We met at the Blue Moose at 5:08pm on September 27.

Chapters 1-5, pages 1-53

This was our first meeting for  Nonsense: Red Herrings, Straw Men and Sacred Cows: How We Abuse Logic in Our Everyday Language by Robert J. Gula. This should be great for helping us to think and converse more logically.

We’ll divide the book into three sections to span 3 meetings.

• Meeting 1 (September 27): Chapters 1-5, pages 1-53
• Meeting 2 (October 25): Chapters 6-11, pages 55-151
• Meeting 3 (November TBA) Chapters 12-17, pages 153-222

We had a great meeting. We are all enjoying the book. We went through the ways language can be misused with emotional appeals, propaganda and mannerisms.

Here is a bit from chapter 1 that I want to share with you:

First, some general principles. Let’s not call them laws; and since they’re not particularly original, I won’t attach my name to them. They are merely a description of patterns that seem to characterize the ways that people tend to respond and think. For example, people:

1. tend to believe what they want to believe.
2. tend to project their own biases or experiences upon situations.
3. tend to generalize from a specific event.
4. tend to get personally involved in the analysis of an issue and tend to let their feelings overcome a sense of objectivity.
5. are not good listeners. They hear selectively. They often hear only what they want to hear.
6. are eager to rationalize.
7. are often unable to distinguish what is relevant from what is irrelevant.
8. are easily diverted from the specific issue at hand.
9. are usually unwilling to explore thoroughly the ramifications of a topic; tend to oversimplify.
10. often judge from appearances. They observe something, misinterpret what they observe, and make terrible errors in judgment.
11. often simply don’t know what they are talking about, especially in matters of general discussion. They rarely think carefully before they speak, but they allow their feelings, prejudices, biases, likes, dislikes, hopes and frustrations to supersede careful thinking.
12. rarely act according to a set of consistent standards. Rarely do they examine the evidence and then form a conclusion. Rather they tend to do whatever they want to do and to believe whatever they want to believe and then find whatever evidence will support their actions or their beliefs. They often think selectively: in evaluating a situation they are eager to find reasons to support what they want to support and they are just as eager to ignore or disregard reasons that don’t support what they want.
13. often do not say what they mean, and often do not mean what they say.

To these principles, let’s add four observations cited by J.A.C. Brown in his Techniques of Persuasion: “Most people want to feel that issues are simple rather than complex, want to have their prejudices confirmed, want to feel that they “belong” with the implication that others do not, and need to pinpoint an enemy to blame for their frustrations.”

The above comments may seem jaundiced. They are not meant to be. They are not even meant to be critical or judgmental. They merely suggest that it is a natural human tendency to be subjective rather than objective and that the untrained mind will usually take the path of least resistance. The path of least resistance is rarely through reason.

Page 4-5 of Nonsense: Red Herrings, Straw Men and Sacred Cows: How We Abuse Logic in Our Everyday Language by Robert J. Gula.