The Irrational Ape: Why Flawed Logic Puts us all at Risk and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World

by David Robert Grimes

As the adage warns, the road to hell is paved with good intentions; poorly considered actions can lead to unintended, dreadful results.

But for all the virtues of our minds, faults in our reasoning are pervasive. Despite the impressive hardware with which we are gifted, we frequently make mistakes ranging from trivial to fatal. While these have blighted us throughout history, it is now more vital than ever that we understand where we can err. We have never been more at the mercy of charlatans and fools, from fraudulent health advice to the emergent phenomena of fake news and viral propaganda. These are not new problems, but the scope of the challenge has changed utterly. We live in an era where instantaneous access to the wealth of human knowledge is at our very fingertips. Yet the paradox is that this same freedom allows misunderstanding, misinformation and falsehoods to perpetuate further and faster than ever before.

The analytical aspect of this is vitally important. If we can learn how to trace the path of each assertion to its logical terminus, we can derive much more reliable conclusions than instinct or intuition alone would allow. Perhaps more difficult is to subject our own beliefs to the same scrutiny we’d apply to the convictions of others. We must let evidence guide us, and be prepared to jettison incorrect ideas and beliefs, no matter how comforting they might be. The question isn’t whether we like the resultant conclusion or whether it fits our preferred view of the world; only whether it flows from the evidence and logic or not.

An estimated 59 per cent of articles shared on social media are propagated by people who haven’t even read them. Reading an article takes effort, whereas sharing something based on an appealing headline alone garners social kudos without any intellectual exertion.

A 2017 PNAS study found that moral-emotive language significantly increased the diffusion of political content across social media. But this comes at the cost of turning us into engines of outrage, implicitly selecting for the most arresting content, regardless of its veracity or social value.

Anger is not a sophisticated emotion; it’s a prism that distorts nuanced situations into misleading binaries, and complex characters into pantomime heroes or villains. A

The instantaneous nature of modern discourse means we are primed to crave velocity over veracity, reaction over reflection.

A massive 2018 study published in Science delved into the fractured fabric of modern discourse, analysing 126,000 contested news stories between 2006 and 2017. Their findings make for sobering reading. By any metric one employs, hoax and rumour completely eclipse truth, and falsehoods consistently dominate the narrative: ‘Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information.’ Emotional content was again a predictor of how widely shared an item would be, and false narratives were crafted to elicit disgust, fear and direct anger.

it takes considerably greater effort to debunk a myth than it takes to craft it in the first instance.

Voltaire famously warned that ‘those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities’.

His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

This is exactly what Trump has done, with the help of the Rus!sian firehose.

Dictatorship can only thrive by subverting our critical faculties, homing in on our biases and exploiting the glitches in our cognitive mesh. Hitler was a devious and skilled orator who knew intuitively what psychologists refer to as the illusory truth effect – our tendency to believe information to be correct due to repeated exposure.

As the great biologist E. O. Wilson suggested, humanity’s real problem is that we have ‘Palaeolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology’.

All this leaves us polarised and divided. Democracy itself is fragile – we share but one world, and if we cannot even agree on basic facts, how can we hope to find pragmatic solutions to the problems confronting us? The solution is to adopt the critical thinking central to the scientific method, where ideas are advanced and rigorously tested. Those that withstand critical examination are provisionally accepted, while those that do not are discarded, no matter how elegant they may be.

Finally, ‘VI: The Candle in the Dark’

I see this as a nod to Carl Sagan and his book 'The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark'

When the structure of our logic is inherently flawed, we’re dealing with a class of reasoning error known as the formal fallacies.

For an argument to be sound, it needs to have (a) a valid structure and (b) premises that are correct. Validity might be thought of as the structure or skeleton of the argument.

Clearly, valid logical syntax alone isn’t enough; for a deductive argument to be sound, the logic must be valid and the premises must be true.

Formal fallacies are rudimentary errors in the logical structure of an argument, which render that argument invalid.

affirming the consequent

I’ve long been fascinated by how pervasive such conspiratorial views are and how they interfere with public understanding of science. This interest led me to write a 2016 scientific paper on the viability of conspiratorial beliefs, attempting to gauge whether such mass complicity by the world’s scientists would even be possible: could NASA fake the moon landings, or climate scientists perpetuate a global warming hoax? Constructing a simple mathematical model, the inescapable conclusion was that – even if all conspirators were skilled secret-keepers – large conspiracies were incredibly unlikely to endure for any appreciable timeframe.

The amusing absurdity here is that the Pythagoreans’ insistence on clinging to rationality was irrational when embracing the irrational was the only rational conclusion!

radiation simply refers to transmission of energy through a medium or space.

fallacy of the undistributed middle (non distributio medii),

fallacy of affirming the disjunct, which assumes that two conditionals cannot concurrently be true.

In reality, the onus is always on the speaker to prove their own veracity, and simply exposing elements of inconsistency of other arguments – real or imagined – does not automatically validate one’s own position.

drawing a positive conclusion from two negative premises – the affirmative conclusion from a negative premise.

the more strongly we hold our views, the more likely we are to accept even deeply flawed reasoning if it adds superficial clout to our world-view.

This means that all the formal slips are non sequiturs (literally ‘it does not follow’), where a conclusion doesn’t flow from a premise. Any non-sequitur leap in logic constitutes an inherently false argument.

This is called the base-rate fallacy, a term that refers to our propensity to jump to conclusions from a single example without an appreciation of the underlying reality. Anecdotes can exacerbate this problem, disproportionally capturing our attention.

Such errors are known as survivorship bias, when one inadvertently overlooks cases with a lack of visibility and instead bases conclusions only on successes.

If the anecdotal fallacy is the vehicle, then the fallacy of incomplete evidence, or the cherry-picking fallacy, is the engine that drives it. Cherry-picking is the selective use of evidence to reject or ignore details that contradict or undermine the speaker’s assertion. The evidence in question might vary in type and scope; it may be the carefully curated selection of supportive anecdotes and testimonials we have previously seen in the anecdotal fallacy. Worse, it might be a selective fixation on only the data that chimes with one’s prejudice while ignoring what the evidence truly conveys.

Cherry-picking is the mechanism that sustains belief in the face of overwhelming evidence against it.

In mathematical logic, an argument can only be sound if both the structure is valid and the premises are true.

the structure of an argument might be logically reasonable, but if the premises are flawed then the conclusion is questionable. Such errors are known as informal fallacies.

But before we move on, there is a vitally important lemma (a logical stepping-stone) here that shouldn’t be overlooked: the mere fact that an argument contains a logical fallacy does not necessarily render the conclusion incorrect. Ironic, isn’t it, that proclaiming a conclusion is incorrect, solely because an argument behind it is wrong, is itself a non sequitur? It is entirely possible to be right for the wrong reasons, and a poorly argued proposition does not always render a claim wrong. This error is argumentum ad logicam (argument to logic) or the fallacy fallacy.

In other words, valid conclusions can be wrapped in bad reasoning. This only becomes more pronounced when we consider how rhetoric misleads us.

An argument from authority is where a perceived authority’s support is used to justify a conclusion.

Relying solely on authority is frequently treacherous, especially when the expertise at hand may be inherently questionable – the predictions of economists, for example, often conflict despite their learning.17

the fallacy of the single cause, or the reductive fallacy.

Causal reduction fallacies come in multitudinous flavours, and perhaps the most pervasive of these are false dilemmas or false dichotomies. These assert a binary choice between extreme options, even when an entire ocean of options may exist.

The Machiavellian trait of this fallacy is that it can be used to force the unaligned or non-partisan to ally themselves with the speaker or lose face. It carries with it an implication that those not entirely in agreement with the proposal of the speaker are implicitly (or sometimes, incredibly explicitly) deemed the enemy.

This is nonsensical but surprisingly powerful, with a magnet-like ability to align the unwary in the direction the speaker wishes. Predictably, it has a long history of political deployment, most notably in the form of ‘you’re either with us or against us’ pronouncements, across all divisions of the political spectrum.

By their very nature, false dichotomies are antithetical to rational discourse, fostering extremism. The inherent polarisation of a false dilemma can poison pragmatic solutions and dash constructive dialogue. Its deep intrinsic appeal lies in its ability to compress an entire spectrum down to simple, mutually opposed extremes, explaining its long-standing appeal to despots and demagogues. It is, however, rather telling that its corrosive influence has not reduced with time and it is still employed in a wide range of fields, with tedious predictability. Social media is rife with precisely this phenomenon, where complex topics with a wide scope for nuanced views get distilled down to a shouting match between two binary and diametrically opposed interpretations. In these forums, the spectrum of opinion becomes curiously bimodal.

The class of informal fallacy that deals with cause-and-effect errors is included under the umbrella term post hoc ergo propter hoc (‘after this, therefore because of this’), capturing the essence of the error with charming brevity.

This phenomenon of affording more weight to easily accessed or recent information is known as the availability heuristic. When evaluating a concept or forming an opinion, this is in effect a mental short cut that relies on immediate examples that are easy to recall. This pivots on the assumption that if something is easy to recall, it is therefore important – or, at least, it’s more important than alternative explanations.

In Kahneman’s words, ‘this is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult decision, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.’

In Kahneman’s words, ‘heuristics are quite useful, but sometimes lead to severe and systematic errors’.

In defiance of the tired old adage, smoke frequently occurs without fire. The tragedy is that, in searching for phantom fires, we often end up kindling our own infernos.

The entirety of human life on the planet is one species: Homo sapiens. Genetically, humans differ by only minimal amounts – on average in a DNA sequence, each human is over 99.9 per cent similar to another human. In the words of scientist Michael Yudell, ‘genetic methods do not support the classification of humans into discrete races’.23