I was trying to make a point to further illuminate Radley Balko’s argument in his post at the beginning of this thread.

I chose two statements relevant to the Israeli Palestine conflict because I believe that on this conflict most people choose one side or the other and that making this choice inevitably causes them to see an incompatibility between the statements which is in fact is not there but is the result of unstated assumptions adopted in choosing sides. If you see no inconsistency between the statements then you agree with me, obviously you have not chosen one side or the other to the extent that it invokes the implicit assumptions that I wanted to use as illustration. You are close to being my hypothetical unbiased observer and the example does not work for you.

I believe both these statements are true or that at least reasonable arguments can be made in favour of both of them. The fact that a person may disagree with one or both statements is not the point. The point is that persons capable of seeing 1 as true would be likely to see 2 as false and vice versa. It is not about what you believe but about what you believe other people would believe. Think of people that you know, do you know any whom you think would agree with statement 1? If so do you think that they would also agree with statement 2?

Anyone who already holds either of those beliefs as true is making an error (neither is true: most such categorical statements are not true, and one of them has designs on being a syllogism without premises (because, therefore…)

Also, does anyone need a six paragraph monograph on cognitive bias?

If you wanted to create the comparison he was looking for, it would probably go something like this.

1. The Palestinians are justified in their killing of Israeli civilians.

2. The Israelis are justified in their killing of Palestinian militants.

I sincerely doubt you could find a person who holds both of those beliefs, but the beliefs are not inherently contradictory and a person could hold both.

Also, this is bullshit:

An unbiased person should be able to see that both statements are true and that their is no contradiction, the appearance of contradiction arising entirely out of unstated and untrue assumptions.

It’s stated in the conjunctive, so if either is false, the quoted matter is false (and I think both statements are false as written).

What Mr. Moulton has done is cleverly dress up the argument that whoever disagrees with him is prejudiced and biased as a lecture on the travails of cognitive bias.

That’s part of how you develop as a writer. If we only wrote on viewpoints that we agreed with, you’d become, I don’t know, Fox News.

My point is that I’ve had several assignments where I was assigned to write something in favor of something I didn’t believe in. And it taught me to examine a subject critically, and examine the opposing arguments so that I could argue more effectively against that position later down the road. We can’t, and shouldn’t, remain in our little safety bubble.

Er, that the two statements are compatible (but likely to be treated as incompatible by people who hold one or the other) was kind of the point. Y’know?

I had some fun teachers in my life. In college, i found you could tell if you were going to rub with a teacher on the first day of class, based on how detailed both the printed syllabus was and the amount of ruler-slapping that went into what pages were read at what time and grading scales. The farther away you get from contact information and office hours, the closer you get to the jungles of 1906. Even chemistry class made a big deal about not so much knowing the answer (like 1.8x+32) but rather figuring out how to take a celsius scale and a fahrenheit scale and taking that lesson of figuring out how to divide 180/100 and finding new places to apply that approach to problem solving. Although i enjoyed a comp 102 class with a teacher that would write a statement on the board and get the class to discuss it while he’d just sit back and give a little shove back to center when the conversation got out of hand. “The phone’s ring is through your nose” and “the sound of clapping with one hand”-type stuff. Then he’d make us go home and try to write something about the unwritable. Science and sentence structure are just vehicles to learn what you should be learning. Wish they had the internet when i was a kid (the degrees between source and recipient are so few now, and its so easy to make it public and share ideas/thoughts/concepts).

Your comment is really smart analysis. I hope to throw this in my own face sometime when making a strong argument about something that “just feels wrong”. Unfortunately, you may be accused of the poisonous sin moral relativism. ;-D

Did those people who took the “con” position really mean to say that foods high in fat and sugar were unhealthy, that people are biologically hardwired to eat fat and sugar as a survival mechanism, and that “government should be doing everything it can to create conditions that lead to healthy eating,” i.e., keeping people from eating fat and sugar?

So…the Government IS trying to kill me!

I can remember three topics; School of the Americas, Abortion, and Food Production where she made us watch a video with baby chicks being crushed by a hammer or something. Yeah, she didn’t win me over to her side of thinking.

There is a problem with getting meanings across, sometimes one makes or writes a statement with the intention of conveying some explicit meanings but the person who reads the statement see in it implied meanings which the writer in no way intended and with which he may vehemently disagree. These implied meanings arise in the mind of the reader because of prejudices and assumptions that the reader has and which he assumes the writer shares.

It may be that the teacher mentioned in the post above is making assumptions that Radley Balko must believe certain things because all reasonable people believe these things and that these things combined with the statements in Radley’s essay imply certain other meanings. Alternately it may be that the teacher is prejudiced and assumes that Radley Balko being a libertarian must hold certain irrational beliefs and that those beliefs in conjunction with the essay imply certain other meanings. Another possibility is that it is the student is misunderstanding the teacher in the same way.

The fact is that one cannot get some meanings across to some people whose assumptions and prejudices make understanding these meanings impossible. Some times implied meanings are intended and this is the basis of the political tactic of using “dog whistling” to target the prejudices of certain audiences, but sometimes one has no intention to signal any meaning beyond what is explicit, and one must add additional sentences explicitly to deny unwanted and unmeant but likely perceived implied meanings.

Consider the following two statements:-

1/ The establishment of the state of Israel has resulted in a great injustice to the Palestinian former residents of the area now occupied by Israel;

2/ The Jewish people know that after 1800 years of massacres and theft that it is unsafe to live among Christians as at any moment their Christian neighbors may turn on them, murder them and divide up their property therefore the Jewish people need a nation of their own;

I would warrant that 99% of readers would assume that the above two statements are logically incompatible, that it is impossible that one person could assert both of them. In fact there is no such contradiction, the appearance of such is entirely the result of commonly held prejudices. Most people take their ideas in packaged sets and most people who agree with statement 1 would be pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel and would find it very hard to agree with statement 2. Likewise most people who agree with statement 2 would be pro-Israeli and would find it difficult to accept the truth of statement 1. An unbiased person should be able to see that both statements are true and that their is no contradiction, the appearance of contradiction arising entirely out of unstated and untrue assumptions.

I just survived a college economics 101 class taught by an admitted Keynesian.

It was simple really, just answer almost all the questions exactly wrong and get an A.

Hey, thanks man. Truth be told, I had a long, long line of shitbag teachers, as well. I never really ran into anyone worth a damn until very late in my academic career. I like to think I’m balancing out some sort of karmic situation, but who the hell knows.

Meat of it is, I hang around libertarian websites not because I agree with everything that gets floated (I do not), but because the free exchange of ideas is encouraged. And not in some bullshit way, either. I encourage my students to write about any goddamn thing they want outside of ‘Hitler was a nice guy’ — and honestly, I’d probably take that as well, if just to be a sophist.

Well, I write too much. Way to get anthologized, Balko. I look forward to using it in class.

“Radley Balko, the writer of the first article, argues that obesity, and the conduction of an unhealthy lifestyle is a private matter.”

“I like the fact that Radley Balko talked about that the government is starting to intervene with this issue.”

“According to Radley Balko, government should have no business interfering what you eat.”

The question has to be asked: Is our children learning?