rattus rattus’ blog

[Ratta asks whether you miss her.]

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge.
— Alfred North Whitehead

If only nonsense would not make so much sense.

Inspired by ideas circling around some postings here, such as “What is wrong“, we at contradicTshirts established a new series of designs and T-shirts: right/wrong.

If there was a commandment for “(really) good liars” it might be: You shall not use fallacious arguments. A “bad liar” — heck, who would not want to be bad from time to time — might just as well juggle with fallacies, and hope for the listeners logical illiteracy.

The Fallacy Files is one of Internet’s finest collection of examples of fallacious reasoning, see for instance “appeals to ignorance“. Moreover, Fallacy Files comes with a weblog, a comprehensive taxonomy of logical fallacies, and more.

Bad Science is the tempting apple that does not fall far from the tree of fallacious reasoning. “If you ever doubted the dangers of fallacious reasoning” says Gary N. Curtis, author of the Fallacy Files, you should read Losing the Lottery by Ben Goldacre, “guardian” of Bad Science.

If you’re unlucky enough, fallacious reasoning could put you behind bars for the rest of your life for “murders” you didn’t commit, and which in fact may not be murders at all.
— Gary N. Curtis, Fallacy Files

A nurse called Lucia de Berk has been in prison for 5 years in Holland, convicted of 7 counts of murder and 3 of attempted murder. An unusually large number of people died when she was on shift (…)
— Ben Goldacre, Bad Science

If I myself was only safe from fallacy.

So, someone and I have started our own T-shirt shop contradicTshirts. The above design is one of our first genuine designs. I am planning to feature some rattus rattus’ blog T-shirts, of course.
Watch out! And meanwhile, happy dichotomizing.

Samuel Butler is often said to have said

Science, after all, is only an expression for our ignorance of our own ignorance.

which he might have never said. Anyway, I think that it might be hard to accurately cite this quote for anyone who actually read Samuel Butler’s note-books. But then, maybe he never wanted us to be that precise at all.

Knowledge (…) is based ultimately upon ignorance. To get knowledge out of ignorance seems almost as hopeless a task as to get something out of any number of nothings, but this in practice is what we have to do and the less fuss we make over it the better.
— Samuel Butler, Note-Books

Today, when using a local e-learning platform to get information about a course on “Interdisciplinary Communication” I learned the imperative way that interdisciplinary communication is inaccessible to guests. Even more so, it is forbidden.
There you learn. Faster than any course could do.

She asked

What are the dreams we share?

I answered

The dream of sharing dreams has come true.