From the Archives - Drama in Philosophy Class!

Introduction

When I was a student at UC Santa Barbara, choosing classes was never easy. The most important requirement of a class was that it fit into my cycling schedule. A two-hour span between classes, followed by a one-hour class, was either a total waste of riding opportunity, or truancy waiting to happen. Beyond this, I tended to go with classes that looked interesting, or—better yet—easy. So when I came upon Philosophy 3 – Critical Thinking, a class essentially about logic, I was really intrigued.

Right off the bat, I wondered if you can actually teach somebody how to think logically. I suspected that you couldn’t—that this was a kind of talent. I also felt like I kind of had this talent, since I was pretty good at math and at writing persuasive papers. Moreover, a childhood nickname my brothers gave me was “Logic Lad.” Believe me, my brothers were not given to ever saying anything nice to me, so this nickname must have been a grudging capitulation around an undeniable trait.

This confidence was tempered by (or perhaps a delusion brought about by) an insecurity, which was that I only thought I was a rational, logical person. To have such swagger and be woefully ignorant of my own inability to think critically was a frightening proposition. So, as a hedge against being an unknowing intellectual poser, I thought I better take this class in order to validate, or possibly bring about, my (supposed) capability to think critically.

Little did I realize, when signing up, how much drama this course would occasion. Read on for the torrid tale of our first midterm exam and its aftermath.

Drama in Philosophy Class – February 8, 1989

I had high hopes right from the beginning about Philosophy 3 – Critical Thinking. The textbook is really cool. Verbal arguments are encoded with all these cool symbols, bridging the gap I always felt there must be between math and clearly written arguments. But I was kind of disappointed, right off, by the professor. She just didn’t strike me as the total braniac that I hoped she (and all my professors) would be.

How could I assess this so quickly, and who am I to declare such a thing? Well, it’s mainly due to her imprecise, unstructured delivery. She loves to ramble worthlessly during lecture, repeating herself continually in a monotonous, tiresome tone. Also, her grammar is pretty bad for a UC professor: “Does anyone else need a syllabi?” or “Another criteria we look at is…” or “While the price of gold really might have fell…”

I know grammar knowledge isn’t the same thing as intelligence, but still … I don’t think an Oxford professor would ever slip up like that. But beyond all this, my main problem with this professor is that her lectures dang near put me to sleep every time. (I know, I know … this could be me. I’ve slept through all kinds of classes, even ones I know would be interesting if I were only awake to hear them.)

But you know, the professor isn’t that bad, actually … she does impart some useful lessons. But the Teaching Assistant (T.A.) for the class bugs the hell out of me. He seems to have recently moved here from some Eastern Bloc country, which wouldn’t be a problem except that his poor grasp of English hinders his ability to clearly teach this subject, given the importance of clarity when dealing with tricky argument forms. For example, when teaching a syllogism, it’s really important not to say “In case he” instead of “In the case that he.” Consider this sentence: “In the case that he does not bring an umbrella, he will get wet.” No problem there, right? But if your T.A. says, “In case he brings an umbrella, he will get wet.” This has an entirely different meaning and makes our protagonist seem pretty deranged, wouldn’t you say? I tried to explain the difference but this T.A. absolutely could not follow me. His English skills were not up to the job. Usually after he talks for a while, everybody ends up shrugging at the futility of it all, and loses interest.

As with most T.A. discussion sections, much of the period is devoted to the Question & Answer session. There are two possible scenarios for how this goes. If the entire class is unprepared or asleep (or both), nobody will ask any questions and the T.A. will wait patiently for about ten minutes before becoming irritated. Then he quizzes the class, perhaps to try to snap us into attention. He doesn’t get any satisfactory answers, either because the students are actually clueless, or they’re toying with him (I can’t figure out which). After five or six students give unsatisfactory answers, I’ll try to end the stalemate with the correct answer. For example, if the question is, “What is a sound argument?” I will say, “It’s a valid argument that has true premises.” Then T.A. will shake his head and field five more wrong answers, growing increasingly frustrated. Finally he will announce the correct answer: “It’s an argument which has true premises and is valid.” How does he not recognize my answer as correct? Perhaps it’s his poor grasp of English … maybe he has memorized the correct answer by rote and thus requires the wording to be identical. Critical thinking indeed!

The other question and answer scenario is somewhat less common. Here, a student actually comes to class having read the material and attempted the homework, but is completely lost. Well, the T.A.’s job is to eliminate confusion, so the student has come to the right place. Or so he thinks! Invariably, the student gets nowhere. He will ask something like, “What is the difference between cogent and sound arguments?” and the T.A. will throw the question out to the class: “Anyone? Anyone?” After waiting for about five minutes for a response from another student, the T.A. will say, “Hasn’t anybody done the reading?” After another awkward pause, he lets the question die, hoping the student has given up hope. If the student repeats the question, the T.A. says, “Well, it’s in your textbook.” If the student still persists, then the T.A. says, “You’ll have to come to my office hours.” This last resort is brutally effective, as no student in the history of higher education has ever gone to a T.A.’s office hours.

But you know, the T.A. isn’t actually my main gripe with the class. After all, being surrounded by other students could lead to a stimulating discussion anyway, right? That’s the whole point of the small discussion sections. But I have yet to hear a single intelligent utterance from any of my classmates. Mostly I just hear a lot of whining. And after the midterm exam, they turned their bitching up to 11. In fact, our discussion section was so heated, it was almost like a student revolt.

Interestingly enough, we hadn’t even gotten our tests back, so the class wasn’t responding to poor grades, not exactly. But I think they highly suspected they’d augered in, based on two things: one, almost nobody finished the test (or even came close), and two, the professor had announced at the post-exam lecture that almost everybody crashed and burned. The median score was a 56%. So my classmates came to class armed with numerous reasons why the test was like, totally unfair. The T.A., arrogant  as ever, took a big risk at the beginning of the period by venturing that the students, not the test, were at fault. Instantly the jackleg spokesman for the students fired off a rebuttal: “Isn’t your argument fallacious?” Well, at least the guy had picked up a bit of the lingo.

The T.A. responded: “At my Thursday review section, before the exam, I asked how many people thought the class was easy. Almost everybody raised his hand. Then I asked how many people had done the review problems. Out of 48 students, four raised their hands. Out of that four, only one had gone to the Reserve Book Room to check his answers. If this is indicative of the whole class, we can conclude that the students did not study hard enough.”

 I have to admit, this makes some sense. But, this being a class on logic, he probably should have trod more carefully. For one thing, it’s not necessarily a given that his Thursday section was intellectually similar to ours. They might have all chosen that section (day and time) based on their athletic or party schedules, for all we know. Second, it’s possible that after his first boring question, a lot of the students lost interest and couldn’t be bothered to keep raising their hands.

Our class demanded a “recount.” I found this absurd. The T.A. hadn’t asked our section these questions, so he had counted nothing … how could he now “recount”? And if he asked our class the same questions now, what were we going to say? That we had also neglected to do the review problems? Yeah, right. Amazingly, the T.A. indulged this “recount,” and guess what? It turns out everybody in the class had done all the review problems and had gone to the Reserve Book Room to check our answers! Obviously the test was a gross miscarriage of justice! Of course all this was immaterial. It’s not the T.A.’s job to write the test, so if the test is unfair, that’s not his problem. Nor could he do anything about it.

This pointless debate went on and on, the class growing increasingly impassioned and the T.A. becoming increasingly flustered. I had no interest in the proceedings because, notwithstanding the median score, I felt pretty confident that, unless I was the most self-deluded person on the planet, I’d done fine. The test had seemed easy to me, almost eerily so, and I had finished early. I couldn’t get too worried about my grade because, if I had done poorly, the low grade would be the least of my worries. Being the most self-deluded person on the planet would be a deep, deep hole that I’d probably spend the rest of my life trying to climb out of.

Feeling a strange combination of boredom and discomfort, I began doodling. Unfortunately I am a very poor doodler. I find my doodles tiresome and annoying and end up scribbling them out. So I got sick of that and picked up a flyer advertising a Spring Break trip to Mexico. Then I read a flyer about how I, too, could earn extra income at home doing telecommunications. Before long, I decided that the discussion had to be more interesting than the flyers. Tuning back in, I realized that there was actually an educational opportunity available to me here: I could listen for, and document, the all the logical fallacies committed by the students—proof of their unpreparedness, as these same fallacies were the very subject of the exam! So here they are, taken directly from my notes:

“We did fine on the homework. But when you put a gun to a guy’s head and tell him to recite the Constitution, he won’t be able to do it. Likewise, with our time restrictions, we couldn’t perform well on the test.” WEAK ANALOGY

“We couldn’t be expected to study that long. We got so many tests right now we just don’t got time for everything. If we spent all our time studying for this class, we’d, like, fail all our others! Besides, think of the stress we’re going through!” APPEAL TO PITY

“Exams are always too long. Like this History test I had we had basically fifty minutes to write three essays. And one of them was on material we hadn’t even covered! Soooo lame!” RED HERRING

“Look: 300 students did poorly. Four T.A.’s and one professor blame us for it. Obviously, you guys must be wrong.” ACCIDENT (general rule applied incorrectly to a specific case)

“Two of my friends didn’t even finish the test and neither did I. So don’t eee-ven try to tell me you gave us enough time!” HASTY GENERALIZATION

“I saw this one dude walking up to turn in the test, and he was just filling in random dots like crazy.” RED HERRING

Some of the arguments I wrote down, while not committing specific fallacies, seemed illogical anyway. See if you can pinpoint the weaknesses in the following arguments:

“In the categorical syllogism problems, the examples were too hard. I mean, what if we don’t know the difference between reptiles and mammals?”

“When you said ‘open book,’ you set a trap for us to fall into. That’s not fair!”

“We only had a minute for each [multiple choice] problem. Maybe we’re just not fast enough readers!”

“When you have that many problems in front of you, they just all start to melt together.”

“What if the ten percent of the class that did well were just a product of chance?”

“I got ahold of last year’s midterm and it was a lot shorter. How do you explain that?”

“I tried to calculate how much time we had for each problem, but it was hard because each section had its own numbering. By the time I figured it all out, I only had half an hour left and I didn’t finish!”

“It was totally bogus. I mean, they were all the kind where you have to, like, stop and think!”

“All the examples seemed like they were from poems.”

This last statement caused me to almost burst out laughing. That would have been unwise indeed … the whole class could have turned on me! From this point forward I was focused purely on not smirking or snorting … not only would I look like a dick, but I would actually be one. For once in my college career, I wished I couldn’t stay awake.

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Cycling Commentary - Why I Believe Chris Froome Is a Doper - Part II

Introduction

In my last post, I laid out the first half of my case against Chris Froome: that is, why I think (and have long thought) he’s a doper. My aim isn’t to change anybody’s mind on this—I doubt that’s possible, and actually I don’t really care—but rather to explain my position, lest any Froome fans read my biased blow-by-blow race reports and decide I’m a jerk. (I’m not actually out to inflame anybody with this blog.) So in this second and final post on the topic, I finish the effort of humbly explaining my position. I hope you’ll conclude I’m a more or less reasonable person, even if you don’t happen to agree with me about Froome.

In my previous post I countered the following two challenges to my position, taken from a debate I had with a friend: 

• Why suspect Froome just because he’s “too successful”?
• Doesn’t Froome’s consistency demonstrate legitimacy, as opposed to the erratic performances of, say, Floyd Landis?

In this post, I take on my friend’s other two challenges:

• The Lance era is over – why shouldn’t we trust the UCI’s decision on the salbutamol case, and use Froome’s essentially clean slate as the basis for our own assessment?
• How would a positive test for salbutamol suggest a wider doping program anyway?

Before we dive in, let me be clear: of course I cannot prove that Froome is a doper. If nothing less than a giant body of irrefutable evidence is what you’re after, don’t even bother with this—go read something else.

The Lance era is over – why shouldn’t we trust the UCI’s decision on the salbutamol case, and use Froome’s essentially clean slate as the basis for our own assessment?

First of all, the Lance era wasn’t the result of one guy (and his team) getting away with murder. The rampant doping throughout those years demonstrated a fundamentally flawed system of enforcement. The last Tour title to be stripped (retroactively) was 2010 … not that long ago, and three years after Postal/Discovery released its grip on the Tour. The sport has a deep, deep hole to dig out of.

How deep a hole? To make the math easy, let’s round down and say that 10 dopers were exposed by the USADA investigation without ever having tested positive. Let’s say each rider was tested 10 times a year for 10 years. That’s 1,000 false negative samples. When you consider all the different substances riders were tested for, across these 1,000 samples, and when you factor in the wide variety of PEDs these riders ultimately admitted to having used, the number of false negatives snowballs even further. And yet when’s the last time you heard of a bona-fide false positive?

Clearly, the drug testing system has been woefully ineffective, erring radically on the side of false negative tests. For us to believe Froome’s salbutamol test was a false positive flies in the face of this reality. (Frankly, there isn’t a single rider in the peloton today whom I’d give the benefit of the doubt if he tested positive for anything. I’d say, “What a shame, I’d hoped he was clean.”)

So why should we trust the UCI’s decision regarding Froome? After all, they based their ruling on WADA’s findings, and there are plenty of signs that WADA is still not doing a good job of policing the sport (click here and here). The UCI’s refusal to share WADA’s reasoning in clearing Froome is making things worse. What we need is transparency but what we’re getting is, “We got a lot of documents from Sky … it’s all good, trust us.”

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the whole peloton is doped, and I’ll allow that perhaps things have improved a bit, but I reserve the right to be suspicious of this or that rider whose performance looks a little too good to be true. When the rider in question is Froome, the suspicious signs start to pile up, as I discussed in my last post.

Note that even if we decide to accept the veracity of the UCI’s recent decision on Froome’s positive test, this shouldn’t put our every suspicion to rest. If we conclude Froome is a clean rider just because the UCI cleared him for salbutamol, we would be committing the logical fallacy of “denying the antecedent.” The fallacy goes like this: 

• Premise: If A then B
• Premise: Not A
• Conclusion: Not B

It is easier to see how this is a fallacy if we consider a simple example:

• Premise: If it rains, I will bring an umbrella
• Premise: It is not raining
• Conclusion: I am not bringing an umbrella

Of course this conclusion does not necessarily follow. Even if it’s not raining, I could bring an umbrella for another reason, such as rain being forecast. For the second premise to be true is not a necessary condition.

Broken down into its simplest form the “Froome must be clean because the UCI dismissed his case” argument would run like this:

• Premise: If the UCI finds Froome guilty of doping, he is a doper. 
• Premise: The UCI did not find Froome guilty of doping. 
• Conclusion: Therefore, Froome is not a doper. 

Denying the antecedent is a universally recognized fallacy. That is, arguments of this form are automatically classified as invalid. To put it more bluntly, just because Froome found his way out of this salbutamol mess doesn’t mean he never doped. Plenty of riders have cheated and gotten away with it. (In like fashion, we don’t conclude Al Capone wasn’t a murderer just because he was convicted only of tax evasion.)

Lance Armstrong employed this fallacy for years, defending himself on the basis of being “the most tested athlete on the planet.” Arnaud Démare used it as well after hanging on to the side of his team car up a key climb in the 2016 Milan-San Remo race, stating afterward, “‘There are judges in cycling. If I had done something forbidden, I would have been disqualified.’” I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that my friend stumbled into this fallacious argumentative form in defending Froome, and perhaps other Froome fans are also falling prey to it as well.

How does the positive test for salbutamol prove anything? How does it suggest a years-long sophisticated doping program? How would salbutamol help Froome win four Tours? Why would he deliberately use more than he needed if it doesn’t enhance performance?

Here I will lay out, in clear logical terms, the reason I think Froome’s positive test suggests a wider doping program. 

• Premise #1: Willingness to cheat via one substance indicates a willingness to cheat via others
• Premise #2: You cannot accidently go over the legal limit on salbutamol, because the legal limit is so high; i.e., a positive test indicates abuse, typically through oral or injected dosing
• Premise #3: In sufficient quantities salbutamol will enhance performance, so a rider can gain an advantage from abusing it
• Premise #4: Froome went over the legal limit
• Conclusion #1: Froome didn’t accidentally inhale an amount of salbutamol that exceeded the legal limit (i.e., he lied about how he took it)
• Conclusion #2: Froome deliberately abused salbutamol to gain an advantage
• Conclusion #3: By abusing salbutamol, Froome has demonstrated a willingness to abuse other substances; i.e., this positive test gives us valid reason to be suspicious of him generally

The conclusions above proceed naturally from the premises; that is, the argument is logically valid by the prepositional form modus ponens, which goes like this:

• Premise: If A then B
• Premise: A
• Conclusion: Therefore, B

In other words, if we assume that a positive test for salbutamol automatically indicates abuse (Premise #2), and that abusing salbutamol can provide an advantage (Premise #3), and that Froome did test positive (Premise #4), then we can logically conclude that Froome abused salbutamol to gain an advantage (Conclusions #1 and #2). If we assume that abusing one drug indicates a willingness to abuse others (Premise #1), and that Froome abused salbutamol (Conclusion #2), then Froome can be reasonably suspected of abusing other drugs.

Because the reasoning is valid (i.e., follows the standard logical rule modus ponens), you can only attack the argument by showing that it is not sound; i.e., you’d have to declare that one or more premises is/are untrue. So let’s look at each premise in turn.

Premise #1 is something I happen to believe, even if I can’t prove it. A rider may decide to be clean because he’s afraid of being caught, or he’s afraid of side effects, or he is a moral person and/or his ambitions in the sport are noble. If a rider has no moral problem with doping, and isn’t afraid of the drugs, and thinks he can get away with taking them, he’ll generally do it, and will not restrict himself to one substance. I mean, why would he? Look at the all the USADA-snared American dopers who confessed (along with other admitted dopers like Michael Rasmussen, David Millar, Frank Vandenbroucke, and Marco Pantani): none of them stuck to a single PED. They all took a variety.

(It is certainly the case that a rider might eschew a particular PED or practice on the grounds of safety; for example, a rider might use testosterone because it’s common, but avoid blood boosting because hotel-room blood transfusions are dangerous. A drug like salbutamol is probably less scary than a lot of PEDs and I wouldn’t be surprised if taking a variety of more commonplace drugs like clenbuterol, triamsinolone, salbutamol, and/or corticoids in combination is a popular alignment with the “marginal gains” ethos that seems to define the modern sport.)

(By the way, here’s Froome’s therapeutic use exemption for prednisolone, a corticosteroid.)

Premise #2, about it being impossible to go over the legal limit of salbutamol via an inhaler, I believe based on my firsthand experience with salbumatol, and from having discussed the matter with a pulmonary M.D. who also happens to be a former professional road racer. You don’t get any performance benefit by inhaling salbutamol because that doesn’t deliver a high enough dose. For the same reason, you won’t test positive by inhaling the drug—you’d have to take a ridiculous number of puffs (18 to be precise). I have a blog post dedicated to this topic, where I’ve done the math. To get the benefit, and to test positive, require either orally ingesting or injecting the drug.

Premise #3 is widely established: using high quantities of salbutamol can give you a performance advantage (click here and here). The fact that this substance is regulated strongly supports the notion that it can confer performance benefits in sufficient quantities. “We have an upper limit because we have multiple publications showing that systemic use of beta-2 agonists, including salbutamol, can be performance enhancing,” WADA senior director of science Olivier Rabin explains here. 

Premise #4 (the positive test for salbutamol) is not disputed by anybody.

If you don’t agree with one or more of these premises, that’s fine, but don’t conclude that I’m a knee-jerk blowhard who bases his conclusion on nothing at all. I hope that, whether you agree with these premises or not, you can see why I’d put stock in them. On the other hand, if you agree with these premises but not the conclusions they produce, then you are not a logical thinker and are reading the wrong blog. Please, go somewhere else.

In case you’re thinking of dismissing one or more of my premises out of hand simply because you can’t imagine Froome cheating, consider this: when asthma is poorly controlled, the sufferer cannot perform as an athlete. I know this from experience. (If you have asthma, you know what I’m talking about. If you don’t, take my word for it because I’m an asthma sufferer and a cycling coach, or go ask an asthmatic athlete or a coach.) To win a grand tour, you have to not only be a top rider, you have to be functioning at close to 100%. An insufficiently mitigated asthma attack takes you way below 100%. By the time I start wheezing, I’m crippled. Any athlete is. And when you get to that point, it’s really too late to try to correct with salbutamol: your race is ruined. My doctor cautioned that for exercise-induced asthma, salbutamol is a prophylactic measure—you take it before the exercise, you don’t wait until you have a problem. Thus you wouldn’t wait until after the grand tour stage, during which you padded your GC lead, to take more of the drug. Froome breathed well enough to put time into his GC rivals on that day at the Vuelta, so he should not have needed extra salbutamol post-race.

It’s also worth noting that a therapeutic use exemption (TUE), such as Froome has for salbutamol (and has had for prednisolone), is not universally acknowledged as an automatically legitimate justification for an ongoing regimen of a prescribed drug. The British House of Commons did a deep investigation into TUEs leveraged by Team Sky, and concluded, “The use of triamcinolone at Team Sky during the period under investigation … does not constitute a violation of the WADA code [because a TUE was in place], but it does cross the ethical line that David Brailsford says he himself drew for Team Sky. In this case, and contrary to the testimony of David Brailsford in front of the Committee, we believe that drugs were being used by Team Sky, within the WADA rules, to enhance the performance of riders, and not just to treat medical need.” Froome himself has acknowledged the slippery nature of TUEs: according to this article, “In 2015 at the Tour de France, Froome explained that during the race he had a medical condition which could have been treated with a TUE. However, he objected to using a TUE, explaining in January 2017 that, ‘I didn’t feel having a TUE in the last week of the Tour was something I was prepared to do. It did not sit well morally with me.’” (Obviously his TUE for sulbutamol during the Veulta did extend through the last week, as his positive test was after stage 18.)

To reiterate, this salbutamol positive is not the cornerstone of my belief that Froome is a doper. What it does do is increase my skepticism that WADA has turned the tide and is now able to enforce their rules.

A final note

Again, this two-part post came about because a reader suggested it’s unfair or at least unbecoming to bag on a rider on my blog just because I think he’s a doper. I’m not too concerned about that ideologically. If I advertise my race coverage as biased, and acknowledge that my aspersions are speculation, and in light of the fact that this guy put himself in the public eye through his choice of career, why should I spare him my public indictment? My blog is a medium that anybody can choose to ignore as he pleases (and most do). I don’t get enough pageviews to make a tiny blip in Froome’s reputation, nor will Froome’s fans be moved to change their minds. Plenty of more mainstream media, along with countless cycling fans, are denouncing him already.

And for the record, I bag on Froome in particular, while going easier on other suspect riders, because he is ungracious even in victory, as I described here and here.

If you don’t agree, at least I’ve explained the rationale behind my bias against Froome. I know I can’t please everybody, but at least I’ve tried…

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Biased Commentary - Could Chris Froome Be Innocent?

Introduction

I enjoy posting “biased blow-by-blow” reports of World Tour bicycle races. I label them “biased” because I when I think a rider is doped I can’t bear to bite my tongue like real journalists and commentators do. And, being just a blogger, I don’t have to.

Needless to say, I have never given Christopher Froome, nor his Sky team, the benefit of the doubt. And, with Froome returning an “adverse analytical finding” (i.e., a positive test) for twice the allowed amount of salbutamol, I seem to have my perennial accusations validated. Not surprisingly, Froome came right out and said, “Yes, I have been cheating all along—and I’ve let down my team, my sponsors, my fans, and my sport, and I am really sorry.”

No, of course he didn’t say that! Like so many dopers who get caught, he’s professing innocence (in the standard-issue tricky language, “I haven’t broken any rules”).  So I’m going to examine his nascent defense and the possibility that he’s actually innocent. And I’m going to be as fair as possible (with the caveat that of course I’m biased). And for those of you who (quite reasonably) are too jaded and cynical to care about Froome, I’ll examine what all this means to the sport.

In case this sounds boring and like ground that’s been covered before, I promise my analysis will be different. For one thing I’ll be pulling in some experts, like the philosophers William of Ockham, Karl Popper, and Marshall Mathers (aka Eminem).

Petitio principii

Because I’m biased, I need to be careful not to commit a classic logical fallacy, petitio principii, otherwise known as “begging the question” or “circular reasoning.” This fallacy occurs when the argument depends on the truth of a premise that is also the conclusion (usually in a disguised form). It’s an absurdly blatant kind of fallacy, but pops up surprisingly often.

Here’s how this would apply to Froome. We start with the premise that he’s a doping, cheating scumbag. Add to that his positive test. Since the test confirms what we already knew (i.e., that he was a doper), we know we can trust the test. And since a trustworthy test produced a positive, he is by definition guilty of doping.

Like many poor arguments, this one is one-sided. That is, it might stoke the coals of other Froome-bashers, but it’s not likely to win over any converts. So it’s non-useful and I won’t use it.

In Froome’s defense

Some riders have come out against Froome with statements that are lame enough to inspire a backlash. For example, Tim Wellens described his own refusal to use inhalers, even though doctors have told him it would help with his bronchial obstruction. “I could improve my breathing capacity by 7 or 8 per cent... but I'm against inhalers. If the public knew the number of riders who have an inhaler… it's enormous.” Another rider, Mathieu van der Poel, was more blunt: “Maybe asthma patients will understand the case better, but cycling and all sports in general are for healthy people.”

I’m not an “asthma patient,” but I do have bronchospasm, which is what afflicts so many cyclists. It’s not chronic the way true asthma is, but involves asthma-like symptoms during hard exercise (which is why it’s often called “exercise-induced asthma”). It’s more common among athletes than the general population, and it’s more common among cyclists than any other athlete. The reason is that cyclists move huge amounts of air through their respiratory systems, without the benefit of it going through their nasal passages to be warmed up and filtered. We can ride for hours at a time, day after day, and cold, damp, or polluted air, or very hot, dry air, can inflame our bronchial passages. (Mountain bikers have bronchospasm more commonly than roadies because of all the dust and dirt.)

I speak from experience when I say Wellens isn’t grasping the benefit of an inhaler. Without it, I will start wheezing ten minutes into my bike ride, which will hamper my performance (far more than 7 or 8 percent) for the whole ride. It’s unfair for van der Poel to accuse me, or any cyclist with bronchospasm, of being an unhealthy person. I’m totally unafflicted by breathing problems unless I’m riding regularly (which is, of course, my lifestyle).

That said, using an inhaler doesn’t give me special breathing powers; it just neutralizes a possible barrier to my normal respiratory function. It won’t give an edge to any person unafflicted by bronchospasm, any more than Viagra will make a sexual dynamo out of a person unafflicted by erectile dysfunction. As Dr. John Dickinson, an expert on asthma, states in this article, “We know that therapeutic doses of inhalers don’t touch performance, so if you’re a non-asthmatic taking a couple of puffs of salbutamol, it’s not going to do anything for you.”

Wait ... not so fast

The person I just quoted was talking about inhaled salbutamol. In the doses inhalers provide, this drug does a great job at reducing if not eliminating the inflammation that dogs bronchospasm sufferers, without conferring any unfair advantage. But taken in high doses through other means, drugs like salbutamol certainly can. According to this article, “Oral or injected beta 2-agonists can have anabolic effects and are banned in and out of competition.” Greg LeMond told Cyclingnews, “Taken orally or by injection [salbutamol] acts as an anabolic steroid, similar to clenbuterol, the drug that Alberto Contador was positive for.”

It’s not outlandish to assert that a very large dose of a drug can affect you in an entirely different way than a small dose. If you take the normal dose of Latisse, you’ll enjoy longer eyelashes. If you take the normal dose of Lumigan, you’ll effectively treat your glaucoma by lowering intraocular pressure. But guess what? They’re exactly the same drug! Only the dosage is different. So you see, one man’s side effect is another man’s performance-enhancing drug. This is why there’s a legal limit on salbutamol.

How was Froome using salbutamol?

According to this article, “Froome will argue that he took three puffs of his inhaler just before providing his sample to anti-doping after stage 18 of the Vuelta.” I’m not sure exactly where this assertion came from but it’s backed up by this quote from Froome: “I have a clear routine when I use my inhaler and how many times I use it. I've given all that information to the UCI to help get to the bottom of this." (Click here for the context.)

Naturally Froome would like us all to believe he took this drug the normal, therapeutic way, by inhaling it. As Cyclingnews explains, “Inhaled, [beta 2-agonists] are not considered performance enhancing. Inhaled doses are allowed in competition without a TUE at doses up to 1600 micrograms over 24 hours or 800 micrograms every 12 hours.”

Froome’s adverse analytical finding (AAF) is the result of having double the allowed amount of salbutamol in his system. That’s a lot, because the legal limit is very generous. I can say this with some authority because the amount of albuterol I need is just 180 mcg—less than a quarter of the legal limit.

Beyond my personal experience, I’ve been around road and mountain bike racers for decades, and I’ve done some calculations based on the most salbutamol I have ever known a person to take. During a full-blown bronchospasm attack, clearly audible to anybody in a 50-foot radius, this person needed two 90-mcg puffs, having taken the standard 2-puff preventive dose before the exercise. So that's a total of four puffs, which is 360 mcg. (All these inhalers provide the same dose.) Simple math tells us Froome would have had to take 18 puffs on his inhaler to reach twice the legal limit.

Giving Froome the benefit of the doubt, let’s suppose he really did get all his salbutamol via inhaler. What might that look like? Suppose he took two preventive puffs before the race, and then forgot he’d done so, and took two more. And let’s say that for some reason he had some breathing problems anyway, but that nobody heard him wheezing, maybe because of all the cheering fans, and nobody saw him use his inhaler during the race because he’s always surrounded by and thus eclipsed by his Sky teammates. So he was able to take a couple more puffs without being seen. That’s six total. And that’s a lot. The person I witnessed having four puffs total suffered jitters and shakes and was not comfortable and probably would have hesitated, to say the least, to take any more salbutamol.

But let’s say Froome is just tough as nails and shook off these side effects ... we’re still only at six puffs. Remember, the legal limit works out to 18 puffs ... so we’re supposed to believe that he took a dozen more puffs, all without anybody noticing, because the wheezing still wasn’t controlled? This seems pretty damn unlikely. Froome would like everyone to believe that the legal limit is really low, so an accidental overuse of the inhaler (e.g., one puff too many) could put him over ... but the numbers say otherwise.

Drug level detected vs. ingested

The rest of Froome’s defense centers around a possible discrepancy between the amount of salbutamol detected in his urine and what he actually used. As described here, “The threshold of 1000ng/ml was set by a scientific study, but metabolism of the drug varies greatly from person to person. In cases of an AAF exceeding the threshold for inhaled salbutamol, athletes can submit to a pharmacological study of their metabolism of the drug to try to prove exceeding the dose was unintentional.”

The logical explanation for a higher concentration of the drug in a rider’s urine (mentioned in two of these articles) is dehydration. Is it plausible Froome was just really, really dehydrated on stage 18 of the Vuelta, when he returned the AAF? Well, two circumstances suggest otherwise. First, he had a great race, cementing his lead over Vincenzo Nibali. I, for one, do not ride well when I’m so dehydrated as to return double the concentration of any substance I could (hypothetically) be tested for. Second, according to the Cyclingnews blow-by-blow report, the temperature was only 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit) that morning, and two other riders commented on it being generally rainy toward the end of that Vuelta. (That’s about all I can glean about the weather.) If Froome has always meticulously followed the same salbutamol dosing regimen—“I have a clear routine when I use my inhaler and how many times I use it,” he told Cyclingnews—then how has he not had an AAF for salbutamol at any time in his decade-long career when he’s surely been tested after very long, hot days on the road that would have left him dedydrated?

But you know what? We could spend an eternity considering the various possible factors that could lead to the test results being so far off, and that’s the wrong approach. If you’re asking, “Who says?” then my answer is, “Philosophers.”

Ockham’s razor

Scientists—including Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, and Albert Einstein—have long made use of a heuristic principle known as Ockham’s razor, devised by the philosopher William of Ockham. As described by Wikipedia, “His principle states that among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected or when you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better.... One justification of Occam’s razor is a direct result of basic probability theory. By definition, all assumptions introduce possibilities for error; if an assumption does not improve the accuracy of a theory, its only effect is to increase the probability that the overall theory is wrong.” 

If we apply this principle retroactively in assessing past doping cases, its reliability is almost comically obvious. What makes more sense: the complicated notion that Tyler Hamilton had a chimera (i.e., a vanishing twin that got lost in the womb) that produced a false positive for foreign blood population—or that he doped? Which seems more probable: that Alberto Contador got clenbuterol from beef brought to him all the way from Spain by a friend—or that he cheated? Which better passes the sanity test: that Floyd Landis drank over 60 bottles of water during a single Tour stage because he was just really, really thirsty, and he returned a positive test because the lab was totally incompetent—or that he doped?

Theories that defy the Occam’s razor principle usually start with some version of, “Wait, there must be some other explanation.” Let’s look beyond cycling history. Consider the song “Guilty Conscience” by Eminem. A scenario is laid out: “Meet Grady, a twenty-nine year old construction worker. After coming home from a hard day’s work, he walks in the door of his trailer park home to find his wife in bed with another man.” Eminem has an interior debate with his conscience, which is voiced by Dr. Dre.

Dr. Dre: “Wait! What if there's an explanation for this shit?”

Eminem: “What? She tripped? Fell? Landed on his dick?!”

Here again, the most likely scenario is also the simplest. Grady’s wife has cuckolded him.

How applicable is Ockham’s razor to Froome’s defense? Well, considering that Froome’s urine level showed twice the limit, and that the limit is so very generous to begin with, and that he hasn’t yet advanced any specific counter-theories for the test being so far off, and that the obvious dehydration explanation doesn’t match the circumstances of the race, doesn’t the idea that he’s somehow innocent seem a lot more complicated than the very simple notion that yet another pro cyclist cheated?

Karl Popper

Karl Popper, a widely esteemed philosopher of science, weighs in on Ockham’s razor in a way that provides more food for thought on the topic of drug testing in sport. Again according to Wikipedia, “Popper argues that a preference for simple theories ... may be justified by its falsifiability criterion: we prefer simpler theories to more complex ones ‘because their empirical content is greater; and because they are better testable’ (Popper 1992).”

“Falsifiability” is a key concept to have in mind when we consider doping in sport. Falsifiability is the idea that a proposition is more believable if its veracity can be determined simply and equivocally through a test. For example, the statement “all swans are white” can be proven false by producing a black swan. Popper cites falsifiability as the “demarcation criterion,” such that “what is unfalsifiable is classified as unscientific.”

Team Sky principal David Brailsford made a grand statement that doesn’t begin to meet the falsifiability standard: “I have the utmost confidence that Chris followed the medical guidance in managing his asthma symptoms, staying within the permissible dose for salbutamol.” Brailsford is countering the existing falsifiable evidence with sheer emphasis, without employing any falsifiable evidence of his own, because nobody has even begun the process of creating a convincing alternative explanation to the AAF. His defense, strident though it may be,  is utterly theoretical at this point, so it’s not even as solid as “She tripped, fell, landed on his dick.” Drug testing is built on the principle of falsifiability, but guys like Brailsford get to counter them with vague what-ifs.

Returning to petitio principii

Look, I’ll be honest: I love the idea of Froome being given three puffs of salbutamol, starved of water, and then placed in a sauna—and then having this procedure repeated over and over again until he manages to produce a urine sample with twice the legal limit of salbutamol. I’d rather watch him do that than win another bike race, frankly. But it’s wrong to indulge him.

Why? Well, I started this essay by promising not to engage in a petitio principii argument that conflates the conclusion with a key premise. But that’s exactly Brailsford is doing by assuming that if Froome’s test returned an AAF, the fault must be with the test. The credibility of Brailsford’s whole team suffers when he automatically takes Froome’s side instead of suspending him from competition. Meanwhile, the credibility of cycling suffers when a rider who fails a drug test gets to keep racing because he is on a wealthy team and has a loud, powerful boss. (Whether or not that is exactly what is going on here is immaterial; this is how it looks to the world.)

No rider above the legal limit for salbutamol has ever escaped suspension by successfully establishing, after the fact, that he could produce an AAF after taking a legal dose. And no rider has surpassed this legal limit as egregiously as Froome. I look forward to the day Froome is finally brought down, but the circus we spectators will have to endure in the meantime will be even uglier than his doped-to-the-gills race “victories.”

Oh, and one other thing: doped or not, Froome is a jerk.

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

What We Talk About When We Talk About “Kit”

NOTE:  This post is rated R for mild strong language.

Introduction

You might not actually care if cyclists use the word “kit” to mean “those silly Lycra clothes we bikers wear.”  Frankly, I don’t much care myself.  But I do care how we approach language in general; how we choose the words we use; and what impact we can have on how the vernacular evolves.  If you love language—and don’t like it eroded by indiscriminate usage—then you should read this post.  It’s the third installment in a series about “kit,” and you can read the first installment here and the second here.

In this essay I rebut an argument from my friend W—, which you haven’t read.  Yeah, I know that’s awkward, but I don’t wish to quote W—’s entire e-mail.  So I’ll quote his most salient points, college-paper style.  If nothing else you’ll get a nice crash course here in identifying logical fallacies.

Straw man

W— begins his argument by stating, “Your whole argument boils down to this: ‘I don’t like Cool Hunting and the things they promote on their website; therefore, use of the word “kit” to mean cycling clothing is invalid.’”

This is a blatant example of what is called the “straw man” fallacy.  This argumentative technique involves erecting an inferior version of your opponent’s argument that can be easily knocked down.  Straw man fallacies can be effective, particularly when the audience doesn’t have the original argument at hand.  I’ll save you the trouble of looking at my earlier posts:  here is a distillation of what I wrote.

• When we use a word, we participate in all its connotations whether we like it or not.
• Using a word can subtly pressure others to adopt it; one teammate admitted, “‘Kit’ still sounds dumb to me, but I use the word because I think I am supposed to.”
• Perhaps “kit” is useful, but we can avoid sounding like wannabe Euro types by using a different term.
• “Costume” is a better word for bike clothing, because so many of us cyclists are poseurs. By using a term that mocks our own pretentiousness, we beat others to the punch.

The above points are from my first post.  That is, I made them before W— even pointed out to me that the website Cool Hunting uses the term “kit.”  How could my whole argument boil down to my reaction to a website I hadn’t yet seen when I made it?

In my second post, I made these points: 

• Cool Hunting’s use of the term “kit” does not, in my opinion, validate the word whatsoever. 
• Word choice is a matter not just of utility but of taste. The members of my bike club avoid “bidon,” despite knowing what it means, because we don’t like it. That “bidon” has a following doesn’t sway us.
• The elasticity of language and the basic ability of a word to convey meaning should not be trotted out as blanket justifications for adopting new usage.
• There is ample precedent for refusing to adopt popular expressions (e.g., “at the end of the day,” “step up our game,” “swing for the fences,” “incent”).

W—’s argument is a straw man fallacy because he has falsely claimed that one of my points is representative of all the others.  It simply isn’t. 

Meanwhile, W— hasn’t even represented my argument correctly as regards Cool Hunting.  I didn’t say Cool Hunting’s use of “kit” is invalid; I simply said that Cool Hunting’s use of “kit” doesn’t, by itself, validate widespread adoption of the word.  That is, I’m not going to start using “kit” just because some website does, especially when it’s a dorky website selling needless, overpriced, twee crap to hipsters.  W— either misunderstood what I meant by “validate,” or he’s quibbling.

Allow me to further clarify my position on “valid” vs. “validate.”  Here’s an analogy.  In the South, people often say “y’all.”  I find this a highly useful (i.e., valid) term, because it’s the only plural sense of “you” that exists in English.  However, the meaning it conveys is perhaps insufficient to validate my own use of the term, because “y’all” is not typical Californian vernacular and my use of it can be puzzling to people.  (I sometimes can’t resist its utility; this has caused others to think I was from the South or was pretending to be.)

By the way, there’s something you should know about Cool Hunting (this isn’t part of my argument, but is just a warning):

The red herring fallacy

Three paragraphs of W—’s e-mail pertain to arguments against “kit” advanced by our teammate Trevor, who started this ball rolling by questioning my use of “kit.”  Trevor attacks the notion that this term is specific and clear enough to be valid.  This is an entirely separate argument from mine, and for W— to respond to Trevor’s argument (in an e-mail addressed to me) is to commit a “red herring” fallacy.  When he writes, “Remember, the argument is not about what words you like or don’t like to use, it is about the correctness of the term ‘kit’ to refer to cycling clothing,” he’s refuting the wrong argument. My argument has always been about whether or not we ought to support “kit.” I’ve gone after its connotations, not its value as a conveyer of meaning.

As you probably already know, a red herring is an argument that seems reasonable, but doesn’t actually address your opponent’s argument.  (In my household it’s known as “red lobster” because my young daughter once goofed when rattling off a list of logical fallacies.)  A red herring can be an intentional effort to distract the audience from the subject, or an unintentional loss of focus.  W—’s red herring is a slide toward straw man, as it conflates Trevor’s argument with mine. 

Here’s an analogy.  Suppose both my kids hate spinach.  Suppose Lindsay says, “Spinach is gross because it’s slimy.”  And suppose Alexa says, “I hate spinach because it tastes like shit.”  To say, “Alexa, you’re forgetting that uncooked spinach on a salad is quite crisp” is to attack the wrong argument, conveniently ignoring what Alexa actually said.  (Take note:  I find “tastes like shit” to be a powerful and valid phrase, but not one that I’d allow my kids to actually use.  Again, utility is not the only criterion by which to judge linguistic choices.)

W— invokes another red herring when he links to this article about the origin of the word “bike,” joking that there may have been “some bike club back in 1882 or so whose riders had a raging argument about how ‘impossibly stupid’ and ‘twee’-sounding it was to refer to a bicycle as a ‘bike.’”  But the article he cites doesn’t concern any objection to “bike,” certainly not on the grounds that it was affectation of any kind.  If the British had adopted “bike” many years before Americans, and those Americans who adopted it also used silly words like “bidon,” maybe W— would be getting somewhere.  But “bike,” according to the article, is an Americanism.

Argumentum ad populum

W— contends that “it is correct, normal—and in fact quite common, even among non-Kiwi, non-Brit, non-Euro English speakers—to use the term kit to refer to a cycling jersey and shorts. None of your criticism of Cool Hunting refutes that. And in fact their usage serves as proof that even a non-cycling specific website with national/international reach uses the term in the way I describe.”  W— goes on to describe a survey he did among participants in the Port of Oakland ride, asking what they call bike clothing.  The result:  “8 out of 10 serious responses were ‘kit.’  These are real, living users of the English language.”  (I wonder if it’s really fair to throw out non-serious responses; after all, isn’t the court jester typically the voice of reason in Shakespeare?  And “real, living users” somehow makes me think of the signs outside strip clubs saying, “See and talk to live nude girls!”  Is this parenthetical aside a red herring?  Absolutely.  Will the phrase “nude girls” bring traffic to my blog?  I hope so.)

An argumentum ad populum fallacy is made when the popularity of an idea is represented as evidence of the legitimacy or veracity of that idea.  Sometimes it’s tempting to assume something is right simply because so many people believe that it is.  (Here’s a doozy of an argumentum ad populum:  “Cigarettes are great!  After all, 40 million Americans can’t be wrong!”)

Whether W— commits this fallacy hinges on what he means by “correct” where word choice is concerned.  So I’ll quote him again; he reiterates that “kit” is “correct English usage, in common parlance in the USA, at least among bikies.”  So for him, “correct” means “in common use,” and I hope I don’t commit my own straw man fallacy by paraphrasing his argument thus:  “People do call it ‘kit.’  Get over it.”

So, his “everybody’s doing it” argument works okay if you construe proper usage as “talking the way everybody else talks.” If we accept “conveys meaning” as the be-all and end-all of language, then W— isn’t really committing a fallacy here.  But of course we shouldn’t accept “conveys meaning” as the true calling of language.  That’s where the next fallacy comes in.

Naturalistic fallacy and the is/ought problem

The Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote, in A Treatise on Human Nature, “I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a god, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find that instead of the usual copulations of proposition, is and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought or ought not.”

Building on this, the British philosopher G.E. Moore introduced the term “naturalistic fallacy” and warned against drawing moral or qualitative judgments—the ought—from empirical observation—the is.  Notions like Social Darwinism, the validity of unrestrained capitalism, eugenics, Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, and so forth are all committing the naturalistic fallacy.  This fallacy lurks behind many a defeatist approach, such as, “If the great grey owl can’t handle a little habitat displacement, maybe it just wasn’t meant to be.  Fate favors pigeons.  Get over it.”

As language goes, the naturalistic fallacy promotes the assumption that the way words end up being used is the same thing as how words ought to be used.  So a  person may reason, “If enough people call a lectern a podium, well, I can too!  If teenagers are throwing around words like ‘twerk’ and ‘vape,’ well, maybe I should too, to show how youthful and with-it I am!  And, I can always use ‘their’ as a third-person singular possessive pronoun (e.g., ‘each person must have their own ticket’), since everybody else does it.  It has become correct, by definition!”  Okay, fine, talk like that.  But don’t assume everybody’s going to like it, or that everybody should.

What does this have to do with “kit”?  Well, W— keeps pointing out examples of how “kit” is used.  I’m trying to make the case that perhaps it ought not be used.  Not because “kit” is as foul as “YOLO” or “artisanal,” but because I think we (i.e., my bike club, and the readers of this blog) can do better.

The do-gooder problem

As for as I know, “the do-gooder problem” isn’t an established category of problem, like a logical fallacy is.  But I feel the need to address a whiff of egalitarian, all-together-now spirit in W—’s argument:  again and again, he equates “correct” with “normal” and “common.”    Thus, when a person like me seeks to fault all these good, common, honest people who are just gettin’ it said, the only way they know how ... well, this may come off as elitist.

To combat the possible PR issue here, I’d like to make a distinction between “elite” and “elitist.”  In my opinion, the desire to do something really well (i.e., better than the average person does) doesn’t make you elitist.  It may make you elite (if you’re successful), but being elite is not itself being elitist and is not a character flaw.

You know that viral YouTube video “Shit Cyclists Say”?  I won’t lie—I’ve heard a lot of those lines from my teammates and I’ve used a few myself—but our general level of discourse is much higher than this.  During bike rides, I’ve had fascinating discussions about economics, public key encryption, net neutrality, glaciers, human nature, and—yes—language.  We don’t judge—though we may debate—and we set a high standard for one another.

This high standard comes through in our members’ race reports, which are consistently funny, food-centric, and well-written.  One member even took a page from the celebrity playbook and enlisted a ghost writer to help burnish his report.  Even something as basic as the name of our training race has been subject to continual revision:  “Hammer Ride” became “Haimer Ride” (based on an e-mail typo) before being renamed “House of Pain” which (perhaps because it wasn’t original, or perhaps because it was too brash) was changed to “Domicile of Hurt” (the acronym being implicit).  This still wasn’t good enough so it was then changed to the delightfully redundant “Domicile of Yurt.”  It’s this spirit of constant innovation that makes me think we EBVCers (and you, elite reader of blogs) could be leaders in the linguistic realm instead of blithely adopting whatever trendy lingo we come across.

So, to reiterate:  “kit” is a valid term, perhaps not completely precise but nonetheless useful (unlike “irregardless” and “biweekly”).  I don’t care who uses “kit,” and I won’t call you out for using it, and I plan to use it myself from time to time as a safeguard against dogmatism (though anybody who knows me will automatically fill in the air quotes, like he or she presumably does every time I insert a pregnant pause before uttering the word “Internet”).  But, recognizing that we can choose to accept or deflect memes, I encourage you to second-guess “kit.”  Sure, it’s a word; sure, it’s valid—but is that really enough?

From the Archives - STEM vs. Rhetoric

Introduction

Some seventeen years ago, before the novelty of e-mail had worn off, I forwarded around a funny message I got from my boss. My friend M— forwarded it to a bunch more people, and one of them sent a rebuttal that I found a little too pat. Moreover, his opening sentence, “Your math is off,” struck me as a little smug. So, notwithstanding the absurdity of the original e-mail, I decided to defend it to the death. (Actually, being in the wrong actually increased my motivation: as a lover of rhetorical finesse, I have a natural fondness for the quixotic job of advancing untenable positions.)

I present the transcript of this debate because I think it’s funny, and because everybody loves a good smackdown, right?

(A note on the title: of course the term “STEM” hadn’t been coined yet in 1997. But my title, you may find, is decent shorthand for the subtext of this debate.)

Knowledge vs. Money - a debate between strangers

From: Dana Albert
Sent: Friday, November 07, 1997 5:36 PM
To: undisclosed-recipients:
Subject: FW: Equation

Check out this funny e-mail from my boss!

--~--~--~--~--

Team,

I think we could call this the rule of the VP level at (insert client here)...

Do you know too much?

We all know that:
Knowledge is Power and  Time is Money.

And, as engineers learned in school:
Power = Work / Time

So, if  Knowledge = Power, and  Time = Money, then  Knowledge = Work / Money

Solving for Money, we get:  Money = Work / Knowledge

Thus, Money approaches infinity as Knowledge approaches ZERO, regardless of the Work done.

Therefore:
The Less you Know, the More you Make.

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~--~--

From: M—
Sent: Monday, November 10, 1997 11:18 AM
To: Dana Albert
Cc: undisclosed-recipients
Subject: FW: Equation

Dana,

Below is follow up from my friend—working on his PhD in Physics...

M—

--~--~--~--~--
From: S—
To: M—
Subject: Re: Equation
Date: Sunday, November 09, 1997 8:22PM

Your math is off. You must assume that work is independent of knowledge for your math to be correct. Since knowledge and work are correlated money does not go to infinity. Work is probaly proportional to knowledge to some power greater than one (first order approximation).. i.e. work = C * (knowledge)^(1+n). Where C is a constant. So if we go back to the eq M = W/K. We get M= C* K^(1+n) / K, by substituting in the relation for work. Finally simplfying, we get: M = C*K^n. So we see that as Knowledge increases money, actually also does increase. All is good in the world still.

S—

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~--~--

From: Dana Albert
Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 1997 7:16 PM
To: M—
Subject: RE: Equation

M—,

I find your friend’s rebuttal to my boss’s treatise interesting. I will analyze the rebuttal in terms of the three branches of rhetoric: ethos (authority), logos (logic), and pathos (emotional feeling).

First, ethos: the fact that your friend is working on his Ph.D. in physics is not nearly as impressive as an actual degree in physics. All that being in graduate school means is that he already has an undergraduate degree and has passed some tests. Meanwhile, we can only speculate on the quality of his undergraduate education. I did immediately notice that your friend’s his message had punctuation errors (such as only one space after a period), spelling errors (such as “probaly”), and grammatical errors (such as the sentence fragment “Where C is a constant”). Suffice to say he doesn’t win huge points in the ethos category.

Moving on to pathos, we immediately see that he bases his rebuttal largely on equations. I was not moved.

Finally, his logic is based upon what I would call a faulty premise: that knowledge and work are correlated. Where did he ever get that idea? It is futile to build an argument on an axiom that is not generally accepted. An effective argument must not only have valid reasoning, but must also be built upon sound premises—thus his equations, nothing more than smoke and mirrors, evaporate.

Clearly all is not “good in the world still.”

Sorry,
Dana

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~--~--

From: S—
To: M—
Subject: I am a Rocket Scientist!
Date: Tuesday, November 11, 1997 4:35PM

Mr. Albert feels that my argument fails for three reasons: I do not have the authority to make such statements, my rebuttal did not stir his emotions, and that knowledge and work output were indeed uncorrelated.

Mr. Albert challenges my authority, citing my numerous typos, and my lack of education. In science, authority has no baring on the validity of an argument. Just as the church’s authority could not stifle Galileo’s heresy, Mr. Albert’s authority can not stifle my heresy. I would also note that he is not immune to typos himself: “I did immediately notice that your friend’s his message had punctuation errors”

Mr. Albert goes on to say that my argument fails to move him. Perhaps, Mr. Albert, my equations failed to move you, because as an English major you fail to understand them.

Finally, Mr. Albert rejects my assumption that work output and knowledge are correlated. I challenge him to reject the assumption the next time he is interviewing a potential employee.

The success of the scientific worldview has been in large part due to the rejection of pathos and ethos, in favor of logos. While Mr. Albert certainly has pathos and ethos in abundance, it does not obscure the fact that he lacks logos. Mr. Albert defends his boss’s abuse of math and science in an attempt to prove that the less you know the more money you make. The argument is empirically false, and the argument should be rejected for that reason alone. I simply wished to point out where the logic of the proof collapsed.

S—

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~--~--

From: Dana Albert
Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 1997 8:16 PM
To: M—
Subject: RE: I am a Rocket Scientist!

M—,

I will continue to uphold the validity of my boss’s statement about money, knowledge, and work. This is fun.

The following sentence, committed by Mr. S—, I find comical: “In science, authority has no bearing on the validity of an argument.” Perhaps Mr. S— is quibbling on the definition of “valid,” which in strict logical terms can mean “correctly inferred or deduced from a premise.” I see no point in doing this: valid, in a normal context, means “(1) Well grounded; just: a valid objection. (2) Producing the desired results; efficacious.” Now, does Mr. S— really believe that authority has no bearing on the validity of an argument? If a doctor diagnoses sickle-cell anemia and the patient insists it’s just a cold, does the doctor back down? When a judge or attorney evaluates the merit of forensic evidence, whom does he call on: a forensics specialist, or an art historian? Perhaps Mr. S— is unimpressed by credentials, but he can hardly speak for the entire scientific community.

For Mr. S— to point out my typo is an excellent example of what in logic is called the “red herring fallacy.” While I did make a typo, pointing it out is irrelevant to the actual argument, which concerns my boss’s statement about work, knowledge, and money. I cited Mr. S—’s grammatical errors because I was attempting to evaluate his level of education. My level of education, on the other hand, does not figure in the validity of my boss’s argument. Meanwhile, since the quality of S—’s education is still very much in question and pertinent to our ongoing discussion, I did notice that in the very sentence in which Mr. S— points out my typo, he commits another punctuation error by neglecting to end his sentence with a period. Perhaps he wasn’t sure whether the period should go after the quotation mark or before it and just gave up. But I digress.

Mr. S— suggests that the failure of his equations to move me emotionally is due to the nature of my undergraduate education. On the contrary, elegant and conclusive math—such as that exemplified by my boss in his original statement—moves me almost to tears. Moreover, a solid argument can impress and persuade anybody, regardless of his or her background. To confine one’s audience to nerdy scientists seems pointless, given that my boss’s original statement had universal appeal to any of us weary cogs of industry.

I was surprised to see that Mr. S— returned to his ill-fated premise about knowledge and output being correlated. This assertion is arguable at best, and simply cannot stand up to ages-old, commonly accepted axioms such as “time is money” and “knowledge is power.” And yet his first attempt to support this assertion is a suggestion that I keep his assertion in mind when conducting job interviews. I can assure Mr. S— that when conducting job interviews, I actually keep in mind the fallacy of this assertion. When I interview an applicant, particularly one weighted down with extra degrees, I invariably have the following question in mind: “Okay, he’s got plenty of knowledge, but after such long residence in the ivory towers, will he work hard enough to finish his projects on time? Will he complete a variety of tasks, or get bogged down in his habit of perfectionism? Or will he decide that his job is a nuisance, and return to academia for another degree?”

Meanwhile, it appears that Mr. S—’s submersion in his graduate physics program has given him a skewed perception of “the success of the scientific worldview.” All around us are examples of science’s failure to persuade people. For example, it is scientific fact that smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer, yet millions of people begin doing it every day. Why? Is it because they refute the validity of the scientific findings? I doubt it. More likely it’s a clear example of scientific logos being overpowered by the pathos of cigarette ads showing beautiful sexy cool people smoking, combined with the ethos of the Marlboro Man and assorted smokers in the entertainment industry. Again, Mr. S— seems to confuse the prestige of his field with the realities of rhetoric.

Mr. S—, meanwhile, himself seems to try to infuse his argument with ethos by titling his message “I am a Rocket Scientist!” and repeatedly citing the strength of logos in science as if it were exemplified in his own arguments. Alas, it is not. For Mr. S— to claim that “Mr. Albert . . . lacks logos” is both incorrect and a good example of the logical fallacy called “ad hominem.” For Mr. S— to assert that my argument is illogical is one thing; to assert that I as a person “lack logos” is a personal attack. I will not dwell on this attack, since it is far more interesting to wonder what problems he has found in my logic. Incongruously, he attempts to support his attack on my logic by claiming that my boss’s statement about knowledge and money is empirically false. First of all, what does empirical evidence have to do with the quality of my logic? Dismissing the premises of an argument does not in itself do anything to evaluate the logic of conclusions that proceed logically from those premises.

Let us use a simpler proof to elucidate Mr. S—’s mistake. Assume this premise: it is raining outside. Assume also this premise: if it rains, Mr. Jones will carry his umbrella. If we assume these premises to be true (i.e., it is raining, and Mr. Jones does carry his umbrella when it rains), then we arrive at the logical conclusion that Mr. Jones is therefore carrying his umbrella. I believe this is a classic example of inductive reasoning, called (if memory serves), “modus tollendo ponens.” Now, if we discover that we were mistaken about the rain—that it is in fact not raining—does that mean we were being illogical when we concluded that Mr. Jones was carrying his umbrella? Of course not. Our logic was impeccable; we were simply wrong about one of the premises. For Mr. S— to state that my premise is the point “at which the logic of the proof collapsed” suggests that he aspires to an understanding of logical proof which he has not yet achieved.

This brings us to what apparently is the last possible foundation of his argument: his assertion that knowledge and output are interrelated, and that this statement is empirical fact. Even when I take into consideration Mr. S—’s lack of experience in the corporate world (immersed as he is in academia), I still must believe that examples of knowledge without output are all around him. What about the tenured professor who hasn’t published in three decades, who recycles the same rote lecture year after year? What about the grad student who has read every single book on his subject and still hasn’t started on his doctoral thesis, and never will? What about all those who finally get their Ph.D.s, only to take dead-end jobs in the service sector, letting their nine years of education slowly fall to oblivion? Meanwhile, we see other examples of output without knowledge, such as the factory worker who knows almost nothing about the textile industry but is nonetheless capable of sewing more than 500 elastic waistbands a day. Clearly, Mr. S— is unwise to base his entire argument—and his condemnation of my logical ability—on such a problematic assertion as knowledge and output being interrelated to a significant degree.

I hope that clears up the matter.

Dana

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From: S—
To: M—
Subject: Re: Equation (fwd)
Date: Wednesday, November 12, 1997 1:44PM

M—,

I’ve been busy researching the correlation between knowledge and wages, but I offer the insights of C—, a fellow graduate student.

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Forwarded message
Date: Wed, 12 Nov 1997 11:36:23 -0700 (MST)
From: C—
To: S—
Subject: Re: Equation (fwd)

I find this entire discourse fairly meaningless in light of one error. Even if we accept the premises that knowledge is power, and that power is equal to work divided by time, the conclusion that these two relationships obey the laws of communicability is fallacious. The original author has fallen into a fairly common trap in the sciences. As with the infamous “Intensity” definition in optics, the true meaning of power depends upon the specific context, or less generally, discipline of science in which it is used.

Since an astronomer uses “intensity” to mean “watts per square meter” and a radiometric scientist uses “intensity” to mean “power per steradian” (the true SI definition), can we state that the ratio, area divided by solid angle, is a meaningless quantity and should thus be discarded? Of course not. As I see it, there are two definitions of power in play. As a businessman might use the term, power is the ability to wield influence over others. Fortunately, the science definition is more exact. It is presented appropriately in the original document, power = work/time. You may disagree with the former definition, but my fundamental point is undeniable: business power cannot be made equivalent to science power.

You may attribute any typos in this document to my telnet settings (which do not properly justify and update the window as I edit) rather than to how much attention I paid to spelling back in the sixth grade. Thank you.

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From: Dana Albert
Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 1997 5:40 PM
To: M—
Subject RE: Equation (fwd)

M—,

I find C—’s assessment to be refreshingly clear and conclusive. With surgical precision, he has gotten right to the crux of the matter: the inappropriate merger of mathematical equations with abstract aphorisms.

However, I can’t help but point out that the original treatise (“the less you know, the more you make”) is meant as comedy—and, like other examples of the comic genre, depends upon its good-natured audience to gloss over the certain things (in this case the math/aphorism incompatibility). If the director of “Trading Places” had been hung up on the impossibility of a panhandler becoming a successful Wall Street trader, the movie never would have been made. In like fashion, if Mr. C— had responded directly to the knowledge/money treatise, he would have spoiled our fun. I much prefer the protracted debate in between, especially when my opponent is off in the weeds. ; )

Dana