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This book is a crash course, meant to catapult you into a world where you start to see things how they really are, not how you think they are. The focus of this book is on logical fallacies, which loosely defined, are simply errors in reasoning. With the reading of each page, you can make significant improvements in the way you reason and make decisions.
* This is for the author's bookstore only. Applies to autographed hardcover, audiobook, and ebook.
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It is fine to compare things - even if they seem quite different. In fact, this is the point of a comparison, to tease out similarities and differences. People often try to argue otherwise (e.g. "there's no moral equivalence between X and Y!", a phrase which is missing the point). This helps in forming moral judgements - if we take A and B, and treat them very differently, a closer comparison could reveal that they're quite alike - and we were wrong to believe otherwise. However, sometimes the common standard by which they're being compared doesn't make sense - this is the faulty comparison fallacy (e.g. "broccoli has less fat than the market leading candy bar" - in this case, whether it's true or not doesn't really matter, since chocolate is a treat that doesn't exactly advertise itself as low fat in the first place). In this case, it is fine to compare 9/11 with 1/6 - they were both major civil disturbances that affected the U.S., with important political repercussions. What matters is where you are going with it. Note that 9/11 was responsible for far more deaths, far more property damage, (arguably) spread more fear across the country, and was thus the worse tragedy - which would imply treating it more seriously than 1/6 (otherwise, you'd get a false equivalence). That said, the fact that one thing is worse than another doesn't mean that the original thing is acceptable - if a Trump supporter reasoned like that, this would be a relative privation argument. |
answered on Friday, Oct 22, 2021 07:28:24 PM by TrappedPrior (RotE) | |
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