Monday, July 30, 2007
Straw Men and Blueprints
One of the huge arguments I got into on the Intarweb many, many moon ago had to do with the differentiation between creating “a picture” and “inventing a straw man.” The unfortunate thing is that some folks don’t know the difference. It is similar in subtlety to folks who go off on a tangent when you bring up the Slippery Slope. Not all examples of the slippery slope are fallacies, only those that have no causation. Looking at the side effects of something is not only reasonable, it is a requirement.
Let me get what the straw man fallacy is out of the way first:
Notice that the definition includes the words “ignores…actual position” and distorts, exaggerates, or misrepresents.
The purpose of creating a straw man is because the arguer chooses not to argue your actual argument, and creates a substitute (ie, the man of straw). The substitute becomes the point of attack. It is a cowardly way to argue (and gets you disqualified by committing a fallacy error).
A straw man should not, however, be confused with creating “a picture” in the sense that someone might ask, “How would that work, exactly?” Using examples of how something might work in practice is not creating a straw man. There is no intention to divert attention from the actual position or to distort it, only to put it in working terms to bring more light or clarity to the position.
The phrase, “a picture is worth a thousand words” is appropriate here.
The argument that went off on this tangent had to do with a discussion about the elimination of publicly support roads. To illustrate how that would work in practice I needed only to rely on history, which is how we got to publicly supported roads (private roads were a disaster!). I created a picture of how that would work in practice, drawing on historical references of how it DID work, in practice.
My opponent in this argument went goo goo on me. He went off on a tirade about how I was creating a straw man, and threw down the fallacy gauntlet… which I attempted to pick up and throw back at his face.
The end result is irrelevant to my points here, but suffice to say I gave up arguing with that intellectual bully.
One of his points to prove that I was engaging in fallacy was to suggest that just because it worked that way in the past, doesn’t mean it would work that way in the future. He went on to suggest that we could fiddle with it (my words, not his) so that we would avoid the pitfalls encountered in the past.
Uhh… OK. What could we fiddle with so those same things won’t happen?
This is the point where you can always identify a jackass. “That’s not my problem” was his (essential) response. Meaning, that he could engage in all sorts of theories and speculation about how things could be better, but he wasn’t going to dirty his hands to actually come up with a blueprint. “I’m not going to engage in a straw man.”
Thud.
His entire theory was a straw man! If you aren’t forced to get to specifics of how a theory would actually work, then you can argue the fantasy for decades, without actually having to defend your nonsense. It is classic navel gazing (or my personal preference of describing it, “mental masturbation"). People like their pet theories, but they hate it when you force them to see that the theory is unworkable in practice. They’ll come up with all sorts of defensive techniques to avoid facing that, including inaccurately describing your critique as a straw man.
All of this becomes very critical in understanding things and coming to a rational judgment. For example, the Founders based our system of government on the structure of Ancient Rome. They modeled our system on the Senate and our states on the provinces of Rome.
Rome didn’t turn out so good. Well, they lasted for 600 years, so they had to be doing something right, but the Founders (specifically James Madison) saw where Rome had made some mistakes, which (he believed) was the cause of their (eventual) undoing. A little bit of putty here, some glue there, and he thought we had a blueprint for a system of government that could withstand the erosions that befell Rome.
[Momentarily drifts off into a reliving a Monty Python sketch.]
The point of that is not to get into the discussions of it (although a branch of it would be interesting to tackle some day). The point was that the Founders (and most specifically, James Madison), transformed from being theorists to practitioners. Theories are all fine and good for discussions at Lady’s Teas, but eventually you have to put the cup down and actually DO something, which the Founders did.
How’s that working out for you?
That was a brilliant line from The Sopranos and has become the shorthand in our house to label a crazy theory. It had to do with an older psychiatrist questioning a patient who had made a decision based on what they thought the outcome would be (or hoped it would be). Of course the outcome was nothing like they intended, but the person was stuck in their theory and desired outcome, refusing to look at the reality, and kept hoping it would come out differently. Therein is the definition of insanity—continuing to do something the same way, expecting a different outcome.
To avoid the insanity then, the way you first examine a theory is to see if something like it has occurred—find out if there is information in the historical record that will tell you what the outcome will be. If you find it, but then suggest that the outcome will be different (because you want it to be different), circle back to the definition of insanity. There is no reason to suggest that desiring a different outcome will create a different outcome. You have to change the experiment to get a different outcome. You have to change the dynamics.
In other words, you have to modify your blueprint if you want an outcome different from the one in the historical record of blueprints.
We don’t need to speculate on “What if.” What KNOW the answer to every “what if” we could conceive of. And why is that? Because we have 10,000 years of recorded history, and there is nothing new under the sun.
Maybe, for example, the fiddling James Madison made on the structure of Rome was wrong. Maybe those weren’t the reasons for Rome’s decline. If the thing you fiddled with weren’t the things that caused it to go awry, then we should expect that our version of Rome will eventually collapse, too. That’s not a desire or a preference on my part. That’s just looking at things through the lens of reality. All societies, good and bad, eventually collapse. The question isn’t “if.” The questions are “when” and “how badly.”
Also, if what James Madison put in place was later changed, then we can’t blame James Madison, can we? One of those fiddles, for example, was the creation of two houses: Senate and the House. With the stipulation that the Senate would be selected by the members of the state legislatures, to decide things where no state would have more influence than any other. But we passed the Sixteenth Amendment, which eliminated Madison’s safety net, and then we’re surprised that the outcome was a disaster? Not me!
The change of selecting the members of the Senate from the state legislatures to popular elections was a good theory. It was supposed to fix other peripheral problems (such as political machines). But it did no such thing. In fact, it made it worse. Kennedy dynasty anyone?
If I were to suggest that we might want to consider overturning the Sixteenth Amendment, the most common response I get is, “What, you want political machines?”
That, my friends, is a straw man.
Undoing the Sixteenth would put us back to where we were and we’d still have the problem of political machines, but we have that now. It would undo the side effects James Madison warned about. We will still have to come up with a different strategy for dealing with political machines… or accept, perhaps, that they are an inevitable outcome of the human condition.
Six hundred years isn’t looking like such a bad run, eh? We should be so lucky.
