maniakes ([info]maniakes) wrote,
@ 2008-04-30 12:40:00
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Quote of the day
It's a pity Crouch didn't invite the Rev. Jeremiah Wright into the studio for a three-way conversation. It would have elevated the tone.
-- John Derbyshire of NRO, on Ben Stein's recent interview with the Trinity Broadcasting Network

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[info]herufeanor
2008-04-30 07:56 pm UTC (link)
Eek.

"science leads you to killing people."

Here I thought Ben Stein was an incredibly intelligent, well educated man. I mean, to start, he's a successful lawyer. You can't be a successful lawyer without being smart and well educated. Secondly, if you ever watched an episode of "Win Ben Stein's Money", you know he's ridiculously knowledgeable.

I don't understand how a many with that much in his head could arrive at such an utterly ridiculous conclusion.

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[info]maniakes
2008-04-30 08:32 pm UTC (link)
I still think he's an incredibly intelligent, well educated man. But now I think he's an incredibly intelligent, well educated man who has convinced himself of several ludicrous propositions.

Intelligence and knowledge do make it easier to arrive at correct conclusions, but unfortuantly they also make it easier to defend an incorrect conclusion, especially to yourself. Humans are exceptional rationalizers, and very smart humans are even better at it than most.

In this interview, Stein is oversimplifying and overstating his point for emphasis and to fit the medium (a telivised interview to a sympathetic audience). I've been following this for a while, and I'm pretty sure what he's against is science as a tool for arriving at moral conclusions, not a science as a tool for describing the world as it is. I find many of his conclusions along these lines absurd and hateful (he blames science for pseudoscientific rationalizations of evil ideologies like Naziism and Communism, which is laughable considering how bad the scientific reasoning behind those were, and considering how often religious rationalizations have been used to justify evil acts), but he's not quite as bad as he sounds in this interview.

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[info]herufeanor
2008-04-30 08:57 pm UTC (link)
I see. That is a bit less unreasonable, though still pretty clearly wrong for the reasons you already stated.

What amazes me is not just that he's putting forward an incorrect conclusion, but that he's putting forward one that so completely ridiculous and extreme. While I know that anybody, no matter how smart and well educated, can be subject to logical fallacies, I expect those who are smarter and better educated to succumb to less severe and obvious fallacies. The quotes in this interview are so ridiculously, blatantly flawed that I find it hard to believe that this is the same Ben Stein.

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