Hey what’s up Thinkers! Kathy Gibbens here…
As I like to do, let’s start off by doing a quick review of a fallacy we covered earlier this season, the Gish Gallop. The Gish Gallop happens when someone tries to make an argument by overwhelming the other person with a huge amount of arguments, some of which are not good arguments, and not giving the other person the chance to respond, then saying that because they didn’t or couldn’t respond to them all, they clearly don’t have a good argument.
If you see someone doing the Gish Gallop, the question to ask yourself is this: “Is it really true that the other person doesn’t know *how* to respond or are they just not being given the opportunity?”
If you want to review or hear more about this fallacy, go back & check out Episode 151.
Is your highschooler not sure what they want to do after they graduate? Well, my friend, Beth from Well Spent Solutions, is an advisor for high school students who are trying to figure out what they want to do and she invited us to have our daughter take the YouScience Assessment. Y’all, this Assessment was so cool. It assessed the way her mind works and how she thinks to help highlight her gifts & talents, and then it matched that up with different career fields that use those particular gifts & talents. Beth took the time to go over her Assessment with us and can I just say that it was so validating for her to hear from an outside source all the amazing ways her brain works and to see such a wide array of options that would be a good fit for how her brain works. Guys, I highly recommend this assessment. And what’s super cool is that for listeners of Filter It Through A Brain Cell, Well Spent Solutions is offering an exclusive discount! Visit www.wellspentsolutions.com today and use the promo code FILTERIT20 to get 20% off of their program Discover Your Talents. That's www.wellspentsolutions.com with promo code FILTERIT20. The link will be in the show notes.
Alright, let’s dive into today’s new fallacy, the McNamara Fallacy. The McNamara Fallacy happens when someone focuses only on measurable data and ignores other important information that is harder to pinpoint. And, yes, this could probably be considered a type of Statistical Fallacy as well.
I’ll tell you the real-life story of where the fallacy comes from in just a minute, but first let me give you a simple example of what The McNamara Fallacy sounds like.
Your friend Tony thinks the only way to judge how good a movie is is by how long the movie is. He believes that the longer the movie, the better it must be. So, if he sees that a movie is three hours long, he automatically assumes it's fantastic without considering other important factors like the plot, acting, or special effects.
Another example of the McNamara Fallacy can be found in education policy and standardized testing. In some educational systems, policymakers heavily rely on standardized test scores as the primary measure of a school's effectiveness or a student's academic success. For instance, if a school consistently achieves high scores on standardized tests, policymakers might conclude that it's a great school, while a school with lower scores might be seen as failing. However, this approach oversimplifies the complex nature of education and ignores many other factors. Students and teachers may be pressured to focus solely on test preparation, sacrificing valuable learning experiences in other subjects or creative activities. Moreover, standardized tests often do not adequately measure important skills such as critical thinking or creativity. By placing too much emphasis on standardized test scores, policymakers may overlook factors like teacher quality, curriculum relevance, school resources, and student well-being, which are all really important to get a good assessment of educational effectiveness.
The problem behind the thinking here is that when someone only focuses on the numbers and statistics, they can miss other factors that may actually have a bigger effect on the outcome!
Here’s the story behind where this fallacy comes from: Robert McNamara was a very smart man who worked as the Secretary of Defense for the United States during the 1960s. He was in charge of making big decisions about the military. But during the Vietnam War, he made some mistakes. McNamara believed strongly in using numbers and statistics to make decisions. He thought if something couldn't be measured, it wasn't important. This led him to focus too much on numbers and not enough on the real situation in Vietnam. For example, he looked at how many enemy soldiers were killed as a way to measure success in the war. But he ignored other important things, like whether the Vietnamese people supported the war or if it was actually making the situation better. Because of this, many people criticized McNamara for making bad decisions that made the Vietnam War worse. The lesson from his story is that sometimes, you can't just rely on numbers to understand a complex situation. You have to look at the big picture and consider all the factors.
Question to ask yourself: “Is it possible that there are other factors affecting this situation that the data isn’t showing?” *repeat*
Remember: When you learn HOW to think, you will no longer fall prey to those who are trying to tell you what THEY want you to think and it all starts with asking one simple question: “Is that really true?”
