Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Logic - Who would have thought?

I liked this video quite a bit! Hope you enjoy the thinking in it too.

2 comments:

Kathy Haynie said...

Good video. Thank you for posting.

Mark & Susanne Kelley said...

Good video, but it suffers from a logical fallacy. If someone proposes any sufficiently horrible scenario in any such decision making grid, it is the one that must be avoided.

One such example relates to the existence of God. If one creates such a grid based on whether or not He exists, and on the consequences of such a belief (using the Christian, Jewish, or Islamic Gods), then the grid will show that the worst-case scenario, the one that must be avoided, comes from not believing in any God. Eternal punishment is the result (generally), and nothing else is even remotely so severe. Therefore, the conclusion would have to be that it is better to believe in God and try to obey Him.

Of course, this is just a bet, and it is a way to try to place the safest bet. But it really has nothing to do with whether or not there really is a God. And it certainly doesn't deal with whether or not God can be fooled by such a bet.

Such a decision grid will always have that problem, and as such is not always a good decision making tool.

Of course, another error with it is that nobody can foresee the future. What if the results of a particular box lead to nuclear war? We can't know that, and yet it might occur as the result of social or political disruptions that accompany the actions taken in either column. We just can't know and there is no way to know.