ‘stupid’ without actually addressing their premise or argument. It’s a lame attempt to discredit the person making an argument by attacking them personally. We then talked about appeals to authority, where somebody tries to add weight to a premise or an argument by using somebody in a position of authority as the reason a premise is true. Its deferring one’s brain power to somebody else’s authority instead of doing their own research into a position or a premise and seeing if the logic stands up beyond just the authority of the person saying it. Just because the Pope says it doesn’t make it logical, reasonable, or rational and making the claim that it is logical, reasonable, and rational just because it came from the mouth of the Pope, the President, a doctor, a lawyer, or Brad Pitt, is a very weak form of argumentation. After that, we talked about the bandwagon fallacy, which is the idea that the number of people who believe or espouse something is a solid and logical form of support for an idea or an argument. The number of people who believe or express an idea or an argument plays no bearing on the truthfulness of that idea or argument. It’s the, ‘a million people can’t be wrong argument’, and it’s an extremely weak position to take. Those million people might not be wrong, but the number of people shouldn’t be the only defense of one’s position. From there we discussed the argument from incredulity. This is the, ‘I cant imagine how that could be so, therefore it must not be so’, argument. The argument from incredulity says, just because you can’t imagine or understand how something could be true, it does not lessen the strength, the reasonableness, or the rationality of ones premise. I don’t understand biochemistry, nuclear physics, and a bunch of other things. But my lack of understanding of those things doesn’t make any arguments that come from those disciplines any less true. Just because somebody doesn’t understand how an appraisal is conducted and developed doesn’t make the outcome any less valid. We talked about the no true Scotsman fallacy, which is where somebody moves the goalpost, so to speak, and defers to their own definition of what a ‘true’, insert your noun or adjective in the next space, is. No real appraiser would ever just check boxes on a form. No true appraiser would ever use MLS photos. You guys know this one well because we see it and hear it all the time from the know it alls who seem to write their own definitions and rules for what constitutes a ‘real’ or ‘true’ appraiser. 

Of course, this goes on with every profession, nationality, sport, and any other category you can imagine. There is always somebody who is unskilled at defending an argument so they dismiss it with the, ‘well no real blank would do that’. Don’t fall for that one friends. We ended the show with one of my favorites, which is the Gambler’s Fallacy, or the Monte Carlo fallacy. This is the fallacy where somebody believes there is some kind of connection between one set of events and another. One coin flip has some weight on the outcome of the next coin flip. Each roll of the dice somehow has an effect on the subsequent rolls. Or, in our case, the appraisal that was completed by another appraiser on a house 3 years ago somehow plays a role on the appraisal you’re now doing on that same house 3 years later. People tend to believe that the starting point of their home’s value, and the lowest point it could ever be, is whatever that value opinion was 3 years ago. They seem to think that somehow we have that information, somehow we start from there, and somehow things can only ever go up from there. That’s a form of the gamblers fallacy where somebody believes all things are connected and either increase the odds of the same thing happening again, or greatly decrease the odds of it happening next. 

The next fallacy I’d like to introduce you to in this episode is what is often called the false dilemma fallacy. This is also known as the black and white fallacy, the bifurcation fallacy, and the false dichotomy. This is one we’ve all used before, whether you know it or not. This is the fallacy that essentially presents only two options for something when, in fact, there might be a whole range of options. This is the George Bush terrorism fallacy where he famously said in a speech to Congress, “you’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists”. You may be familiar with this one in the form of, ‘if you loved me you would do ‘X’. It’s a form of argumentation that tries to force you to choose between choice A or choice B, when in fact there may be a multitude of better choices. This one can be closely related to the slippery slope fallacy, which we’ll take about in a few, but you’ll most commonly hear this one in the appraisal industry by using the low hanging fruit of the AMC model. You’ll hear appraisers who say, “the AMC absolutely ruined the appraisal industry and, if it wasn’t for the AMCs, the industry would be good again”. Obviously, one can hold that opinion, but the reality is much more nuanced for any industry. Whether you agree with that premise or not, it essentially presents only two options: AMC’s ruined the appraisal industry, or, without AMCs everything would be great. You only get to imagine a world with them or without them and you only get to imagine two options: ruined and not ruined. The reality is that there are always a variety of influences and factors at play in the world, in an industry, and rarely are there ever only two options. In fact, in the analogy I just presented, the ruin of an industry is, first and foremost, just an opinion, and secondly, completely disregards and removes any responsibility from the participants in that industry. This is similar as saying something like, ‘eat a vegan diet or be unhealthy’, ‘if you don’t like my friends, you must not like me’, ‘you’re either for schools of choice or you’re for failing public schools’, ‘if you’re a republican than you love war’, ‘if you’re a democrat than you love big government’. All of these present a false dilemma as the central premise. The reality is that there are almost always a variety of ‘in the middle’ choices. Any time you hear only two choices being presented, be on the lookout for the false dilemma. 

The next one is called the hasty generalizations, or arguments from anecdotal evidence fallacy. The hasty generalizations fallacy is just as the name implies, when somebody makes a hasty generalization across a whole group or population based on very limited evidence or personal experience. This is why its often called the argument from anecdotal evidence fallacy, because somebody has an experience or belief based on their own personal experience, or maybe the experience of somebody they know, and then extrapolate that belief across the whole population. The hasty generalization sounds like, ‘Realtors are all money hungry scammers and only care about themselves!’, ‘my appraiser undervalued my house by $30,000; appraisers are assholes!’, ‘my friends mom went to France and said French people are rude’. Or, how about this one, ‘a white appraiser undervalues a minority individuals home, the appraiser was probably a racist’. If you aren’t aware of this one yet, its all the news in the appraiser and real estate communities where some very limited anecdotal evidence was shared regarding a minority getting two appraisals done and the two appraisals disagreed with each other. One was done, supposedly with some evidence of the person’s race, the second appraisal with any and all evidence being removed from the house. The second appraisal obviously comes in higher than the first so, the only conclusion must be that it was due to racial bias on the first appraiser’s part. This is also a form of the false dilemma fallacy we just talked about. The public is only given two options: if your home’s value doesn’t come in where you’d like it to be and you’re a minority, it must be due to racial bias. Now, let’s be clear, I’m not making any claims that racial bias doesn’t exist, I’m simply pointing out that, in the anecdotes the world has been given thus far, the conclusion has already been arrived at before any evidence or investigation has been conducted. Be very careful of making hasty generalizations yourself and be wary of any argument that presents a conclusion based on very limited anecdotal personal experience. You can have an opinion that all YMCA pools are dirty because you swam in a few of them and found that to be true for you, but you can’t make a claim of fact that all of them are that way. 

From here we move on to the slippery slope fallacy. This is one was also tend to see lots of all around us these days. The slippery slope is a form of thinking that draws dire conclusions of one potential path or one potential outcome based on sometimes spurious connections between often unrelated things. A good example of this was the argument and claim that violent video games would end up creating more violence in the world and turn many more kids into mass shooters.  We heard this one a lot over the last 20 years and some may even use the argument from anecdotal evidence to support the claim that its come true. After all, there are a lot of mass shootings in the world today, and more kids are playing violent video games, that must be the reason. However, studies over a 20+ year period have made several other connections that explain some of these horrific events, like single parent homes, a more violent world in general, more access to information than before, constant wars, and several other factors. I’m not making an argument for or against, just using this as a common example of the slippery slope fallacy. In the appraisal industry, a slippery slope argument is the AVM argument. When I first entered the industry around the year 2000, there was lots of talk about AVM’s, automated valuation models, being the end of the appraisal profession. The argument was that the automating of the data, and the increased ability for computers to model risk, there would be no need for a human appraiser in about 5 or so years. Here we are 21 years later and, yes, the technology, the artificial intelligence, the data collection capabilities, and the modeling has gotten exponentially better since then, and we’re all still here and busier than we’ve ever been. We hear the slippery slope argument with companies like CoreLogic, Fannie Mae, and Google gathering massive amounts of data every single day and that they’re using that data against us to increase the amount of appraisal waivers and to lessen the need for human appraisers. And this might all be true to some extent, but slippery slope arguments tend to try to appeal to our innate fear centers by pointing out the scariest and worst-case scenarios. I’m never a fan of sticking one’s head in the sand and ignoring an argument, or worst-case scenarios, but I am also a fan of taking in all the available information that is evidence against the slippery slope scariest outcome. 

There are lots of political arguments that use the slippery slope and by presenting them, again, I am not making an argument for or against them, just using them as examples of the fallacy. If we allow gay marriage, eventually people will want to marry farm animals. If we legalize prostitution, we’ll see s steep decline in marriage rates, a destruction of the family, and an increase in disease. If we legalize drugs, we’ll see a massive decline in productivity, a nationwide epidemic, increase in crime rates, and an increase in accidents on the highways. All of these, regardless of their truthfulness or any factual supporting data, are forms of the slippery slope fallacy. The truth is that we can always guess at what the end result of a series of decisions might be, but, like they false dilemma fallacy, we can never really know what the ultimate outcome of a series of events will be. Usually, the reality is something different than any proposed final outcome of a hastily applied slippery slope argument. Again, just to be clear, just because the slippery slope is a form of fallacious reasoning does not mean it won’t come true, its just that you have to put it in its proper place alongside other potential outcomes that don’t all involve a downward spiral into complete chaos, violence, ruin, and anarchy. 

Ok friends, thanks for hanging in there with me this far! The last one I’d like to introduce you to is a fun one called the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. This one is also known as the false cause fallacy and it’s basically the Cherry picking of data to support an already decided conclusion. It’s called the Texas Sharpshooter after the comically satirical practice of shooting at the broadside of a barn, and then painting a target and bullseye around the closest cluster of bullet holes after the fact and then claiming you’re a really good shot. The Texas Sharpshooter fallacy is act of inserting meaning into randomness because it fits a desired conclusion. It’s the deliberate act of ignoring the differences while only focusing on the similarities. Basically, this one simply implores us not to ignore the differences and outliers in the data, while only focusing on the clusters of data that suit the conclusion we may want. In data science, this is sometimes called Harking, which is an acronym for hypothesizing after results are known. Not that coming up with good hypothesis after looking at the data is a bad thing, as long as you are not cherry-picking data that supports your desired conclusion and rejecting any data that does not. Obviously, we sometimes see the clustering illusion in appraising when we pull big samples of data and spit out scatter plots. Its typical to look at the clusters of dots on the chart and draw some kind of conclusion from it. After all, isnt that why you’re doing it? The problem is that the clusters of dots don’t necessarily always mean what you think they mean, and they can be deliberately misleading. Here’s a good example of the sharpshooter fallacy and how we, as pattern seeking beings, sometimes like to ascribe meaning to randomness. 

Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy were both presidents of the United States, elected 100 years apart. Both were shot and killed by assassins who were known by three names each with 15 letters; John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, and neither of those men would make it to trial as they would both be killed prior. Abraham Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy, and President Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln.They were both killed on a Friday while sitting next to their wives, President Lincoln in the Ford Theater, President Kennedy in a Lincoln car made by the  Ford motor company. Crazy, right?! There’s more though! Both men were succeeded by men named Johnson; Andrew Johnson for Lincoln and Lyndon B. Johnson for Kennedy. Andrew Johnson was born in 1808. Lyndon Johnson was born in 1908. What are the odds? Well, the odds, it would seem, are merely random and coincidental and, when presented with that information, its easy to paint a target around it and make the randomness have some kind of meaning. What meaning? I’m not completely sure, but meaning for some nonetheless. Be careful of taking random data and ascribing meaning to it based on a conclusion that you may have already formed in your head, or one you really want to be true. 

Thanks for tuning in again this week my friends, I hope you’ve enjoyed learning about some of the most common logical fallacies. Don’t hesitate to reach out to me if you ever need help with anything in your business, I’d be honored to chat with you and have the opportunity to try and add some value for you. So, until we speak one on one, or until next week, I’m out…