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I find four of your five examples are incorrect. The examples you provide for Emotional Reasoning, False Dichotomy, Incoherence and Scapegoating are not examples by your own definitions provided. I also note that emotional reasoning is not the term the provided video uses to describe the phenomenon described, which is good, because emotional reasoning is something else entirely. I am copying my critiques from a comment on another blog discussing your points.

Emotional Reasoning: "Baby formula linked to horrific outbreak of new, terrifying disease among helpless infants. Parents despair." - Sure, that's a lot of scary language to cram into a headline, but no argument is being made. No facts are being replaced by emotion in a process of reasoning. Click baity, but not emotional reasoning (which is what the video suggests, to be fair; they don't call it emotional reasoning either.)

False Dichotomy: "The solution is EDUCATION. We have to improve our schools before we can deal with crime on the streets." So... where is the dichotomy here? There is no "Either you do X, or you do Y" choice, but rather a statement of steps and the order to take them in. You can argue that it is false that you have to fix the schools before dealing with crime, but the argument (or perhaps just the point) is that crime is solved by education. No dichotomy.

Incoherence: "You don't know what you're talking about. Even though science is yet to show a correlation, it's very clear that violent video games like ___ make people more likely to commit crimes." Those can both be true at the same point (although they are not arguments like she says, but statements of fact as perceived by the arguer). Science has yet to show that I have three kids, but I clearly do; I am still awaiting a response from the publisher on the study I submitted, but you know how peer review goes.

5: Scapegoating: "The reason voter turnout is down is because Millennials refuse to leave the house to go vote." She defines scapegoating as "A large or complex problem is blamed entirely on a single individual or group, who cannot reasonably be responsible for it." Is it unreasonable that voter turnout is down because a slice of eligible voters doesn't want to get out and vote? Really? Now, one would want to see some numbers on that, like voting % of each age bracketed generation over time, showing that other cohorts vote at pretty much the same rate as always but Millennials are really low and bring the overall average down, but it is a reasonable claim, and one that can be falsified. Whether or not it is because they refuse to leave the house to go vote, or refuse to leave the house in general, or are fine leaving the house but refuse to wait in line to vote, that's a different question, and might not be testable.

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deletedSep 19, 2022·edited Sep 19, 2022
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