Thread: The other tpg.com (.au) has advice from Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit

I was looking at these and seeing a few that I've been guilty of while arguing here. Then I noticed that it was another tpg.com... .au. Thought it'd be interesting to post them here.

CARL SAGAN'S BALONEY DETECTION KIT

Based on the book The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan

The following are suggested as tools for testing arguments and detecting fallacious or fraudulent arguments:

...

Common fallacies of logic and rhetoric

Ad hominem - attacking the arguer and not the argument.
Observational selection (counting the hits and forgetting the misses).
Meaningless question ("what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?).
Excluded middle - considering only the two extremes in a range of possibilities (making the "other side" look worse than it really is).
Short-term v. long-term - a subset of excluded middle ("why pursue fundamental science when we have so huge a budget deficit?").
Straw man - caricaturing (or stereotyping) a position to make it easier to attack..
Weasel words - for example, use of euphemisms for war such as "police action" to get around limitations on Presidential powers. "An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public"

I love that last one.....Weasel words.

Anyone notice that "right" and "wrong", have been completely replaced by "appropriate" and "inappropriate"?

Weasel words.. lol.

The more syllables the smarter you look? Wrong. Inappropriate.

I can pick out several of these that I've heard at work in the last month. I need to print this out and hang it up outside a few offices.