Hey, what’s up guys! I hope you enjoyed the discussion on 10 questions to help you think about online drama from yesterday! I’m telling you, these thinking skills will help you so much when you’re faced with situations where people are trying to tell you what you should think about it. Don’t fall for it. You do the thinking, you filter it through your brain cells and come up with your own conclusions!
Anyways, I wanted to start today by sharing a review that one of your left for the podcast. This review is from a listener called “Jenniferpriceless”
Thank you so much for listening, for sharing and for reviewing the podcast! Truly, it helps the algorithm matrix to get the podcast in front of more people!
Ok, so let’s talk about a new fallacy today. Today’s fallacy is the Part-to-Whole Fallacy. The part-to-whole fallacy is when someone makes an assumption that what’s true about one part of a group or a thing has to be applied to other or to all parts of that group or thing.
A super simple example would be: “Wow, I’ve met two girls with beautiful red hair in this church…do all the girls here have red hair?” Do you see the Part-to-whole fallacy here? The person took a characteristic of two girls and applied it to all the girls in the group.
Here’s another example of Part-to-Whole fallacy thinking. Have you ever seen one of those art pieces that looks really cool but it was all made out of trash or scraps? Can you imagine the artist trying to explain his idea for that art work to someone before he made it: “Wait, you’re telling me that you’re going to take some nasty, ugly piece of trash and make a sculpture? That’s going to be disgusting…you can’t make anything amazing out of trash!” Well, is that necessarily true? Just because one piece or several pieces of the sculpture are ugly trash, does that mean the entire finished project will be ugly-looking? Not at all! If you’ve ever seen some of these sculptures I’m talking about, they’re amazing! They’re super cool & creative and nobody would ever describe the finished product as being ugly or disgusting. So what was true for one piece of the sculpture can’t be applied to the entire thing.
It’s like saying that just b/c you found a spelling error in a book that makes the whole premise & argument of the book wrong. Well, is that true? Just b/c one page has an error, does that mean the whole book is erroneous? No, obviously it doesn’t.
The problem behind the Part-to-Whole Fallacy is that it’s making an assumption that just isn’t true.
Just because you know one Republican who doesn’t like Chinese people, that doesn’t mean all Republicans don’t like Chinese people. Or just because one Democrat on TV said that we should do away with the 2nd Amendment, doesn’t mean that ALL Democrats believe that.
Question to ask yourself: “Is it really true that this one characteristic applies to EVERYONE or everything in that group?” … *repeat*
Join me tomorrow when we’ll be talking about the reverse of this fallacy. And…
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?”
