{"id":53,"date":"2008-11-25T19:55:22","date_gmt":"2008-11-25T19:55:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/?p=53"},"modified":"2020-07-05T13:12:31","modified_gmt":"2020-07-05T13:12:31","slug":"bad-thoughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/2008\/11\/25\/bad-thoughts\/","title":{"rendered":"Bad Thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I recently finished the book <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20080905210753\/http:\/\/www.word-power.co.uk\/books\/bad-thoughts-I9780954325534\/\"><cite>Bad thoughts &#8211; a guide to clear thinking<\/cite><\/a> by Jamie Whyte.<\/p>\n<p>It was a really interesting and engrossing read.<\/p>\n<p>The book is split into a number of chapters, each dealing with a type of logical fallacies. These include &#8220;The right to my opinion&#8221; and &#8220;morality fever&#8221;. It is well written and funny, dissecting statements from the great and the good, showing their flawed reasoning. As well as contrasting hypothetical positions of liberals, socialists, conservatives and libertarians.<\/p>\n<p>One timely chapters deals with stock brokers. After discussing whether their high salaries are rewarded for <em>luck<\/em> or for <em>skill<\/em>, and discussing statistics of results and how <em>some<\/em> of the traders will have good runs he concludes:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nInvestment banks should employ former winners of Lotto tickets for them. No salary could be too high for these wizards of ticket selection.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I recently finished the book Bad thoughts &#8211; a guide to clear thinking by Jamie Whyte. It was a really interesting and engrossing read. The book is split into a number of chapters, each dealing with a type of logical fallacies. These include &#8220;The right to my opinion&#8221; and &#8220;morality fever&#8221;. It is well written [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,20],"tags":[21,796],"class_list":["post-53","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-philosophy","tag-book","tag-philosophy"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3828,"href":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions\/3828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/agraham.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}