Some Defenses Against Misinformation

According to Chase Hughes, one of the best defenses against misinformation, psyops, propaganda, or whatever you want to call it is to be very good in spotting logical fallacies.

He reports that you should first remember that "emotional response suppresses critical thinking". So teach yourself to stay calm when you see the news. Furthermore, train yourself to spot the following fallacies:

1. Appeal to emotion. Our brain is more inclined to believe information if it looks scary. So be careful around scary looking pictures or words since they might override your rational brain.

2. Strawman Argument. This is misrepresenting the argument of the opponent. For example, summarizing the argument of a politician in a simplified way so that the argument makes no sense anymore.

3. Bandwagon Fallacy. This is claiming something is true just because everyone says it is.

4. False Dilemma. The world is very nuanced. With a false dilemma you pretend that you are right by claiming that it must be right because the opposite is wrong.

5. Ad Hominem. Attacking the person and not the argument. I see this all the time on Reddit. For example, Person X has said that we should buy more buildings because we have a housing shortage. Then a commenter says that is false because person X is just a ********.

6. Appeal to Authority. This is claiming something is true because an authority figure like a politician or scientist says it is true.

7. Slippery Slope. A claim that says "if we don't fix X now, then extremely negative outcome Y will happen". For example, if we allow this, we will lose all of our freedoms.

8. Hasty Generalization. Making giant claims from a tiny bit of evidence. For example, one athlete cheating doesn't mean all do. Another way to spot this is to remember "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".

9. Red Herring. This is when someone introduces a irrelevant topic or argument to divert attention away from the original issue.

10. False Equivalence. Pretending that two things are equal even when they are not. For example, both political parties have extremists so they are exactly the same.

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A joke and antisemite refutation told after the first world war

From The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) by Hannah Arendt:

An antisemite claimed that the Jews had caused the war; the reply was: Yes, the Jews and the bicyclists. Why the bicyclists? asks the one. Why the Jews? asks the other.

"Let's get real about free speech"

Great talk by Greg Lukianoff on TED. The presentation is only 12 minutes, which I can recommend anyone to watch.

First he clarifies that not all speech should be free. Some speech acts like incitement of violence should not be protected. But opinions should always be free.

The main four points of the talk are that

1. Free speech makes you safer. If you ban free speech, you can't hear who the Nazi's in the room are. You are not safer for knowing less about what people really think.

2. Free speech cures violence. Some people say speech is violent. Real violence is being punched in the face or being stabbed. "We insult the victims of actual violence by equating words with violence. Free speech is not violence. It is the best alternative to violence ever invented."

3. Free speech protects the powerless. Some say that free speech protects the powerful, but in fact they don't need that because they are powerful. It is people that are not powerful that free speech protects. That's why people like Ghandi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela were all in favor of free speech. Free speech is the best check on power ever invented.

4. Even "bad" people can have good ideas. And "good" people can have bad ideas.

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The Most Difficult Part of Investing

I’ve been investing some money for a few years now. One thing I noticed though is how it is a kind of character building if you follow Buffett’s strategy.

If you follow Value Investing, you basically estimate a company’s fair value and then decide whether you decide to buy or not based on that. After this point, the crowd may be ignoring you, going with you, or going against you. The stock will jump up and down each day. And somehow you just have to sit there and take the psychological beatings. If the price goes up, you have to remind yourself that that doesn’t guarantee you were right. If the price goes down you have to look through your reasoning again and hopefully you realize that your reasoning still holds. If not, you have to learn from it.

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About

Contact: email.

Publications

• Storopoli, Huijzer and Alonso (2021). Julia Data Science.
  ISBN: 9798489859165 (html, pdf)

• Huijzer, Blaauw, and den Hartigh (2023). SIRUS.jl: Interpretable Machine Learning via Rule Extraction. Journal of Open Source Software, 8(90), 5786, (html, pdf)

• Huijzer, de Jonge, Blaauw, Baatenburg de Jong, de Wit, den Hartigh (2023). Predicting Special Forces Dropout via Explainable Machine Learning (html, pdf)

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Sunlight is the Best Disinfectant

Quoting Alasdair S. Roberts:

Louis Brandeis is credited with writing that “Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” But why did Brandeis say that sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants? Because he was referring to a statement by James Bryce in his 1888 book, The American Commonwealth.

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Summary of On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice

This is my hand-written (zero AI) summary of the book On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice (2024) by Adam Kirsch. I've tried to extract the main ideas as well as possible, but would still encourage readers to buy the book for more details and a better written text.

On Settler Colonialism

After the October 7th attack, many people were first introduced to the concept of settler colonialism. However, it has been an well-known concept among academics for two decades. Settler colonialism argues that societies like the United States or Israel are illegitimate because they were created against the will of the native population. Since the concept is nowadays used for various political causes, it should be seen as an ideology instead of a historical concept.

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How Is a Cult Defined and How Can People Get Out?

People often say that that members who vote party X or party Y are inside a cult. I think we can all agree that whatever political affiliation, cults are never a good idea. They might even play a role in the ever increasing polarization that we see happening. So out of curiosity, I opened the book Cults Inside Out (2014) by Rick Alan Ross to learn how a cult is defined and how people can get out.

What is a Cult?

According to Robert Jay Lifton in his paper Cult Formation (1981), destructive cults have three primary characteristics:

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The Effect of Language in Propaganda

From Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of 'brainwashing' in China by Robert Jay Lifton (1989):

For an individual person, the effect of the language of ideological totalism can be summed up in one word: constriction. He is, so to speak, linguistically deprived; and since language is so central to all human experience, his capacities for thinking and feeling are immensely narrowed. This is what Hu meant when he said, "using the same pattern of words for so long... you feel chained."

Summary of The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

This is my hand-written (not AI) summary of The madness of crows by Douglas Murray. Throughout the summary, I’ve tried to extract the core of the arguments as well as possible. For more information about the sources and for generally a better written text, I encourage readers to buy the book.

The Madness of Crowds

Every day we see the crowds behave irrational, this book goes into the underlying reasons.

From the nineteenth century onward, many people lost their meaning due to religions falling out of favor. Something new arose to fill the vacuum. This something came from academia into the mainstream since the 2008 financial crash. It isn’t hard to see why a generation that might never own a home is drawn to an ideology that promises to fix inequality.

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