Breaking news!

After much deliberation, including consultation with an expert on fallacies, I've decided to add Bad Faith as another category to the list of fallacies on the right side bar. I feel this is for the best as I really want to help educate and improve the quality of thinking "out there", not because we haven't posted anything of substance lately (bloody marking...).

3 doors

I'm being lazy - another brainteaser:

You are on a game show and win! The host gives you a choice of 3 doors, A, B and C. Behind one is the prize* and there is nothing behind the other two.

He asks you to choose a door. You choose one (let’s say B).

He then opens one of the other doors that (he knows) doesn’t have the prize (say A).

You are now offered the chance of staying with the first door you chose (B), or changing to the one remaining door (C).

Q: What should you do? Or does it make no difference?
__________
*Feel free to imagine whatever prize you like. You aren't really on a game show after all, it's just made up. I'm imagining some kind of "marker-bot". A robot that could do all my marking for me.

3 men* go to a restaurant…

and pay $30 for a meal.

The restaurant owner checks their bill and realises they have been overcharged by $5. He gives a waiter the money and instructs him to reimburse the three men. The waiter is a bit dodgy, so he pockets $2 for himself and gives each man back $1 each.

Each man has therefore paid $9 and the waiter has kept $2.

Given: $9 multiplied by 3 is $27 and then adding $2 makes $29 [(9 x 3) + 2 = 29], where did the other $1 go?
_________
* Feel free to substitute "women" if you are that PC.

Bad faith - the fun way to haggle

Don't like haggling? Me neither. So I fake haggle to turn an awkward experience into a memorable one. I shall call this type of haggling the Bad Faith haggle. There are many options - I will describe one of these.

I am currently attempting to buy a PDA, and most storekeeps (sales assistants) assume that they can expect a haggle. I make the implicit explicit. I say, "I suppose at this point I should haggle".

I then pretend to make a cellphone call to my wife and to begin a conversation. In an aside to the sales assistant, I tell him that my wife haggles, even thought I don't because I find the whole process demeaning. I then say to him "my wife says how much discount for cash?" When he replies I convey this information over the phone to my fake wife. I then say, "she says you've got to be joking". I then say to my fake wife: "I think your last comment was unwarranted, as the sales assistant looks offended". This surreal exchange continues for some time - I can get quite inventive, and I have even managed to have a heated argument with my fake wife in the middle of negotiations.

If the item is not too expensive, I like to finish off this way. After beating down the list price by a modest amount through my fake-wife-telephonic-proxy-haggle, I agree to the purchase, and then calculate the difference between the list price and the discounted price. I then tip the sales assistant by the exact amount of the haggle-discount. This amazes the sales assistant and compensates him for his trouble. I like to think that it also gives him an anecdote for dinner table conversations and salesperson conventions which he can use for the rest of his life.

How to be a postmodernist

Tip number 1: Have nothing of importance to say and whatever you say should be idiotic and wrong. Lest people see what you are saying is unimportant, idiotic and wrong, you must never communicate it clearly. Write meaningless Gibberish.

Tip number 2: Avoid those who are adept at using Occam's Manure Fork.

Here’s a perfect example of PoMos following Tip 1 - from the book Empire, by Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri:

…a new paradigm of power is realized which is defined by the technologies that recognize society as the realm of biopower. In disciplinary society the effects of biopolitical technologies were still partial in the sense that disciplining developed according to closed, geometrical, and quantitative logics. Disciplinarity fixed individuals within institutions but did not succeed in consuming them completely in the rhythm of productive practices and productive socialization; it did not reach the point of permeating entirely the consciousness and bodies of individuals.

They follow tip 2 by having it reviewed by credulous fools, such as Emily Eakin in The New York Times, who thought the book was: "...filling a void in the humanities."

Roger Kimball, in his piece in The New Criterion, The new anti-Americanism, replied to that little gem of a comment with: "It would be more accurate to say that it epitomizes that void." Precisely. These people couldn't think their way out of a paper bag.

And on the off chance you need more reason to despise sciolism from this type of pseudo-intellectual trash, other than the fact it is meaningless piffle:

Antonio Negri was an architect of the infamous Red Brigades, a Marxist-Leninist terrorist group. In 1979, he was arrested and charged with "armed insurrection against the state" and seventeen murders, including the murder of the Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, who was kidnapped in 1978 and shot dead fifty-five days later, his body dumped in a car. Negri did not actually pull the trigger. But, as David Pryce-Jones noted in an excellent article about Empire in the September 17 number of National Review, "The Italian authorities had no doubt that Negri was ultimately responsible. Just before Moro was shot dead, someone telephoned his distraught wife to taunt her, and that person was identified at the time as Negri." He fled to Paris, where he struck up friendships with Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and other specimens of enlightenment. He eventually returned to Italy and negotiated a sharply reduced sentence for "membership in an armed band."

A delightful man, this Italian Political Philosopher. I imagine the photo of him above will be what he looks like when he (no doubt) finds out he's won the Nobel peace prize.

___________
Technorati Tagged - Fallacy, Skepticism, Gibberish, Post Modernism.