Mistakes in Reasoning, pt. 2 - The "All Roads Lead to Rome" Fallacy
This is the second entry in a series on obnoxious mistakes people make in reasoning. The first entry, on the difference between generalizations and predicates, is found here. If you see someone making one of these mistakes, direct them here so they can learn the error of their ways and I can get more traffic. Win-win.
This entry is about the “All Roads Lead to Rome” fallacy. It’s pretty simple to understand and so this will be a short entry.
It’s my opinion that this single fallacy is at the root of most of the obnoxiousness in our present day political discourse. The fallacy is where someone’s ideology, their way of interpreting the world, is used to bend any evidence towards being support for the ideology.
For example, let’s say Bradshaw and Teri are discussing the wage gap:
Teri: Women earn less because of discrimination and sexism against them.
Bradshaw: There’s actually legitimate reasons that women as a group earn less. For example, men work, on average, 15% more hours.
Teri: Well, women work 15% fewer hours only because of sexism…because bosses don’t give women the opportunity to work more.
Bradshaw: There’s also the fact that men select more lucrative careers in science, technology, and business, whereas women tend to pursue humanities and social science at a higher rate.
Teri: That’s only because science, technology, and business have bro cultures that discourage women! They’re sexist industries.
Bradshaw: Ok, men also work in more dangerous industries that give more hazard pay.
Teri: Only because our sexist culture assumes women are fragile and weak!
We’ve all dealt with people like Teri. No matter what evidence you present, they bend it into evidence for their ideology. This is the All Roads Lead to Rome fallacy.
The more reasonable approach is to ask the other party to make a prediction about a controlled experiment using their ideology. Predict what will happen; if you’re wrong, then your beliefs need changing. But as we all know, even in this case there will be some excuse, some reason why the belief still can’t change, because the belief is more important than the truth.
To my consternation I don’t know how to deal with people that think like this. A proper understanding of epistemology and logic will at least convince people that thinking this way is problematic, but people interested in how to form more accurate beliefs aren’t the problem in the first place. “You can’t reason someone out of what they were never reasoned into in the first place” as the saying goes.
This is an example of sophistry, the female is obviously solipsistic, as we all are to some extent. Arguing facts with feelings does not produce fact, just feelings. If you are arguing values, facts are meaningless. If this frustrates you because you are intellectually superior to the average knuckle dragging fuck puppet that is self interested well. Ok.
Perhaps ask Teri directly what it would take for her to reason that perhaps the root cause of these problems isn't what she thinks it is, but something else. It's a shot in the dark, and they're probably not going to engage honestly with the question, but the answer they give you will be a good indicator of if they're worth wasting your time on in the future.