This is the first in a series of however many posts I feel like posting about the way debate is carried out on social media and in the outside world. It frustrates the hell out of me seeing the same fallacies trotted out repeatedly and I just want to alert your attention to them. Be very sceptical about people who use these devices, and always try to catch yourself using them before it's too late!
The Impossible Expectations argument is a simple concept - it's when someone demands a ridiculously high, perhaps even impossible, standard of proof for an argument they are against. A standard which they invariably do not apply to sources of information that fit their existing narrative. That's it in broad terms, but I'm going to talk about a specific variant of it that I see repeatedly. In a nutshell "you were wrong about something once so I can disregard everything you say". The Impossible Expectation is that the source must have always been 100% right about everything from day one!
Here are a couple of examples. First up the internet comment section made flesh and somehow voted into the most powerful position in the world, Donald Trump. Trump denied CIA reports that Russian hacking had influenced the election campaign with the argument, from his own Twitter and a statement released by his transition team
"These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction" [1]
Often the argument is used in relation to science, another example from Trump's transition team member Anthony Scaramucci
"There was an overwhelming science that the Earth was flat. And there was
an overwhelming science that [...] we were the center of the world. A
hundred percent, you know, we get a lot of things wrong in the
scientific community. You and I both know that." [2]
Both claims are at the least debatable, but even allowing that they were true, so what? It sounds superficially convincing, oh hey well they were wrong about this, but it's a lazy, worthless argument. To err is human. Have the speakers themselves ever been wrong about anything? Can we disregard them entirely on that basis?
There are also different ways of being wrong, some much worse than others. Making a prediction that doesn't turn out to happen is hardly a sin. If 55% of the betting predictions I made were accurate I'd be living on a tropical island somewhere, not sitting here in the pitch dark at half past four. Honest mistakes happen. But how can you tell if a mistake is honest? Largely by the person's response when it's pointed out. An honest debator accepts it and corrects it. A dishonest debator ignores it and even doubles down by repeating it later. Finally there are deliberate attempts to deceive. If a source is caught *deliberately* making false claims or statements, you'd be right not to trust it, especially if it happens repeatedly.
In the general case though, if this is one of someone's main arguments, be sceptical. Even more so than usual. To keep your guard up against this argument, keep it specific and keep it short. During the election campaign, someone on the Democratic side posted something along the lines of "130 terrible things about Trump". Opening themselves up to the counter "hey look, number 117 isn't true because X. THEREFORE I CAN REJECT YOUR ENTIRE LIST".
I'll hopefully have a bit more to say about sources and how to evaluate them in a later post, but I'll leave it there for now. Watch out for the fallacy of Impossible Expectations! Do feel free to comment on Twitter or Facebook in response to the initial post.
[1] widely reported inc. http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/trump-team-russia-cia-intel-election-232460
[2] https://mediamatters.org/video/2016/12/14/watch-cnn-anchor-informs-trump-transition-official-climate-change-science-isnt-matter-opinion/214816 (the anchor actually does a reasonable job debating against)
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