Logical Fallacies - Appeal to Authority

Several days ago, I received a comment on one of my posts saying, basically, "So this guy must be an idiot?  I mean come on man!" followed by this link:

Cambridge Virologist Slams Lockdowns as "The Greatest Hoax Ever".

I'll let you read the article if you wish, but the title pretty much says it all.  So, what to think about this?

There's a Logical Fallacy called "Appeal to Authority", in which someone presents a position taken by some expert and uses that person's position as an expert to claim that whatever he's said is right.  In this case, because the good Dr is a virologist, he must be right when he slams current lockdowns as a giant hoax.

Unfortunately, there are many examples like these.

Linus Pauling was a world-recognized chemist who won two Nobel Prizes.  That feat alone puts him in a very small, select group of only 4 people and is the only one to have won two unshared Nobel Prizes.  Obviously, a recognized expert in his field.

However, later in life, Linus Pauling took a position supporting a limited form of eugenics which you can read about in the article linked to above.  He also began promoting the use of massive doses of Vitamin C to treat conditions ranging from the common cold to cancer.

His research was treated with skepticism, as is common in scientific circles but as others tried to replicate his results, faults in his experimental design became apparent.  Ultimately, no subsequent, independent research was able to replicate and support his findings.  

So what do we learn from an example like this?  Only that experts can be wrong, even in areas where they might be considered knowledgeable.  Only independent research can provide the data to either support or refute claims made by anyone, even experts in certain fields.

And appealing to the expertise of an individual is never enough.  Supporting studies and data is what makes someone's claims valid, never the fact that they are an expert.  That's a Logical Fallacy in this case.

Elon Musk is well-known for his two main enterprises, Tesla electric cars and Space-X.  Not only is he rich, he's obviously at least somewhat of an expert in something.  He's also had a number of rather controversial opinions on COVID-19.

There's nothing especially new in what he's contended.  Such views are well known on social media.  The only point in raising them here is to point out that just because Elon is famous and rich does not mean that his views are automatically worth paying any attention to.  To do so would be an example of Appeal to Authority.

Unfortunately for Elon, the scientific evidence does not support his positions.  He might know lots about electric cars, but that doesn't mean he knows anything much about virology or epidemiology.  

As is commonly said in scientific circles: "Extraordinary Claims Demand Extraordinary Evidence".  Even the experts need to provide evidence.

About Those Facebook Shares

I don't generally spend much time reading screeds that appear regularly in Facebook posts. While sometimes there are opinions that are interesting or novel, more often than not they are ill-informed rants with few facts and even less evidence. As seen below, the words of the original post have been italicized for clarity.

Everyone who reads my posts know where I stand with the Covid virus, and the measures our governments have put into place. Let me clarify a few things.

Yes, a quick scan of your FB page reveals another Wexiteer and also someone quite dismissive of public health policies. I also note the use of that phrase “our governments”. Yeah, the people you and I voted into office so they would handle things that needs to be handled. The people who often came from lives more or less like ours. The people who could be you and me, if we wanted to go get elected. So I could write you off as just another Libertarian nutcase, but I will plow on through your screed to see where it ends up.

This is a real virus, that makes some people very ill, or in fact causes death in others. Especially people who have preexisting health issues or sadly, the elderly. I might add that being over 65, I am considered to be in that endangered group.

The typical disclaimer that “some of my best friends are black so I couldn't be racist”, or that “I completely recognize that this virus is real and serious, but....don't tell me what to do...” kind of thing. The problem is that you actually don't take this seriously at all. Nor have you tried to understand why public health measures are important. You “just don't like being told what to do”, when it comes right down to it.

Infection or positive test results, more on that later, are approximately 0.9 percent of the general population. Death rates are approximately 0.3 percent of that number.

Statistics, potentially dangerous and misleading territory. Fortunately, the OP only makes these two quick references to the numbers. The main intent seems to be to minimize the scale of this pandemic. After all, how serious can something be if it's only affecting less than 1% of the population, right? I see this kind of comment almost every day, where someone will say that 99.9% recover, or that less than 1% die, and so on.

The problem here is with percentages applied to big numbers like the population of a country. In Canada, if “only” 1% of the population died of anything, that would still be 370,000 people dead. In the USA, that's around 3.6 million people dead. World wide, that's around 70 million dead. Frankly, for a disease that many chuckleheads have dismissed as “just the flu”, that's not too bad. Seasonal flu might kill as many as 3000 to 6000 people (in a bad year) in Canada. So far (keeping in mind that this pandemic isn't over yet), Canada has experienced around 12,000 deaths. So perhaps 2x to 3x as bad as the flu, so far. Many experts believe that COVID will prove to be as much as 10x as bad as the flu. This article discusses why it's NOT “just the flu”.

Another problem lies in posting numbers that seem to assume that this whole thing is over. It's not. Any number posted today will be old news a month from now. As of June 17, the COVID death rate in Canada was 22 per 100,000 population. As of November 27, the COVID death rate is around 32 per100,000. In the USA, the COVID death rate is around 72 per 100,000, a bit more than twice ours in Canada.

If you really want numbers, you can spend a lot of time on this page: Keeping An Eye on the Numbers – COVID-19 in Alberta.

What IS interesting is the positivity rate, what percentage of positive results come from all the tests that are done. In Alberta, as of the end of November, the positivity rate is well over 7%. That chart appears well down on the site noted above. Epidemiologists have long recommended against opening things up too much if the positivity rate is above 5%. The virus is simply too difficult to control if community spread is that high. And once it gets too high, the ONLY way to bring it down is to shut almost everything down. This is why following the 4 or 5 simple practices is so important. It's either follow those or there will be more draconian measures brought in when there is NO other option. Even Alberta has recently had to recognize that reality.

My point is that there are many numbers. Most of them are changing on a daily basis. Some of the numbers are instructive and others won't be very helpful until we can look back on the pandemic once it's all over. In the meantime, deliberately using the smallest numbers you can find in an attempt to minimize the scale of this problem isn't really helpful. Just remember, a number is only small until it isn't. There was a day, last March, when there were no deaths attributed to COVID in the USA. Now there are over 260,000, a mere 8 months later, and that number is likely smaller than the real number (excess deaths in 2020 were estimated to be well over 300,000 a month ago).

Mainstream media has blown this into a huge fear causing event. Everywhere we look Covid 19 has taken front stage. Every second "story" on the news is about Covid. During the 1960's, the KGB ran psychological research that determined if you ran fear causing messages to groups of people, it took about two months to cause a permanent change in their psyche. That fear would exist in their minds even after hearing facts telling them there was nothing to fear. I only watch TV news about once a week now because of this.

There is no argument that listening to a steady diet of COVID stories can be concerning. Unsettling, even. Personally, I find the science of all this quite interesting. The world has experienced other pandemics, but this is really the first major one since around 1918-20. What it has done, though, is expose the very serious lack of science knowledge and understanding in the population at large. I find that quite concerning because it points to our inability to grasp the scale of other problems that we face globally and, consequently, our ability to address those problems at all, let alone in a timely fashion.

As for what is reported by the media? As everyone knows, “if it bleeds, it leads”. Sure, stop watching TV. But if you want good information, go to the science, and that science is NOT found on YouTube or Facebook.

Our governments, in their efforts to stem the spread of this virus, have seriously overstepped their mandate. Have we really turned into this "nanny state" where we want our governments to protect us from everything, and give us everything? How long do you think our economy will sustain this?

Once more, an unsubstantiated opinion. Or rather, two opinions. So, in order....

First, that governments have overstepped their mandate. I'm not sure what mandate the OP is talking about here. I don't recall seeing anything in ANY political party's platform about seeking the power to manage global pandemics, but I assume that the reason governments facilitate the building of hospitals, funding healthcare, pollution controls, etc., is to minimize unnecessary deaths. Just try and convince the population that governments “shouldn't” be doing things like that. The OP here is just miffed that he is being asked to wear a mask in the interests of public health. And recognize that public health policies will ALWAYS seem like overkill, unless they don't work. If they DO work, nothing will happen, and the naysayers, like this guy here, will complain that it was vast government overreach. If the policies fail, too many people will die and there will be a massive outcry asking the simple question” Why didn't the government DO something?”

Second, that we are being subjected to “nanny state” tactics. I don't think we're even close to governments protecting us from “everything”. Otherwise, they would have banned cigarettes and possibly even cars. And they're certainly not “giving us everything”. Hell, we can't even get proportional representation and pharmacare. Besides, I'm not even sure I understand why this comment is relevant to this discussion. In any case, the economy is going to be in trouble. There is NO way around it. If the virus expands exponentially, as it is now doing, you will have huge numbers of people sick (ie: not going to work, shopping, flying, etc), you will have hospitals overloaded (ie: other medical conditions not being dealt with, more people dying from COVID and other medical problems), and most people, being unwilling to get sick just for the fun if it, not shopping, traveling, working, meeting in groups, and so on. The economy is going to take a beating.

OR, we try to mange this pandemic, control the spread, and allow at some semblance of normal life to continue.

You want some examples to chew on? Look at some countries where the virus has been controlled (usually with short term pain for long term gain) like Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia.... and compare it to countries where their policies have been abysmal failures, like Italy (where hospital patients are receiving O2 in their cars because there is no space inside for them).

The next thing is the PCR test in use. The inventor of this test says it was not designed to test for Corona viruses, and that if you run the test long enough it will find a disease of some kind in everyone.

This is a classic bit of factually incorrect nonsense that has wormed it's way into many social media posts. Unfortunately, it's simply NOT TRUE. This highlights, once again, the risks of just sharing everything you see that you happen to like (in other words, whatever happens to coincide with your personal biases) without checking to see if it's true or not.

In fact, the inventor of this test, one Kary B. Mullis (who died in August 2019, some months before the SARS-CoV-2 virus appeared, making comments from him about this virus quite impossible), said no such thing. The only thing Dr Mullis commented on was that the test he invented didn't seem as useful as a quantitative tool, which just means that you might not want to rely on it to determine how many (in this case, viral) particles were present in the original sample, but it's certainly very good at determining if those viral particles are present and exactly what they are.

It's a very common mistake made by all the YouTube PhDs that have popped up lately to claim that the PCR test can't identify any piece of DNA in particular. In fact, it can. The PCR test can be set up to test for the presence of pretty much any segment of DNA or RNA that we might want to find. Since the complete genetic sequence of this current coronavirus was established back in March 2020, and since we can pick out sections in that genome that are unique to that virus, it is a relatively easy task to set the PCR test to work to see if those unique segments are there. If they are found, it means, very simply, that you have been exposed to the virus and that is is in your body.

If you want to read a more complete assessment of this issue, this short article explains it quite well.

It's important to note that the PCR test does not need to look for the entire viral genome, only for a unique and shorter segment. This is done to reduce cost and testing time. One thing, among many, that these YouTube PhDs don't understand is that the PCR test actually CAN identify a specific pathogen by finding specific sequences of genetic material. That is, quite literally, what this test is designed to do.

Recently Elon Musk, owner of Tesla, tested 4 times in one day. Same nurse, same test, 4 times. He got 2 negatives, and 2 positives. He was not ill in any way. Yet, we shut down our economies based on the results of this test.

Once again, more social media nonsense from these armchair PhDs. To start with, Elon Musk was being tested with one of these “rapid Covid tests”. One reason why these are not widely available in Canada, or in BC, is that they are really not accurate enough yet. These tests actually DO have fairly well-established false negative and false positive result rates. As this article points out, Elon's two false negative results are within the known limitations for this kind of test.

Elon then goes on to question the PCR test itself, once again illustrating the dangers of poorly-informed people commenting about complex technology that they know nothing about. Elon should stick to electric cars, a topic that he actually does know something about. The article linked to above explains why Elon's comments about the PCR test are faulty.

And one more comment about the PCR test. There are many, many, many posts on social media about “the high false positive rate” of the PCR test. A quick search will provide good answers to this from institutions that are well qualified to comment about this. This information from Public Health Ontario covers most questions aboutthe PCR tests used in that province. In actual fact, the false positive rate of the PCR test is widely quoted to be much less than 2%, even close to zero. The false negative rate can be somewhere between 2% and 37%. What it means is this: If the PCR test done on a swab from the inner reaches of your nasal cavities comes back as positive, there is an almost 100% certainty that you harbour the virus in your body. If it comes back negative, it means that there is still a statistical chance that you DO have the virus. The various tests that can be done are described here in this article from Harvard Medical.

Let me say this about the politics of this situation. Any time we give our politicians the kind of power we have given them, our rights and freedoms are in serious danger. All of these freedoms are God given and hard fought for by our predecessors. We cannot and must not, let them be degraded.

First, I object to the phrase “God given”. I'm an atheist. God (or god) has nothing to do with this at all, IMHO, especially since he/she/it doesn't exist..... And if you think your “freedoms are being taken away because you are being asked to wash you hands and wear a mask....but refuse to do these things that will help protect others, you have little justification dragging god into this discussion.

Otherwise,, this strikes me as more Libertarian whining. As a population, even in open western democracies, we give our governments power to put a wide range of restrictions on what we can do. Surely it isn't necessary to reproduce a list here, but a few are worth making. Over the decades, governments have enacted rules that force us to: drive within certain speed limits, drive on one side of the road or another, not drive the wrong way on one-way streets, pay taxes on reported income, license our vehicles, not discharge firearms in populated areas, get a license before going hunting or fishing, follow building and electrical codes for our homes, not assault others, either verbally or physically, not practice medicine without a license, not teach school without a license, not make counterfeit currency, not operate a business without a license, not kill other people.... I'm sure you get the point.

Most of us, at one time or another, have bitched about all these “government regulations” and about some laws that we see as nonsensical. Use of recreational drugs jumps to mind here. Nevertheless, there are still laws about these even now, despite the collateral damage that such laws have created over the decades. (We all know that the “war on drugs” has been an abject failure). People incarcerated for smoking a joint, for example. Lack of research into the possible medical benefits of cannabis for another. The way to fix any of these perceived problems is to put pressure on our elected officials to change these laws where evidence supports that change.

If I can be permitted an ideological aside here, for decades, progressives (and Libertarians, I believe) have contended that personal use of recreational drugs should NOT be a criminal matter and that drug addiction should not be criminalized but treated as a public health issue. Conservatives, on the other hand, have resisted changes in that direction. That could be why we still have very high rates of death from drug overdoses because we have not been able to bring in changes to deal with these problems. Conservatives have resisted every step of the way.

Finally, we live in a world that is inherently dangerous. We can be taken down at any time by a virus or bacteria. Car crashes, random violence, heart attack, stroke, and injury of many kinds happen all the time. If we were serious about saving lives, we would outlaw every sport and activity that causes injury and death. We would outlaw cigarettes and fatty foods.

What I think the OP is saying here is that since we are all at varying degrees of risk of dying from a wide range of things, that we really shouldn't be trying to reduce those death rates, because <shrug>, y'know, shit happens. Y'all gotta die sometime, right? So no vaccines, no hospitals, no doctors, no ambulances, no speed limits, no road rules of any kind, no building codes, no training and licensing requirements for anyone no matter what.... Surely that isn't what he really means, but that is more or less what he is saying.

So we DO have rules about helmets, seat belts, car seats for kids. Those rules are there for good reasons. They make our dangerous lives somewhat safer. (Perhaps they are there to help protect people from themselves, since many are too stupid to take the precautions without being told to). So safe, in fact, that we've forgotten how dangerous certain parts of it have been in the past. This is why more people resist vaccines. They haven't experienced the terrors and damage (personal and economic) of serious infectious diseases. The parallels between this current pandemic and the 1918-20 flu pandemic are uncanny. I would recommend reading The Great Influenza by John M Barry.

As an aside, my personal opinion is that we should ban cigarettes and some of this overly processed, high salt, high fat junk that passes for “food” these days. We would be better off. So if Libertarians want to hop on that particular bandwagon, I'll be right there behind them. But only if I can still have my beer and chips at the end of the day.

We would also feed the starving and help the poorest of poor. Starvation kills thousands every day. We need to get our priorities right, and do what we were put here for.

Don't get me started about straw man arguments. We could solve inequalities in our societies, we could solve starvation, poverty, illiteracy... There are known fixes for all of those things. The reason we haven't is because it's very easy for people in rich countries to ignore all of these things. These are “other people's problems”. We didn't sort those problems before COVID because we didn't care enough to sort them. Don't blame current public health measures like social distancing and mask wearing for our continuing failure to sort those issues now. We didn't have our priorities right before. COVID is not the reason why we haven't fixed those problems in the past 9 months.

Thanks for listening.

And this is why I don't bother reading stuff like this. Too short on facts. No evidence to back any of it up. An aggravating lack of knowledge, especially of the science behind what's happening. Just. Not. Worth. The. Time.

So, before sharing stuff like the post I've been commenting on, spend some time fact-checking what's being said. Promoting misinformation is one of the causes of the problems we're finding ourselves in these days. Don't contribute to it. Get the facts. Promote those.

My 2 cents.

The Beginning of the End

 The big news today was the call by media outlets in the USA, based on vote counts announced in a few more states, that Donald Trump has been beaten by Joe Biden.  Biden will become the 46th President of the USA.

There has been lots of rejoicing, probably summarized by this little picture:

There will be recounts and legal challenges, to be sure, but the outcome seems pretty clear.  Biden will become President and the USA, but reconciliation with the nearly 50% of voters who supported Trump will not be easy.

Trump and his team have persisted in attempts to seed distrust in the election's outcome.

So, the analysis has already begun.

This article contends that all this election has done is to show us all what the "real" America is.

And this article from The Atlantic addresses the electoral divide and the difficulty both parties will have in coming to terms with the outcome.

Just one more thing in a year that has already had its share of "things".