Jump to content
Science Forums

What Kind Of Fallacy Is This?


Kriminal99

Recommended Posts

Some people learn by copying and memorizing.  Others learn by reasoning and critical thinking. The former can know many things, but may not know why these things are true.  To learn new things, they often depend on prestige; group hug, to decide if they should memorize or not. 

 

Whereas the latter, by being able to reason and think critically, is able to understand on their own and is less dependent on prestige or the group hug. They may not always add group approval to their writings. If the critical thinker knows his audience may not understand, but is knowledgable, they may find it expeditious to throw them a group hug bone; prestige reference.  

 

This difference is not so much fallacy, as it is two ways of doing the same thing, but which don't see eye to eye, due to the type of proof each uses. The memorizer uses subjective proof; prestige. The critical thinker sticks with rational proof, which may contradict prestige. 

 

The critical thinker should be given more social prestige, compared to the memorizers, since he is able to do what the group hug does, all by him or herself. But since the memorizer can't reason and think critically, he/she may wait for the group hug to say if this is so. If the group hugs is composed of other older memorizers, then the blind lead the blind, so cause and affect do not apply. 

 

Hillary Clinton once talked about it takes a village. This is connected to group hug thinking. It does not apply to the critical thinker who can  perform well all by themselves, even without the group hug. The problem with group hug thinking is what happens if the group hug is wrong? Legions of memorizers will defend bad ideas, based on the group hug and not based on reason. Then even simple logic will seem suspect and require a group hug before it is memorized.

 

If the critical thinker is wrong, he does not have as much negative impact, if they lack the prestige to lead legions of memorizers down the wrong trail.  

Edited by HydrogenBond
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 4 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...

There's the old joke about the new CEO who wanted to find out how smart his VPs were, so he asked his sales guy what 2+2 was and he said, 22, at least, and probably more, depending on my commission plan, So he asked the engineering guy, and was told, It's 4, +- 0.00006, but it'll take 6 months and $500,000 to find out for sure.So he asked the financial guy, who said, it's however much you want it to be, and by the way, it's tax-deductable.

 

(Note: I used to work in finance.)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...