Not a Good Argument

Planes are statistically the safest way to travel, by a really absurd margin. Despite this, I can find an example of a plane crash with ease. I can even find documentation of a really horrific plane crash, with gruesome pictures and stuff.

It shouldn’t really need to be said, but I’m going to say it here anyway (mostly for the purposes of linking to this later): responding to a claim of “X is very rare” with an example of X is not a good argument.

I might say “Flying is very safe,” and you might argue by showing me horrific pictures of a plane crash while smirking and saying “Oh, so this looks ‘safe’ to you?” If you do that, you’re wrong and not very bright.

Many people who argue this way are simply dumb, but some of them are manipulative. For example, they might know that flying is very safe, but maybe they run a bus company and they have strong incentive to trick people into shifting their travel miles from planes to buses as much as possible. That person absolutely loves it when a plane crashes, because they know that even though this argument is wrong, it sometimes works.

(I’m not saying everyone who works for a bus company relishes plane crashes, obviously. There are plenty of reasons to base your travel plans on things other than maximum safety, such as cost or convenience, so buses are fine. Just using that as an example.)

So whenever you make a statistical claim and someone responds with a single example of the statistical outlier, do a quick check: are they just dumb, or are they trying to push an agenda?

People who are correct don’t always make good arguments (and it’s a shame when they don’t). But people who are incorrect almost always make bad arguments, because there are precious few good arguments for incorrect positions.

If you want to be right more often, one of the first steps you can take is not to use bad arguments for any position. If you refuse to use bad arguments and force yourself to only use good ones, you’ll automatically exclude a lot of incorrect positions from your life.