Education
A Logic Quiz
by Clay Staggs
If you’re sick of reading my posts bemoaning the fact that we don’t teach logic anymore, then you probably should skip this one. For those of you brave enough to read on, I offer the following as a quiz. Yesterday Senator Obama gave a major speech on his energy policy. As summarized by the outstanding Politico website, below are the three main points. The quiz is to see if you can identify the flaw(s) in the logic of the plan.
The three main components of Obama’s plan are:
— Get 1 million 150 mile-per-gallon plug-in hybrids on U.S. roads within six years.
— Require that 10 percent of U.S. energy comes from renewable sources by the end of his first term – more than double the current level.
—Reduce U.S. demand for electricity 15 percent by 2020.
Got that? We’re going to ADD 1 million plug-in vehicles to the electricity grid, yet REDUCE demand for electricity by 15%. Obviously, these two goals are facially contradictory. But it’s really worse. Even without the increased load that all these plug-ins would add, demand for electricity is constantly increasing, for (what ought to be) fairly straightforward reasons: the population is ever increasing, we constantly add new electric gadgets to our lives, etc. Without major changes to the way we live, how exactly can demand be expected to decrease?
Let’s take this debate a step further, shall we? Leaving aside adding 1M new plug-ins, given that we live in a (relatively) free economy, how, exactly, will the government achieve a goal of reducing the demand for electricity 15%, when the vast, vast majority of electricity is consumed by the private sector?
But the final flaw in the logic is this: why is there a need to reduce electrical demand by 15%? What’s really wrong with electricity in and of itself? After all, he’s advocating plug-in vehicles!! Isn’t the real issue with electricity how it’s generated? There was an article recently about a possible breakthrough in solar energy technology by researchers at MIT, which, if it pans out, could provide vast amounts of energy with no pollution and no C02. You can read about that here. If we could generate electricity that way, why reduce its consumption?
It blows me away that a howler like this can get past the layers and layers of speechwriters, advisers, etc., that typically accompany a presidential campaign. The question is, though, (aside from nerds like me) does anyone notice, and if they do, do they care?
Posted by Clay Staggs at August 5, 2008 08:57 AM
I have often wondered about the last question. I don’t know if the masses have the ability to interpret and parse these things or if they have the ability and choose to not take the time.
I wonder, in some cases, if the tendency to compartmentalize and separate everything has been taken so far as to a disbelief that two sentences relate to each other, much less the subjects of those sentences.
The other part of that is statements in a political forum seemed to be met with apathy in large part anymore. This makes things very difficult. There’s very little incentive for politicians to tell the truth (even if they believe there is such a thing as truth) and a lot that seems like incentive to mislead or bald faced lie. Shame, really. This governmental system really needs a base of honesty to work as well as it could.
As to your main point of logic, well said. Logical consistency is very rare commodity in all spheres these days. Let me know when the Logic/Critical Reasoning class starts.
Jeff,
I think that I truly learned logic and critical thinking in law school here at the University. One would think that Obama - a graduate of the top law school in the country (where I believe he was editor in chief of the law review) would have some of those skills.
So I think this leads to two possible conclusions. First, they don’t teach very much critical thinking at Harvard Law. Second, you’re correct and he’s intentionally pandering, promoting illogical ideas knowing that he’ll never get called on it by his adoring press corp.