Appeal to Outdated Data – FT#176

08 Jun Appeal to Outdated Data – FT#176

Show Notes

The Appeal to Outdated Data fallacy occurs when someone uses evidence to support their claim, but the evidence has already been debunked or superseded by contradictory data.

Trump

We started out by discussing this clip of Trump talking about Chicago’s gun laws:

Then we looked at this clip of Trump citing Anthony Fauci incorrectly:

And finally we talked about this Elon Musk tweet:

Mark’s British Politics Corner

Mark talked about Nigel Farage getting NetZero wrong:

He followed that up by talking about Rishi Sunak having out of date figures on Green policies:

Fallacy in the Wild

In the Fallacy in the Wild Jim talked to Jonathan Jarry, who coined this fallacy on the Body of Evidence podcast. Jonathan is a science communicator at McGill University, and you can find out more about him here.

Then we discussed this clip from Law and Order: SVU

And we finished up with this clip from Boston Legal:

Fake News

Here are the statements from this week’s Fake News game:

Mark got it right this week, and is on 51%!

Pardons are still not a logical fallacy

We talked about the flurry of seemingly corrupt pardons from Trump.

The stories we really didn’t have time to talk about

• Marjorie Taylor Greene, AKA Mickey Rourke reflected in the back of a spoon, has critiicized part of the One Big Beautiful Bill we talked about last time, which is a bit rich, because she voted for it. But in her defense, she didn’t actually read it before she voted for it. I should clarify, that is HER speaking in her own defense. “Full transparency, I did not know about this section on pages 278-279 of the OBBB that strips states of the right to make laws or regulate AI for 10 years,” she tweeted. “I am adamantly OPPOSED to this and it is a violation of state rights and I would have voted NO if I had known this was in there.” It could be argued, as Eric Swalwell did, that reading the fucking bill before voting for it was her only job, but she was pretty sure voting for it would own the libs, so why bother reading it. Another aspect of the bill that was hidden away in the fine print on page 562 of over a thousand pages, is a provision to prevent courts from enforcing contempt orders on, for example, hypothetical Presidents who send people to El Salvadoran prisons and then defy court orders telling them to them back. MTG’s Republican colleague Mike Flood, from Nebraska, was booed by voters at a town hall when he told them “I am not going to hide the truth: this provision was unknown to me when I voted for that bill”. I’m sure as the Bill works its way through the Senate there’ll be no such slacking off, but even when the GOP Senators vote for their own bastardized version, one person will definitely read it – Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough. It’s her non-partisan job to make sure everything in the Bill is in keeping with the Byrd rule which bars the  Senate from including any “extraneous provisions” in budget bills. Basically, according to the rule, if a policy provision doesn’t have an effect on the budget, it can’t be included. Even budget changes that are “merely incidental” to policy provisions are considered out of order. Given that leaving AI unregulated for 10 years and letting people get away with contempt of court are not necessary to implement the budget reconciliation goals of the Bill, it seems likely those provisions won’t make it into the final version.
• Everywhere you go right you come across AI – not just the ones you go to deliberately to use, it sits in Microsoft Outlook like the old animated paperclip asking if you want help precis-ing the email you just received, it sits in Google giving you a summary of all the websites listed, as a summary already of the available links to your search query, it sits in Bing inviting you to make a picture based on your words. All of them have a disclaimer that states AI generated content may contain mistakes – even Musk’s Grok admitted to that. So like all diligent undergraduates we make sure, don’t we, that the stuff we used-to cut and paste wholesale from Wikipedia, (in my day from the latest edition of the Philosophical Review magazine in the library) and now get AI to generate from all the stuff that’s been bunged on the interwebs like so much trash into a dumpster, we make sure we read it, double-check it, and even rewrite it, to make it sound like us, and not that we’ve just copied and pasted it etc etc etc.  There are even tools, in the AI arms race, used by college professors and public holding-government-to accounters to check the AI-generatedness of written work. ChatGPT etc leaves little invisible markers in text they generate which can be read by such tools and assess the percentage of ai-generatedness of the shit you’ve just shovelled onto paper. Unsurprising then, that when the most under-qualified undergrad medical student RFK Jr and his MAHAhahahaha crowd produced a Make America Healthy Again report that cited hundreds of studies which decried America’s food supply, pesticides and prescription drugs, NOTUS.org found that some of those studies did not actually exist, and the Washington Post reports that experts found that scientific citations in the report were generated by AI. Some citations included “oaicite” attached to the URLs, that’s OpenAI’s marker for stuff it generates. George C. Benjamin of the American Public Health Association in this scenario is your professor Undergrad Kennedy Jr, and he says “This is not an evidence-based report, and for all practical purposes, it should be junked at this point. It cannot be used for any policymaking. It cannot even be used for any serious discussion, because you can’t believe what’s in it.”  The problem is that far from thus being sent down from college and told never to return, it is fundamentally RFK Jr’s entire raison d’etre – we know we can’t believe anything that comes out of RFK Jr – except maybe that worm? – so why bother even going through anything he’s written in support of himself? After all Fascist Barbie Karoline Leavitt said it was “backed on good science” – which isn’t even spoken on good English!
• Being the President is a hard job. Even being a shit President isn’t easy, and Trump fails at the most basic aspects of that on a daily basis, so imagine if your job was to get him to read the President’s Daily Brief. It’s an important document that includes highly classified intelligence analysis, information about covert operations, and reports from the most sensitive US sources or those shared by allied intelligence agencies. The PDB allows the President to make life or death decisions on complex domestic and foreign policy issues, and it’s what prevents him from looking like an uninformed fuckwit when he gets intelligent questions from the press, foreign dignitaries, or government officials. Politico reported last week that Trump has sat for 12 presentations of the President’s Daily Brief since taking office, which explains the fuckwittery somewhat since, as the name suggests, they’re supposed to be daily. There is also a written briefing document, but Trump doesn’t read that either, even if you write it in bullet points and include his name at least once on every page like they did in the first administration. So Tulsi Gabbard, whose job it is to keep him informed about stuff, since she’s the Director of National Intelligence, has been trying to think of ways to present the information so that he’ll pay attention. Personally, I’d make an AI version of Trump himself alternating between reading intelligence reports and rambling anecdotes about Arnold Palmer’s dick, because I reckon Trump spends quite a lot of his time just rewatching his old rallies, but Tulsi’s come up with a pretty good idea too. According to NBC, one idea that has been discussed is to transform the PDB so it mirrors a Fox News broadcast, according to four of the people with direct knowledge of the discussions. Under that concept as it has been discussed, the national intelligence director’s office could hire a Fox News producer to produce it and one of the network’s personalities to present it; Trump, an avid Fox News viewer, could then watch the broadcast PDB whenever he wanted. Sure, it’s not great that you have to trick the President into doing his job by wrapping information in a piece of cheese and hoping he accidentally swallows some, but whatever works I guess.
• “The person in charge fails to demonstrate knowledge of food safety,” the inspector noted in May amid the volume and severity of the violations, which is a violation in and of itself under the health code. – Who do you think that was and where? Yep Trump ‘bing’ correct, White House kitchen – “X” uhhh urgh! How dare you? You simply need to watch The Residence to understand that the incumbent POTUS is merely tolerated on the premises and is allowed nothing to do with the running of the dining in any way at all. No, it’s the exclusive National Golf Club Bedminster membership of which Trump described as “an investment in life, luxury & leisure,” touting its “top amenities & services”. Things that irked the Somerset County Department of Health included non-compliance with all three requirements in the “food protected from contamination” category, with violations including expired milk, raw meat stored improperly and a dishwasher that maxed out at 170 degrees – when the minimum required for commercial premises is 180. The club received a score of 32 out of a 100 possible points, with the inspector documenting 18 violations—nine of which were deemed critical, meaning they “may result in an unacceptable health risk.” You’d think the cleanest of areas the bathrooms would be fine surely but nope, unless you count storing a sanitizer bucket in one as a guarantee of cleanliness? This is a man who stored secret government documents in the john so waddyagonnado? I tell ya whadda the inspectorate gonna do – they issued the club a “conditionally satisfactory” C grade and required to display a placard with the grade in a visible location. The conditions were somewhat met with a snap inspection in June when the club earned a B grade with a score of 86—the lowest score possible to still receive that grade. The inspector documented six violations, including two categorized as critical. Keep an eye on the dismantling of the department of health’s public inspectorate anytime now, but be sure that the initial membership fee of $350,000 per year is not going to change! 
• According to a recently released federal ethics disclosure, Trump’s Border Czar Tom Homan was paid an undisclosed fee working as a consultant for Geo Group for two years before he joined the administration in January. It’s probably just a coincidence that Geo Group is one of two companies running the vast majority of for-profit immigrant detention facilities, and Homan is calling for a massive increase in the immigrant detention system, which he says needs at least 100,000 beds – more than double the 41,500 currently in ICE’s budget. While arrests have increased since January, actual deportations have stayed fairly level, which means all those detainees are going into private facilities, many of which are run by Geo Group who, incidentally, donated half a million dollars to Trump’s inauguration fund this year. Not happy with current rates, Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem have pressed immigration officials to nearly double their quotas and arrest up to 3,000 people per day, which has led agencies to instruct ICE officers to get creative with ways to increase arrests and suggest them to superiors. “If it involves handcuffs on wrists, it’s probably worth pursuing,” said one email seen by the Guardian. I’m sure it’s just about the rule of law, though, and not blatant money grubbing corruption, even though they are now regularly arresting people with no criminal history and targeting people who are attending citizenship hearings because that’s the quick way to round up non-citizens.
• Dinesh D’Souza’s goto FBI whistleblower/informant/grass/unqualified-whinger who featured large in Police State talking about how the US was a Police State and how when he pointed that out he was no longer welcome in the FBI and other made up fucking nonsense, Dan Bongino,  finally got his dream job – you’d think? He’s the bureau’s deputy director. Poacher turned Gamekeeper – revolutionary overthrowing the ruling class and getting to run things his way you’d figure? Nah – he’s had to stop podcasting about how bad things have been and it’s all Biden’s fault and how Trump has fixed everything – even though Police State was made about the state of America when Trump was in charge – yeah whatever – he’s had to stop taking to the airwaves and had to start taking a lunchbox into the office. He appeared last week on Fox News lamenting about how unhappy he’s become now that he’s the bureau’s deputy director, complaining that he “gave up everything” to take the job. Part of what he’s given up possibly is the money-making aspect of making stuff up for your MAGA audience as he and his boss Kash Patel made a fairly astonishing plea to the MAGA faithful during the joint appearance on Fox News: Stop expecting Hillary Clinton to be arrested for murdering Jeffrey Epstein, they stressed, because Epstein killed himself. Which of course prompted right-wing conspiracists to hammer them for failing to keep their promises to expose the “truth” about his death. Especially since both Patel and Bongino had helped promote those very conspiracies around Epstein.“I’m just telling you what we see in the file,” he declared. “I want to be crystal clear on this. I am not asking anyone to believe me, I’m telling you what is there and what isn’t.” Wailing “I miss me too” when told that one woman misses him and his show, Bongino added “Part of you dies when you see this stuff behind the scenes.” Yeah the making shit up part – just ask former mystical Q Anon arch-conspiracy theorist whose glory came crashing down when he eschewed anonymity by revealing his very normal Ron Watkins name – and I for one Dan Bongino would plead with you to stop whining about it – cos I’m laughing so hard it’s beginning to hurt, no stop please!  
• Trump’s tariffs are finally making American automakers take a good hard look at how they do business, and change where their vehicles are assembled. Ford, for example, shut down production of the Explorer in their Chicago plant for a week in May because of a shortage of necessary parts. They, along with three other major car companies, are considering shifting some production to China as a direct result of Trump’s brilliantly thought out and not at all shit tariffs. As part of the totally arbitrary trade war started by Trump, China has started requiring companies to get permission to export magnets made with rare-earth metals such as dysprosium and terbium. Those magnets are used in electric vehicle motors as well as windshield wipers, headlights and other important car parts. China controls 90% of the world’s supply of these metals, and their unwillingness to export them is causing global shortages, but they are very happy to allow exports of assembled car parts which include the magnets, so regardless the level of Trump’s tariffs, it’s becoming better for business to export your motor to China, have them assemble it, and import it back in to put in a car – a process which was previously done in a US factory. The alternative is to go back to less efficient, more expensive older technology which doesn’t use the magnets or strip premium features like adjustable seats out of American cars, making them less attractive to consumers. Well done Trump, you fucking idiot.
• In what feels like a tacit admission that they must have done that then surely; shadow chancellor Mel Stride said the Conservatives  will “never again” put the UK’s economic stability at risk by making “promises we cannot afford”. In a speech, he thus disowned Truss’s £45bn package of tax cuts, which spooked financial markets and led to the former Tory PM’s resignation in 2022 saying “mistakes were recognised” and acknowledging “the damage to our credibility is not so easily undone”. Which is odd cos that implies the mistakes they made were easily undone, or even just “undone”. There’s still the £22 Billion black hole in the economy that Rachel Reeves is slashing formerly left-wing things like disability benefits and winter heating allowances as a result of. And this week added to those PR disasters by saying not every government department will “get everything they want” in the upcoming spending review. And of course her goddammed position on ruling out borrowing for day-to-day spending and not raising taxes again fuels speculation that spending cuts will be made. I don’t get why ‘tax and spend’ is such a bad position to avoid – I know it was the criticism levelled by the Tories for 14 years, but let’s just assume that was one of the “mistakes they recognised” and vote through tax surcharges on multi-millionaire with a massive commons majority – or something? Meanwhile, out on the irrelevant fringes of an increasingly irrelevant Tory Party, Liz Truss said she had a plan to “turbocharge the economy” and accused Stride of bowing to “failed Treasury Orthodoxy”. Oh and Zia Yusuf resigned as the chairman of Reform UK, saying working to get the party elected was no longer “a good use of my time” Earlier, Yusuf had criticised Sarah Pochin – who won last month’s Runcorn and Helsby by-election – for urging Sir Keir Starmer to ban the burka “in the interests of public safety” during her Prime Minister’s Questions debut on Wednesday. Yusuf said it was “dumb for a party to ask the PM if they would do something the party itself wouldn’t do“. In response to Yusuf quitting, Pochin said he had been “a great friend and colleague”, adding that “the professionalisation he brought to Reform UK will have a lasting legacy” – it’s certainly not done it til now! And recently expelled Former Reform MP Rupert Lowe said: “The question is – how did a man with no political experience be given such vast power within Reform?” Probably the same way as all the others? Is my guess!

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