What is the Bottleneck Fallacy?

[@Pfhorrest]

I've never heard this fallacy named, but thought of something like it myself when -- and in retrospect I'm now even more amazed that this happened -- my old philosophy of religion professor was arguing that widespread belief in Biblical truth constituted a large amount of testimonial evidence to its truth. I countered, ineffectually, that many people all pointing at the same ancient book and saying "yeah that's true" doesn't add any support beyond just the book itself. I was sure the professor's claim was fallacious then, even as a student, but learning now that it's actually a proper named fallacy and all, I'm kind of amazed that he would so brazenly commit it.

[@tillschuttert7403]

I like your precision and systematic reasoning. Thumbs up! Keep it up!

[@CarneadesOfCyrene]

Thanks!

[@cliffordhodge1449]

Humorous side note: I am reminded of the Firesign Theatre album in which the narrator says, "Everything you know is wrong," and proceeds to present an 18th century "recording" of America's colonial forefathers in a tavern. Also, the record album titled "50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong".

[@bigredracingdog466]

I use those same five words repeatedly, especially when discussing politics or religion.

[@RENATVS_IV]

Very good video about one of my favourite topics: How supported is a claim or argument. Thank you

[@cliffordhodge1449]

This is very relevant regarding ancient texts which had to go through stages of verbal transfer, transcriptional transfer, and translational transfer. Even the most reliable persons will make errors or disagree on the proper translation.

[@Jorge857]

Love your videos! I have learned a lot, thank you for your effort!

[@CarneadesOfCyrene]

Thanks! Glad you enjoy. :)

[@doomakarn]

I accidentally used this fallacy recently in a debate, corrected myself when I found stronger evidence that contradicted my army of sources without evidence.

[@CarneadesOfCyrene]

The ability to revise your cliams based on additional evidence is a rare, but essential one! Good job.

[@v_tomazoni]

Where I live, this happened during the pandemic. French scientist Didier Raoult's study on hydroxychloroquine served as the basis for dozens of politicians and media channels to claim that this medicine really worked

[@tcorourke2007]

Another great video. I've been looking for the word citogenesis for ages! Although I see a lot of the disinformation being generated in media first.

[@Chamelionroses]

This reminds me of one time I claimed there was research for a thing and another person made a claim there was not. My burden was showing there was research and not what the research entailed so I gave links that such existed. Though this isn't bottle neck fallacy there are many false claims about things where unreliable sources or discredited sources exist. Some will make claims on topics where they think only the other person has burden of proof. What is that called?

[@CarneadesOfCyrene]

Good question. There are a couple of things going on there. One is a question of who has the burden of proof (the burden of proof rests on the claimant). The base case should be to suspend judgement on the truth of a claim. If you claim that something is or is not the case without evidence I would call this the appeal to ignorance fallacy (kzbin.info/www/bejne/pmrIq4F4d8ialck). If your claim is "There is research on X." Then you just need to show that there is research and it is really about X, not that the research, is good or well done. If they are objecting to the content of the research because they think it is not really about X, then you might be in trouble. But if they are objecting to the support for claiming that X, you can still say research was done, so long as you are not actually claiming X.

[@thoughtyfalcon3991]

Detecting this fallacy is exactly how the Muslims have kept a record of authentic sayings of the prophet of islam. They would research about every single person in the chain of narrators and grade the saying based on how many strong and weak links there are in the chain.

[@cliffordhodge1449]

So-called journalism has declined to such an extent - false and unsupported reports, as well as opinions presented as if they were clearly factual - one would hope that people have an intuitive understanding of this fallacy, but some can be pretty clever at putting forth doubtful or just false "information".

[@stevenjbeto]

“Context alters identity”, as taught in philosophy class back in the early 1970’s, suggests the importance of context in any evaluation of data in a search for truth. Consider an investigation of a crime. Few investigations begin with all of the facts; if it did, there would be no need for investigation. Most investigations begin with scant evidence and a hunch. On his quest to understand Relativity, Albert Einstein developed a mind experiment based on a simple Aristotelian Syllogism: If data point “A” is true, what else would have to be true? This lead to his well known mind experiment involving a man standing still facing a railroad track when a passenger train speed by. A man inside the train was seen walking down the aisle in the opposite direction the train was moving. What good is that, you might ask? Mind exercises create a grid, a map of reason, from which many questions arise. These questions can be used to formulate falsifiable premises. (Later fleshed our by Dr. Carl Poppers and is now part of the Scientific Method of Research.) In this early stage of Einstein’s study, a reasonable man might think Einstein crazy as the mind experiment is not proof. But, the proof is and was figured out by all the hard work made necessary to prove the premise, and the development of actual investigations involving solar eclipses, as I recall. Lesson? A hunch often leads to solution if and only if you are willing to put in the effort, which perhaps informed Thomas Edison’s famous quote, “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”

[@dedlunch]

Edward Bernays

[@mikevsamuel]

Might this play on intuitions from treating sources like independent dice rolls? If a roll of 1 on a die is analogous to a source being reliable, then when we have a lot of dice to roll we'd expect at least one of them to roll 1: for large n, (1 - 1/6ⁿ) ≈ 100%. Independent sources might be ORed; it can seem like the claim is implied by (source1 is reliable OR source2 is reliable OR ... OR source99 is reliable). But when all but one of the sources are themselves claims about other sources, you can get a situation where a claim is implied by (source1 is reliable AND source2 is reliable AND ... AND source99 is reliable). So going back to the dice, when there's a long chain of arguments, the reliability is analogous to needing to roll all 1's. For large n, 1/6ⁿ ≈ 0.

[@mesplin3]

The notion that credence can be expressed as a spectrum and this spectrum is similar to a probability measure appeals to my intuition.

[@RyanK-100]

Weak evidence is better than no evidence when a decision needs to be made immediately. Not making a decision because of weak evidence is a positive decision to not act.

[@AndyWearsPants]

This the problem with idea laundering, and it is why articles in journals published in the hyphenated studies are barely reliable and often delusional.

[@Vargulf-mr7pj]

Interesting video on and important topic! I agree that if a claim turns out to be based on a single source, that will, everything else equal, weaken the case. You could, however, be interpreted as making the stronger claim that the strength of a claim depends only on the strength of the one bottleneck source. This thesis is, I think, under normal circumstances dubious. Suppose I’m unable to assess the reliability of some single primary source - which I often will be unless I’m an expert in the field. If many scholars cite that single source, I’ll be inclined to trust that source more. The fact that a source has been much cited, I take as second-order evidence for the reliability of that source. So although a bottleneck will weaken the argument, it will not necessarily be true that it is irrelevant how many scholars or experts have cited a single source. I suppose this effect is driven by the fact that the reliability of a source is dependent on facts about the source. Since there might be many facts about the source that bear on its reliability, I’m normally forced to trust the expert consensus.

[@CarneadesOfCyrene]

Interesting argument. There are more nuanced questions here about, what kind of source is it, and why is it widely cited. Is it because it is the only historical link to a claim but one of mixed reliability (e.g. Diogenes Laertius)? Is it because most experiments show the opposite and this is the only one that supports the claim (i.e. they are cherry picking the evidence)? Or that it is simply the only experiment that has been done on the subject. Many landmark experiments that are widely cited have failed to be reproducible. Many experts citing one source may not mean there is consensus or support for the claims of that source. If you are trying to check the reliability of a primary source, by all means check what other secondary sources that look into its reliability have to say about it, but don't just trust the number of citations. A lot of experts cite Diogenes because he is the sole source for many of the ancient philosophers, and while his quotes are generally reliable, (based on how he quotes sources that are extant) his analysis is not. So simply relying on the fact that he is widely cited will give you and incomplete picture.

[@targetthetank]

Thank you for proving that most research papers for college and universities are not research papers, because multiple tests by different contemporaries or even repeatable experiments have not been done. It all "hearsay". Also more pride in real scientists that actually do actual research for published papers in peer reviewed journals.

[@6DAMMK9]

"AI drawing": Where 500k people talking about the crisis of AI drawing anime stuffs, 0 professionals actually read through the essays and find out that was not the case. There are design flaws / limitation to fufill the specific task with a highly generalized tool, and everybody is actually either abusing or misusing the model. Now it is outta control: It's called "spells" in East Asia, no once call it as "prompt" anymore. A bit upset as a Computer Science student.

[@InventiveHarvest]

Excellent video about building knowledge. I like philosophy when it's not being dumb. A+++++

[@cultondiase]

I suggest you a video. Watch this short video for results on intelligence and the self that even philosophy and psychology professors haven't achieved yet. The name of the video is WHAT IS TABULA RASA? WHAT IS IQ INTELLIGENCE? WHAT IS THE CORRELATION BETWEEN THEM?

[@davidpledger9842]

Feels like everything is fake news when you look into it this hard

[@HegelsOwl]

I have a weird fallacy for you: In my argument against the "Resurrection Hypothesis," (which I've worked on for about 40 years), I cite Josephus, "Wars," 6.6.2, that the Sanhedrin (of which Paul was a member) used evangelism to dupe Romans to pay for a messianic army for their own destruction. I sometimes get the objection, that since no biblical scholar (to include atheists) has ever cited 6.6.2, it must have been refuted. Nothing comes up on search that it's been refuted. No one can cite a refutation. What species of fallacy is this? I'd really appreciate it, thx.

[@jeffjones6951]

Beautiful! Guess "scholars" tend to cite only the sources that support their own preconceived notions (affirmation bias). And in this case an absence of "evidence" (i.e., citations) against their premise becomes evidence FOR their beliefs.

[@HegelsOwl]

@Jeff Jones That 6.6.2 totally ambushes everyone. Even atheists hate me for citing it, for some reason. You'd think they'd jump up-and-down in glee! No.They call me "stupid." They're as irrational as the Christians. Nobody who's read Josephus can possibly forget Titus' famous speech to the Jews after he took Jerusalem, and that's what 6.6.2 is. How has everyone missed it? Should go down as one of the Eight Great Mysteries of Modern Science.

[@jeffjones6951]

@@HegelsOwl Will check it out. Always go to the source material!

[@InventiveHarvest]

Hello Carn ades. Your homework assignment is to do a video on the coase theorem

[@andrewzebic6201]

Big example of this was with a famous article that claimed 98% of climatologists believed climate change was man made. It was an article made on fallacious grounds, using neutrality and statements of uncertainty as indicating support. It was widely propagated through many media outlets though, making it appear to be a certain fact, since so many other sources referred to that article

[@keno9964]

They used the same method to spread fear about covid.

[@CarneadesOfCyrene]

The stronger support for that claim would be citing the individual sources that argued for a causal link between human actions and climate change, not citing the opinions of climate researchers.

[@allantoh6162]

You're conflating opinion with actual research that happens to SUPPORT the opinion. They are 2 separate "things". And you used what you perceive to be the "opinion" part to denigrate the value of that overwhelming opinion that climate change is man-made, purely because it is, in your mind, "opinion". You discounted or conveniently left out the other side of that equation, that their opinions overwhelmingly dovetailed WITH THE RESEARCH CONCLUSIONS. Poor analysis on your part.

[@allantoh6162]

@@keno9964 Another false jump to conclusion, due to your own bias.

[@cinemanuggets24]

Can Lewis' trilemma be called a variant of the bottleneck fallacy?

[@CarneadesOfCyrene]

Yes, depending on your specific objection to it. The challenge would need to be to the claims of the Bible itself (i.e. claiming that the Bible misrepresents what Jesus said or whether he even existed). In this case the Bible is the weak link in the chain of reasoning, since it is a dubious source that was written many years after Jesus's death, and had dissenting accounts scrubbed from it. It appears to be the "gospel" of many people, but is actually only a single source that was curated to promote a certain viewpoint.

[@stevenjbeto]

“What is the source of the claim?” Consider the Catholic Priest tragedies. Is the claim in question from the Catholic Family who dared speak out against the moral lapses and criminal behavior of their Priest, or is it the denial from the Priest himself? The weakest point is not so evident. Is it the claimant’s or the accused? Is it wise for a third party to refuse to investigate a claim based on another known fallacy, ‘Affirming The Consequent’ (e.g.: “He couldn’t possibly be a pedophile; he is a Catholic Priest.”)? And, there is a silent vector: Confirmation Bias. What we have are three fallacies working against each other: 1. The Accuser; 2. The Accused 3. A ‘disinterested’ third party ( Is the third party looking for a way not to investigate?)

[@CarneadesOfCyrene]

A good point. In situations of one source vs another, (i.e. a single accuser vs a single accused) this fallacy is less relevant, while the other fallacies you list (and ones such as the No True Scotsman fallacy kzbin.info/www/bejne/l2O8Y2qNatiliJI) are more relevant. There's also a certain level of perverse incentives going on here. If the investigatory party benefits from not finding anything, there is a perverse incentive to not do their job. That does not mean that they will necessarily fail to do their job or that they will come to the wrong conclusion, just that the incentives are misaligned.

[@stevenjbeto]

@@CarneadesOfCyrene There seems to be a common tactical response by people who fear an exposure that may negatively impact their social identity, power and control, possibly their finances and potential loss of liberties. By utilizing the Ad hominem to slander the claimant, isolating him or her in the community, and destroying their credibility, the accused registers a vicious denial. In the case of the Catholic Priest issue, fellow parishioners were used by the Priest to do the dirty work, as it were. I have seen a similar pattern in other forms of defense and suspect the likelihood that somewhere in academia there must be studies on this phenomenon. Thanks for the clarification regarding my first noted fallacy, Affirming the Consequent, and for the reference to the ‘No True Scotsman’ fallacy. I will study it and contact you if questions develop. I suspect there shall be many opportunities for me to learn from your Channel. -SJB

[@RustyWalker]

Ah I see. This is like when theists like to tell us that "500 witnesses saw the risen Jesus. Paul says so."

[@Th3BigBoy]

Add me to that list. I have seen the risen Jesus as well.

[@RustyWalker]

@@Th3BigBoy Interesting. What was he wearing?

[@Th3BigBoy]

@@RustyWalker He had a robe on. It was white but there was a second layer on underneath it that was partially green. After our encounter I was freed from my addictions and made new. It was as though I was using my eyes for the first time. The message of the cross is an offense to many. I myself used to mock Christianity for most of my life. All over videos like this too. Nevertheless He is real, and that changes everything.

[@RustyWalker]

@@Th3BigBoy What other ways could you explain this experience?

[@Th3BigBoy]

@@RustyWalker I'll leave that for you and the other skeptics to worry about. I know what I saw and experienced and I am a witness to Jesus Christ. What you do with it is up to you. I hope the God of Abraham blesses you mightily.

[@marcyanus1430]

Weak hadith vs Strong hadith.

[@MatthewMartinDean]

5.8 thousand people saw this video, they must be on to something, eh?

[@kl3cb]

Thanks for creating these videos! Just this one argument completely obliterates so much of the theology I had shoved down my throat that was claimed to be reasonable and factual.

[@johnmanno2052]

There's no such thing as a "reliable" source, because epistemology.

[@p_L0]