False Equivalence and Attempting To Vaccinate Against Stupidity

This post is reprinted from a Facebook post from April 2020 and is presented here to take up space while I think of something insightful to say.

The phrase for today is False Equivalence, which is when you try to draw a conclusion based on flawed or false reasoning. Back in the day before we had a fancy term for everything you would probably have just said “that’s like comparing apples to oranges”.

This diatribe is aimed at any of my remaining Facebook friends who have been posting the false equivalence of “40,000 people die in car accidents every year, so we should ban driving” or as I saw this morning if you are Rudy Giuliani and as you are trying to mock the notion of Michael Bloomberg putting $10M for an army of contact tracers being hired and trained in New York you say;

“We should trace everybody for cancer, and heart disease. And obesity. I mean, a lot of things kill you more than Covid-19. So, we should be traced for all those things. I mean life possesses a certain degree of risk. “

Direct quote, not out of context you can see the video for yourself, I will post the link in the comments.

So Giuliani’s reasoning was a False Equivalence because none of the things he mentioned are infectious diseases. Relative to the car deaths example the apples to oranges there is that a car accident is not an infectious disease. Your neighbor being killed because he lost control of their car does not mean that everyone living next to them might also die in an accident unless of course they were in the car with them or they drove through your living room while you were watching TV.

Cancer, heart disease and obesity are not infectious diseases. Again if your coworker has a heart attack it does not mean that you will also have a heart attack because a coronary is not infectious. Maybe obesity is contagious if say your coworker brings donuts to the break room every morning and you eat all the chocolate old fashioned everyday, you both might get fat. But as much as you might want to blame your coworker for bringing the donuts, nobody told me to eat them all.

eh, I mean, you. Whatever. Shut up and mind your own business.

But lets just for a minute say there is some correlation between vehicle deaths and Covid-19 deaths, there are laws on the books in regards to driving that are intended to keep the roads safe and mitigate (there’s that word) accidents and fatalities. You must have a license to drive and you must renew that license every so often to prove you can see and still know the rules of the road. You must wear a seatbelt and all cars are required to have airbags.

You are not supposed to drink and drive and if you are caught you could have your license revoked because beyond being illegal drinking and driving makes you a risk to not just yourself but to others you might injure or kill while driving drunk. You can have your license revoked for getting too many speeding tickets, speed limits being another law meant to keep the roads safe and, yes mitigate traffic deaths.

You may not like the rules, you may not follow them, but I cannot imagine that the roads would be safer or the risks of accidents and deaths on the highways wouldn’t be anything but astronomical without them and if you choose to flaunt or break them the blowback usually only impacts you and does not spread like wildfire to other people.

As for cancer, there is some amount of what you might call contact tracing there. If you had a tumor and it was discovered that it was the result of being bitten by a radioactive spider while working as an unpaid intern in some mad scientists lab you can bet that at some point somebody might show up and ask if anyone else has been bitten by a spider lately, suggest that you get yourself checked then maybe spray a little bug spray around the room. They might also shut down the scientists bug-irradiating machine since having an unlicensed atomic device in a residential neighborhood more than likely violates more than one or two building codes.

Contact tracing. It works, or at least it helps. False Equivalencies only serve to erode whatever argument you were trying to make.

If Giuliani had really wanted to mock Bloomberg he could have said something like “Man, if he hadn’t wasted half a billion dollars on running for president he might have been able to fund a vaccine.” or “I’ll always be taller than him”

But I digress. I will end my rant here by saying Covid-19 has taken the fun out of life in a lot of ways. Tossing out factoids that only made sense at 3:00 AM when you are walking home from the bar doesn’t do anyone any good. Even the most well-intentioned bit of sarcasm can have a profound effect on people.

Just ask the President.