A Simple Introduction to Basic Logic (in four parts)

Comments

• hogboblin

  March 2019 edited March 2019

  @DarrenWalker

  ...but I like the idea that Socrates is a three-winged bat. That means something, right? My emotional attachment to an idea makes it valid, right?

  Never mind that it isn’t logical. That it makes me feel good is all that matters, and that should be considered as important as coming to a logical conclusion, RIGHT?

  My emotions hold the same weight as logical conclusions. They are as defensible as logical conclusions.

  Take me seriously, dang it.
• DarrenWalker (deleted user)

  March 2019

  @hogboblin: I also like this idea. It amuses me. If you want to logically reach the conclusion "Socrates is a three-winged bat" the answer is simple: change the premises.

  Premise: All humans are three-winged bats.
  Premise: Socrates is human.
  Conclusion: Socrates is a three-winged bat.

  There—that's perfectly logical. The logic is flawless. The only problem is this: all humans aren't three-winged bats.

  ---

  The same problem occurs when you like the idea of your two new bookcases being three feet across each, and do the math accordingly, and then discover one of them is actually only two feet across. 3 + 3 does equal 6! The problem is that one of your numbers shouldn't have been 3.
• laylanie

  March 2019 edited March 2019

  But this book I really like says Socrates was a featherless chicken! This book can't be wrong!
• Babichev

  March 2019

  Logical fallacies are so common we often don't see the problem with them.

  "Here is an inaccurate logical operation:

  Premise: All humans are mortal.
  Premise: Socrates is human.
  Conclusion: Socrates is a three-winged bat."

  He is? Wow! ;-)

  Here's one that, in the right context, can almost seem to make sense.

  All ducks are birds.
  Chickens are birds.
  Therefore, ducks must be chickens.

  Thou shalt not commit logical fallacies.

  https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/
• CuddleStella

  March 2019

  But wouldn’t the premise have to be proven true first? What if some humans are not mortal?
• pmvines

  March 2019

  I breathe air. Goats and horses breathe air. Therefore i must be a goathorse.
• hogboblin

  March 2019

  @stellarosass

  “What if some humans are not mortal?”

  That defies the laws of nature, and can be easily dismissed.
• respectful

  March 2019 edited March 2019

  Some of my favourite silly logic:

  The Hazards of Baked Bread

  -- more than 98 percent of convicted felons are bread eaters.
  -- half of all children who grow up in bread-consuming households score below average on standardized tests.
  -- more than 90 percent of violent crimes are committed within 24 hours of eating bread.

  Bread has been proven to absorb water. Since the human body is mostly water, eating bread could easily lead to your body being taken over by this absorptive food product, turning you into a soggy, gooey bread-pudding person.

  @stellaross The statement about Socrates being mortal is still counted as being logical, whether or not the premises are true. You can read it as: "If A and B are true, then C must also be true" (without having to actually prove A and B are true).

  A: All my friends love cuddling
  B: Sarah is one of my friends
  Conclusion: Sarah loves cuddling

  ... is logical, even if some of my friends don't love cuddling (or if Sarah is not my friend).

  (I had to find a way to get cuddling into this thread somehow!)
• garrablanca

  March 2019

  WoW @DarrenWalker I can see you are totally decided to convert everyone into a human computer.
  The thing is that in Humanity there is also craziness and illogical behavior... And sometimes that's also beautiful.
• DarrenWalker (deleted user)

  March 2019 edited March 2019

  Back from the watch shop!

  @laylanie: LOL.

  @stellarosass and @hogboblin: As @respectful says, the premises don't have to be true for the argument to be logical: only for it to be true. You can have a totally logical—and totally false—argument.

  @respectful: [snicker] I can translate that. Ready?

  If almost all members of a certain group of people do a certain thing, doing that thing makes you very like the people in that certain group.
  Almost all convicted felons eat bread.
  Eating bread makes you very like a convicted felon.

  If half the people who do X also do Y, then X causes Y.
  Half of all children who eat bread score below average on standardized tests.
  Eating bread makes children more likely to score low on standardized tests.

  If Y takes place within 24 hours of X, then X caused Y.
  Most violent crime takes place within 24 hours of the criminal eating bread.
  Violent crime is often caused by eating bread.

  All bread absorbs all water, in all forms, regardless of bread:water ratio, whenever bread touches water.
  The human body is mostly water.
  Most of your body will be absorbed by bread if you let it touch you.

  [laughing] Logical! But ridiculously unmoored from reality.

  .

  @garrablanca: I can translate that, too.

  "I can see you [have] totally decided to convert everyone into a human computer."
  DarrenWalker has defined the term "logic."
  Defining a term is only done by those who have decided to convert everyone into human computers.
  DarrenWalker has decided to convert everyone into a human computer.

  "The thing is that in [h]umanity there is also craziness and illogical behavior."
  If you don't know the premises, logic will not give you the conclusion.
  The causes (premises) for certain human behaviors (conclusions) are not known.
  Logic will not allow you to predict certain human behaviors.

  If you can't use a certain process to solve a problem (say, you can't use math to determine the combined height of two blocks because you don't know the size of one of them), that process and the problem are opposed (the problem of combined block height, for example, is unmathematical).
  You can't use logic to predict certain human behaviors.
  Certain human behaviors are illogical.

  "And sometimes that's also beautiful."
  Beauty is a valuable thing.
  The unpredictability of human behavior is sometimes beautiful.
  The unpredictability of human behavior is sometimes valuable.

  I agree that humans are too complex for us to ever have all the data we would have to feed into the logical process in order to predict behavior perfectly.

  I also believe that if we could get all the data (accurate and true) and feed it in, the logical process would give us accurate and true results.

  But, like you, I actually prefer an element of uncertainty. So I'm not at all bothered by the fact that gathering all that data is humanly impossible.

  Edit. Edit-edit. Man, this is fiddly. I'm telling you, perfectionism is awful. And I'm still not sure about that floating period, but without it respectful's spoiler looks like it belongs to garrablanca....
• DarrenWalker (deleted user)

  March 2019 edited March 2019

  @garrablanca: Put simply, we disagree on a basic premise.

  To expand on that....

  I say, "If you know the premises (that is, everything about a human and everything about the situation that human is in), logic will give you the conclusion (i.e., it'll tell you exactly what that human will do)." You hate that premise.

  Even though it's impossible to know everything about a human and whatever situation they're currently in.

  Even though that perfectly accurate conclusion might turn out to be a really complex probability algorithm, due to even perfect knowledge being susceptible to uncertainty.

  (This has to do with reality being basically the result of a bunch of amplitude distributions in configuration space factorizing more or less randomly, and even Yudkowski's explanation of quantum physics, admirably clear writer though he is, made my head hurt so let's just settle for "sometimes the most certain, positive, perfect conclusion is in fact 'either this thing will happen or else this other thing will'").

  All of us use logic to take premises (things we know about someone) and make conclusions (predict what that person's most likely to do in a given situation) all the time. Poor knowledge gives poor predictions. Better knowledge gives better predictions. Perfect knowledge would give perfect predictions.

  This seems pretty intuitive—I'd expect everyone to believe that on some level—so I don't really understand what you're so upset about.

  Or... wait, do you think that if someone else knows you're going to do a thing, and why, the choice is no longer yours?

  Edit: Changed the link to a better one (to be precise, the next one in the series). You can still read both, just the click the "No Individual Particles" link at the top or bottom of the article. This one's got more humans in it, that's all.
• respectful

  March 2019 edited March 2019

  @DarrenWalker Just a guess, but I think @garrablanca probably isn't objecting to being logical, just to an overly analytical approach to life -- as opposed to being more intuitive and feelings based.

  Speaking of which, I think intuition is really interesting. Someone might not be able to put into words why they did something, but there is always a reason, whether they are being guided by accumulated experience (usually a good thing) or by negative associations, prejudice etc (not such a good thing).

  Relating it back to cuddling again: intuition is very useful for filtering out creeps (a kid once said, "Listen to your brain! It knows lots of stuff"). But it can also produce false positives -- your gut telling you someone isn't trustworthy due to negative associations, e.g. they are from a race of people you once had a bad experience with.
• DarrenWalker (deleted user)

  March 2019 edited March 2019

  @respectful: I wonder. I defined logic as a process in which premises are added together to get conclusions, and he said I was "convert[ing] everyone into a human computer," and followed up by explaining that his main issue is with the idea that human behavior is the result of logically understandable processes.

  "Humans aren't computers," he might as well have said; "the things they do aren't logical, and it's best that way."

  ---

  Edit:
  But he's wrong—which would be fine if it were just him, but I hear this idea a lot. We can see how a computer's premises (the commands in its code) add up to the conclusion of what it actually does, because computers are simple enough for us to list all those premises. We can't see how a human's premises add up to the conclusion of what they do, because humans are complex.

  The premise list for humans is even longer than the premise list for weather systems, and we all know how well we do at predicting those. But that doesn't mean weather is illogical; just that we don't have the data needed for the logical process. Same goes for human behavior.

  Except individual human behavior is so ridiculously complex we'll never have the data we need to predict it perfectly.

  @garrablanca can't possibly be objecting to my argument that one should be overly analytical in life, because I've made no such argument. I'm overly analytical, but really, when have I ever said it was a good idea? Intuition is useful. Emotion is not illogical. I keep saying this. I am, in fact, remarkably passionate about this. Why? Because my reason tells me it's true, and I don't like people telling me I believe the opposite.
• TouchIsTLC

  March 2019

  I will continuously come back to and stay on this site even after all my cuddle boxes are full just to read posts from @DarrenWalker and @hogboblin

  Question - is there a way to "follow" people so you can track their comments in the forums without just looking at every post daily?
• TheFunCartel

  March 2019

  There is an amazing grasp of the obvious running through this thread.
• laylanie

  March 2019

  @TouchIsTLC that sounds like an improvement opportunity to me. Make it more like a true forum so that we can either go to the user and see what they've posted or possibly a way to integrate friends into a "see what they've posted" section.
• garrablanca

  March 2019 edited March 2019

  WoW... This is so crazy logical and beautiful... and also fun to chew, all this points of view.
• garrablanca

  March 2019 edited March 2019

  @DarrenWalker

  Well, Darren, my first comment was because I was trying to understand the need that drives you to feel compelled to post this short thesis about logic.
  This means it was just interpretation of the purpose, that also is not precise is just a point of view, when one goes beyond the text (because is fun).

  Well as you know is not new that I been telling you that over-thinking is sometimes useless, especially like you said we don't have all the data needed to get to a good conclusion.
  For me, that could lead to a loop of slightly different statements.

  And by the way... Here are some that I can say
  No, I'm not against logic.
  Yes, I'm against overthinking.
  No, I'm not against you.
  Yes, I enjoy reading all this craziness, because I definitely find good points of view, the other crappy ideas I just ignore.
  And sometimes I enjoy to argue when I have the time to do it.
  Yes, I think that we should look a balance of being logical, intuitive and passionate.
  No, I'm not saying you don't have those things like feelings or passion.
  But for the miles and miles of text yeah is logical to think this is too much overthinking.

  @respectful you honored you nickname, I'm impressed.

  Oh and
  the answer to everything is 42.

  Edit: Some grammatical corrections, my English is not that good, but I'm trying my best to improve!
• DarrenWalker (deleted user)

  March 2019

  @FunCartel: I am well known for my amazing grasp of the obvious. It would probably seem less amazing if more people had it. Which means, I suppose, that my goal here is "to make my amazing grasp of the obvious seem less amazing."

  Which neatly answers @garrablanca's question about why I'd bother to explain what logic is to people: I'd like everyone to understand what logic is so they'll stop elevating (or lowering?) me to computer status.

  Using Daniel Kahneman's ideas about the two systems that drive the way we think, I'm prone to overuse System 2—the slower, more deliberate, more easily controlled one—and I actually have trouble using System 1 (the fast, automatic one). They both operate logically, of course. It's just that System 1, when it goes "I feel better when I eat chocolate - I want to feel better now - I want to eat chocolate," doesn't bother to give you the premises, just the conclusion (which is a big part of what makes it so much faster), while System 2 lists pretty much everything.

  In common terms, overuse of System 2 is "too much thinking," while overuse of System 1 is "not thinking enough."

  Of course this is ridiculous, since you're thinking either way. It's just that the quick slapping together of premises (without evaluating them, or even remembering them afterward) is so fast it doesn't seem like thought.

  Overthinking—which I do often—is when System 1 has the conclusion all ready, and it's actually accurate and useful, but I'm stuck going over all the premises with System 2 just to make sure they're really okay. It's like checking a calculator's answer using pencil and paper, which is a good idea if you think there's a bug in the calculator's program, but otherwise....

  I rely heavily on System 2, even in areas where System 1—the intuitive system—is working just fine. This isn't "being logical." It's just "paying way too much attention to the logical process."

  ...And, alas, my wall of text is interrupted by an alarm. It's time for work. See you all later!
• TheFunCartel

  March 2019

  @DarrenWalker The problem with all of this is you are grouping things as either-or and that is rarely the case with complex issues or problems. I suggest using argument mapping software which increases the complexity of critical thinking as you go along and essentially demonstrates that the system 1 vs system 2 model is hopelessly oversimplified.
• DarrenWalker (deleted user)

  March 2019

  @FunCartel: Well, of course it's only a generalization—fast thinking vs. slow, intuition vs. analysis—but I think it's a useful generalization, which helps to explain that while I do in fact over-analyze things, intuition operates just as logically as analysis (albeit it's easier to make errors when you're not analyzing each step).

  Side note: Do you suppose it's a coincidence that 42, in Japanese, is considered unlucky because of the similarity to 死に ("to die")? The answer to life, the universe, and everything indeed. Given Douglas Adams' sense of humor, he might've done it on purpose.
• TheFunCartel

  March 2019

  @DarrenWalker So in your last post it becomes apparent this is not about logic but as you said an explanation of you over-thinking things. That in itself is shifting your premise from the mathematical to the personal.
• DarrenWalker (deleted user)

  March 2019

  @FunCartel: [blink, blink] ...Beg pardon? Sorry, I thought your objection was to my use of Daniel Kahneman's fast/slow binary, not to the main post itself. I don't see how "grouping things as either-or" is any sort of problem when it comes to defining logic as a specific process (which was the whole point of this thread, though of course it's gotten a bit windy from there, as forum threads do).