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I started reading a bit about logic some time ago and have quite enjoyed it. I do need some help with a statement recently made in the media which seems to me to be based on floppy logic.
It fell out of a nasty mass murder in which people were shot on the street almost at random. Shortly after the shooter was captured, a local politician tried to reassure a shaken city by announcing that the streets were as safe now as they had been before the shooting spree started. To me, that's just loopy. The streets were obviously not all that safe originally as some wacko could pop up and start a gun battle.
Is the way I am looking at his pronouncement wrong or was the original statement illogical? If the latter, how would such a fallacy be classified?
Maybe a post hoc argument of correlation/causation? This incident made the street unsafe, therefore the lack of safety on this street is only due to this incident.
I started reading a bit about logic some time ago and have quite enjoyed it. I do need some help with a statement recently made in the media which seems to me to be based on floppy logic.
It fell out of a nasty mass murder in which people were shot on the street almost at random. Shortly after the shooter was captured, a local politician tried to reassure a shaken city by announcing that the streets were as safe now as they had been before the shooting spree started. To me, that's just loopy. The streets were obviously not all that safe originally as some wacko could pop up and start a gun battle.
Is the way I am looking at his pronouncement wrong or was the original statement illogical? If the latter, how would such a fallacy be classified?
Thanks.
Your first mistake was believing that people are always logical.
Your second mistake was believing that a politician could be logical.
Now don't try to tear those statements apart looking for the logic. You just might hurt yourself... lol.
Maybe a post hoc argument of correlation/causation? This incident made the street unsafe, therefore the lack of safety on this street is only due to this incident.
I think so too. People sort of assume that the streets are "safe" relatively speaking until some incident occurs. Then some start being afraid, and then when the threat is removed, they start to feel that it's safe again.
I think it is a function of us being pattern-matching creatures. Or more exactly, we notice aberrant patterns. Most citizens are relatively law-abiding and non-violent. The gunman was a huge aberration. The aberration now being removed, the threat is removed. I hate to admit it, but in terms of what it actually was, the politician's statement was logical. Overgeneralizing its intended meaning is overthinking it. The politician was not saying that something like this could never happen again. He was saying that we can put this aberration behind us and rest assured he is not still an actor.
I think politicians, being human, probably have more sense than we sometimes give them credit for. At some level that politician knew that a slightly more evolved train of thought would be to assess how that aberration came to be and take steps to minimize the probability that it would ever happen again. But that quickly becomes complex and impractical because such aberrations arise out of things far beyond the scope of city government and the will of society to act. It would require society to address mental health care, attitudes towards mental health care, attitudes towards health care spending generally, gun control, and attitudes towards gun control, and it would require an effort that's national in scope. And so it is more pragmatic to just say, the threat is past, nothing to worry about here, move along folks, and let's return to business as usual and hope for the best. That fulfills one of a politician's main functions, which is to provide for that ever-nebulous "common good" which particularly at the city government level is restoring the balance of law and order and public faith therein.
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