Yes, I am blogging about it too.

By now I am sure everyone has seen the image of this dress, and has assuredly engaged in a contentious debate with someone about its true color. Is the dress black and blue or white and gold? As I perceive it, the dress is white and gold, but this must surely be an optical illusion as the original version of the dress can be found on Amazon, and it is clearly blue and black.

So, what is the deal here? The exact explanation isn't entirely clear, but it is definitely a result of the way our brains process visual stimuli. The most important thing to recognize about human perception is that we don't passively receive stimuli from the external world. Our eyes aren't camera lenses, and our brain is not a photographic plate (or an SD card to bring our metaphors into the 21st Century). Instead, our brains play an active role in constructing the world that we experience. For a detailed description of what is going on here, I recommend this post from the Yale neuroscientist Dr. Steven Novella.

The basic explanation is that this image is overexposed. This creates an ambiguous color stimuli that our brains seek to resolve in such a way that it can perceive a cohesive, recognizable image. For many of us, this means that our brain resolves the image not as an ambiguous color splotch but as either a white and gold or a blue and black striped dress. According to Dr. Novella, about 70% of people see this as white and gold which is interesting because it means that many of us autocorrect this image 'incorrectly.' The important thing to stress is that even though most of us perceive this image incorrectly, this error is merely an artifact of how our brains process information. That is, our brains are working exactly as they should, but they are still given inaccurate information about the world. This is because our brains did not evolve to represent the world perfectly accurately, but instead evolved to help us survive. This means that we often overcorrect or misperceive what is actually happening. Again, this is not because our brains are defective, but because this is how our brains function normally.

Here is an article from Wired that discusses this illusion as well.

Finally, see this video from Captain Disillusion:

Lies or False Memories?

If you have been paying attention to the news lately, you can't help hearing about disgraced former (for now, depending on the ratings of his replacement he might return) NBC Nightly News Anchor Brian Williams.  Williams got into trouble for claims he made about an incident that occurred in 2003 during the US invasion of Iraq. In particular, Williams claimed that he was in a helicopter that was hit by an RPG and forced into an emergency landing. Williams then claimed that he and the crew had to defend themselves against enemy fire untill the calvary in the form of the US military came and rescued them. Here is what Williams told David Letterman on The Late Show in 2013:

We were in some helicopters. What we didn’t know was, we were north of the invasion. We were the northernmost Americans in Iraq. We were going to drop some bridge portions across the Euphrates so the Third Infantry could cross on them. Two of the four helicopters were hit, by ground fire, including the one I was in, RPG and AK-47. [Emphasis Added]

Interestingly enough, this was not the version that Williams first told back in 2003. According to transcripts from NBC, in 2003 Williams characterized his experience as follows:

We quickly make our drop and then turn southwest. Suddenly, without knowing why, we learned we’ve been ordered to land in the desert. On the ground, we learn the Chinook ahead of us was almost blown out of the sky. That hole was made by a rocket-propelled grenade, or RPG, fired from the ground. It punched cleanly through the skin of the ship, but amazingly it didn’t detonate. Though the chopper pilots are too shaken to let us interview them, we learned they were shot at by some of those waving civilians, one of whom emerged from under a tarp on a pick-up truck like this one and shot the grenade. We meet a unit from the 3rd Infantry called in, as it turns out, to protect us from the enemy which they say doesn’t look like the enemy. [Emphasis Added]

So, in 2003 it was one of the lead choppers ahead of Williams that was shot down, but a decade letter Williams was claiming that he was on the copter that was shot down. What's the deal? According to many in the media, the answer is obvious, Williams is a liar.

While this might seem like a reasonable conclusion, a little critical thinking reveals some serious problems with this interpretation. The most obvious being, why would someone lie about something that could so easily be corroborated? This is not some random nobody claiming war experience that he didn't have, this is a major public figure who has regularly appeared on national television for over two decades. Furthermore, why would he have told the story on national television one way in 2003 and then in a completely different way ten years later? If it really was a lie it appears to have been a pretty dumb one.

In my opinion, I don't think Williams lied. Instead, I think he misremembered. This may sound like an excuse, but if we look at the science of memory, we quickly realize that the misremembering hypothesis is far more reasonable than the lying hypothesis. The Yale neuroscientist Dr. Steven Novella reaches this same conclusion in a recent blog post. He argues that given what we know about how fallible human memory is, the far more likely conclusion is that Williams was misremembering. As Dr. Novella puts it:

While I do not know what Williams remembered, it is wrong and naive to assume he is lying. Williams was likely betrayed by his memory. It is reasonable to argue that, as a journalist, he should have rechecked earlier documentation of the event rather than relying upon his memory. That is a lesson hard won.
Williams probably assumed that his memory was accurate. He may have been falsely reassured by the clarity of his memory, which is not a good predictor of veracity. He thought he was “going crazy,” but he is just suffering from a typical fallible human memory.

Similarly, on a recent episode of the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast, Dr. Novella went into the subject in a bit more detail.

We tend to fuse memories; we confuse details; we also tend to personalize memories, meaning we’ll take a memory of something that happened to someone else and over time we will remember it as happening to us.

Given all of this, it seems much more reasonable to conclude that Williams misremembered rather than lied.

A Great Red Herring

Here is an excellent example of a Red Herring from the folks at Family Guy.

Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?

A Loaded Question occurs when someone asks a question that contains a number of unspoken assumptions. The tricky part is that it is very difficult to respond to that question without tacitly accepting the assumptions that are buried in that question. The most famous example is, "When did you stop beating your wife?" One cannot really respond to this question without accidentally admitting that one has a history of spousal abuse. Examples like this can be quite amusing, but we should never forget that people have often exploited these fallacies for their own gain.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of this is an electoral tactic known as Push Polling. The way it works is that in a contested election, one side will employ people to call up likely voters in the guise of conducting an electoral poll. These "pollsters" will then ask a series of Loaded Question in the guise of collecting polling data. These questions will often imply that the candidate being asked about is guilty of some scandal with the hope that the people who are being asked these questions will assume that the scandal must be real, otherwise why would the "pollster" be asking about it?

Push Polls were a favorite electoral dirty trick of George W. Bush, and he employed them several times both when running for Governor of Texas as well as when he ran for President. The most famous and well-documented instance of this was during the 2000 Republican Primary in South Carolina. This primary came early in the season, and up to this point John McCain had been making all the headlines and winning the few primaries and caucuses that had been held up to that point. Recognizing that his campaign was in trouble, George W. Bush (or more accurately his campaign advisors) decided to use a push polling technique, and began calling likely voters in South Carolina under the guise of conducting a poll. These voters were asked a number of questions including, "Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?"

This is a great example of a Loaded Question. The question clearly implies that McCain has fathered an illegitimate black child, but it doesn't actually accuse him of doing that. It merely suggests it. This suggestion is further bolstered by images such as the one at the top of this post, which show the McCain family with, apparently, a black member. The individual is, in fact, McCain's adopted daughter Bridget, and the story of her adoption is actually quite touching, and reflects well on McCain and his family.

However, at the time, these smears, taking the form of loaded questions delivered by push poll were strong enough to derail the McCain campaign (which says something about the values of the primary voters in South Carolina), and he went on to lose the primary to George W. Bush who was subsequently elected president. 

I do not relate this story to criticize Bush or to praise McCain, but instead to show why it is so important to study and think about these fallacies. We study these fallacies because they are out there everywhere, and these fallacies are out there everywhere because they work. If we don't work hard to recognize them and call them out when we see them, we allow them to work and we allow others to be deceived. And this isn't good for anybody.

Apparently Young Black Men Want to be Thugs (or maybe Police)

Eduction is when one takes a quotation out of its original context. The video that follows is an excellent, though disturbing example of this. This video is particularly helpful in that it shows the eduction, and then shows the original footage that was edited to make the subject appear to say something very different from what he actually said:

In case it wasn't obvious, the news station edited the comments of that young boy to make it appear as if he was intending to pursue a life of crime. In effect, the news station wanted to present this African-American male as a "thug-in-training." However, if we look at the raw video footage of the interview, we can see that this young boy wants to be the exact opposite of a "thug-in-training." Instead, he wants to join the police! So, through selective editing, this station made a young man appear to say exactly the opposite of what he did. The question of why a station would do this is an exercise left up to the reader.

The Appeal to Emotion to End All Appeals to Emotion

The Appeal to Pity is a type of appeal to emotion in which one attempts to play on someone's sympathy or empathy to get that person to support a conclusion. The idea is that you make your audience feel pity for some subject, and then you can get them to support the policies that you claim will help that subject. When I teach this topic in my classes, some student invariably raises his or her own hand to offer the following commercial as an example of an Appeal to Pity. Without further ado, here it is

Now I am a sucker for dogs, so I am clearly the target of this video. It is almost impossible for me to avoid tearing up when I see dogs suffering (particularly that poor dog whose back legs don't seem to work). Thus, even though I can recognize this video for the fallacious argument that it is, it is still remarkably effective. And this is the major reason these fallacies continue to exist and proliferate. They work, even on people who know that they are being manipulated. I really need to donate to the local SPCA.

Does Nicholas Cage cause people to drown in their swimming pools?

A great new website, Spurious Correlations, has just appeared on my radar, and it fantastically illustrates the Post Hoc fallacy. The website takes data sets, and then hunts through the web to find data sets that correlate with the initial data and then presnts it in the form of a chart. The headline for the post comes from this chart:



As this chart nicely shows, there is a correlation between Nicholas Cage films and drowning deaths in swimming pools. There is clearly no causal relation that I can think of here (though Cage has certainly appeared in some dire films recently), but there is a clear and obvious correlation. This entire website does a great job of illustrating the mantra that "correlation does not equal causation." I encourage everyone to take a look at the site because many of the correlations are interesting and quite humorous.