#perception vs. reality

[retrobanditloser]

[wausaupilotreview]

"It is easier to be less concerned with what is true, than with having a a media sponsored reflection that tells us what to believe. We have been trained by our screens to be compliant with what brand sells." - Rick Lohr of Wausau

Your letters: Reflections on reality

[kdylanspencer]

Sometimes family feels like love, comfort, and a safety net wrapped in razor wire.

[dearyallfrommatt]

An Argument Against Reality - Why You Can't Trust Your Senses

 A very sharp, concise exploration and explanation as to why the human senses are, at best, fallible and, at worst, complete illusions. Growing up, I was the type that only believed in what my five senses told me. That all went away after reading Kant for the first time, which is right around my first hit of acid.

 Still, it feeds into my general skepticism about paranormal phenomenon. No, someone telling me they saw a ghost or a UFO doesn’t cut the mustard. I talked to Hank Williams once while tripping. Since we’ve not evolved to move at the speed of the average automobile, our minds “fill in” some of the things our vision can’t completely digest while we’re moving down the road. Think of that the next time you’re driving while texting on a familiar stretch of road.

 Reality is not only stranger than we think it is, it’s stranger than we can ever perceive it to be. Like the young lady in the video, this often gives people existential crises when they try to wrap their heads around it. If they got any sense, anyway. I’m often amazed at how shallow some people’s thinking is when confronted with concepts like this.

 Or, hell, maybe I’m just neurotic and so is she. I don’t know. Anyhow, interesting video and something to think about. Also, Up And Atom is a very good channel with lots of neat stuff, usually more hard science. However, that’s what philosophy is form calming yourself down after the fact of being blows your mind.

[trentteti]

Flawctober: The Perception vs. Reality Fallacy

In preparation for the November 2018 LSAT, we’re going to spend the month of October going over some of the most common logical fallacies we see on the LSAT. Being able to reliably identify these fallacies will help you out on a ton of questions on the LSAT — about half the questions in Logical Reasoning section, in fact. Over this month, we’ll be doing such a thorough investigation into some of these common fallacies that we hereby dub this month Flawctober. Today, we’re discussing the perception vs. reality fallacy.

“Gwyneth Paltrow says that the best way to cure a cold is to drink a big mug of peppermint tea mixed with apple cider vinegar, so anyone beginning to feel cold symptoms should imbibe this mixture as a surefire way of making themselves feel better.”

“A newspaper conducted a survey of 100 football fans, 75% of whom said that football-related brain damage is not a serious concern for professional football players. One can thus conclude that NFL players have nothing to worry about when it comes to whether their sport of choice is harming their brains.”

“President Donald Trump’s uncle was a science professor, and Trump has noticed a lot of scientists on both sides of the climate change issue; therefore, the jury’s still out on whether climate change is really a thing.”

What do all of these arguments have in common (aside from being ridiculous, of course)? They’re all based on what someone believes to be the truth. We at Blueprint call this the “perception vs. reality” flaw.

What is the “perception vs. reality” fallacy?

As much as we’d like to believe we all know everything, when it comes to the LSAT, whoever you’re citing as support needs to be a reasonable authority on the conclusion you’re trying to draw.

The “perception vs. reality” fallacy occurs when the person or people cited in the premises can’t be reasonably expected to know about the conclusion that’s being drawn.

In other words, you could cite Cardi B’s opinion when drawing a conclusion about releasing diss tracks or wearing exceptional outfits or getting in fights with Nicki Minaj, but you can’t validly use her opinion to support a conclusion about, say, the conflict in the Middle East.

How can I identify when an argument contains this fallacy?

There are a couple common indicators that an argument contains a perception vs. reality fallacy:

• The premises are about what people think or believe, and the conclusion is phrased as being definite (for instance, in the Gwyneth Paltrow example above, you could validly draw a conclusion about what Gwyneth believes is the best cold remedy, but not a conclusion about what the most effective cold remedy is)

• The argument contains a study or survey, but it’s used to support a conclusion that the group being surveyed isn’t qualified to speak on (see the NFL example above – you can draw a conclusion about what fans perceive as problems for players, but not about whether brain damage is or is not a problem for players)

How would I strengthen or weaken an argument containing this fallacy?

This fallacy is effectively a problem with the strength of the support being provided, so if you want to strengthen an argument where the perception vs. reality flaw is occurring, you need to establish that the person or people cited as support actually know what they’re talking about. For instance, in the Trump example above, you could strengthen the argument by adding in the information that Trump himself holds a PhD in environmental science and has studied the climate change issue extensively. (Stop laughing! That’s what you’d need to make the argument make sense.) Conversely, if you want to weaken this type or argument, you need to make it seem even less likely that the person has any clue what they’re talking about.

Flawctober: The Perception vs. Reality Fallacy was originally published on LSAT Blog

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Contrary to common understanding, the great rise in prison populations was not precipitated by an increase in crime or in the number of individuals in the crime-prone age group. Victimization studies and official data reveal that from 1975 to 1985, a period in which prison populations doubled, crime rates were actually declining." Moreover, during the largest period of prison population increases, the population of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-old males increased by only ten percent. Other factors, then, must explain the dramatic increase in prison populations in the late 1970s and early 1980s. 

The primary source of the rise in prison populations was a dramatic change in criminal justice policies: specifically, a shift to policies that mandated that convicted criminals be incarcerated, and incarcerated for longer periods of time. Prior to 1970, prison administrators were better able to adjust prison populations through flexible parole criteria. As prison populations increased, parole boards frequently advanced parole dates or took slightly greater risks with parole candidates in order to ease the burden on a prison. However, animated by both conservative concerns about leniency to criminals and liberal complaints about the risk of inequity due to parole board discretion, several states attempted to curb this discretion by adopting so-called "determinate sentencing laws." Indeed, the movement away from parole board discretion was so great that between 1975 and 1982, ten states abolished their parole boards entirely.

California's determinate and minimum sentencing laws were typical. These statutes established minimum prison sentences for given offenses and prescribed mandatory prison terms for felonies involving a deadly weapon or for multiple felony offenses."' California did not, however, immediately authorize additional funding to corrections to accommodate the projected increase in daily populations. Similarly, New York passed several laws during this period imposing mandatory prison sentences for drug users and sellers, recidivists, and violent offenders, all without providing any accompanying increase in corrections appropriations. 

Improved techniques for identifying parole violators dramatically increased the number of parolees returned to prison and exacerbated the effects of eroded parole board discretion on prison crowding. In California, for example, the vast majority of parole violations today stem from illegal drug use that is detected by testing procedures not available ten years ago." By 1987, forty-three percent of all prison admissions for felonies were for parole violations, most of which involved drugs.' Overall since 1977, California has seen a sixfold increase in the percentage of parolees who are returned to custody for violating the terms of their release." 

The absence of a relief valve in the rest of the criminal justice machinery compounded the impact of restricting parole board discretion. Parole board members are better insulated from political pressures than legislators, administrators, and-in states where judges are elected-even the courts. Faced with strong public pressure to get tough on crime and keep convicted criminals imprisoned, these political actors allowed prison populations to swell and forced prisons to exceed their previously determined physical "capacities." Thus, political pressures rather than increased crime rates led to the increase in prison populations. This effect-larger prison populations-became widely publicized, due in significant part to a simultaneous movement in the lower federal courts to confront prison conditions, a movement that adopted crowding as its centerpiece. The following Section analyzes the role that the courts played in bringing the issue of crowding to the forefront of the prison policy debate.” 

-  Jeff Bleich, “The Politics of Prison Crowding.” California Law Review, Vol. 77, No. 5 (Oct., 1989), pp. 1147-1149.  

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“There has almost never been a time in our history when critics have not condemned the nation's prisons as too crowded. As one would expect, movements to reduce crowding have frequently coincided with increases in prison population. Yet changes in the level of concern about crowding are not indissolubly linked with changes in actual prison populations. 

Movements to alleviate prison crowding often have not coincided with changes in prison population. Several major construction and anticrowding reform movements occurred during periods of relative population stability. For example, in 1931, the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement blamed overcrowded conditions for hardening criminals, and thereby launched a significant decarceration movement. During the five years preceding this movement, however, populations had increased by only five percent.  It was not until the period from 1936 to 1939 - after the movement had stalled - that there was a sudden increase in prison populations. Similarly, in the early 1970s, the Federal Bureau of Prisons embarked on a major prison building program, and some states initiated large-scale decarceration, despite remarkably little change in prison population growth. 

Likewise, prison crowding complaints have occasionally been ignored during periods of prisoner population expansion. For example, a dramatic influx of new inmates between 1936 and 1939 contributed to a fifty percent increase in prison population during the 1930s. In 1939, a major study of prisons concluded that serious overcrowding was one of two main evils of the American penal system. Notwithstanding these developments and despite earlier reform efforts, there was little or no significant campaign for prison construction or prison reform during this period.”

-  Jeff Bleich, “The Politics of Prison Crowding.” California Law Review, Vol. 77, No. 5 (Oct., 1989), pp. 1144-46.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“There is no objective method for determining with precision the point at which increases in prison populations produce crowding. The ability of a prison to withstand population increases depends on numerous factors other than the amount of space per inmate. This fact, however, has not prevented standard-setting bodies from establishing "capacity" figures. Predictably, such figures are remarkably inconsistent. Most definitions of prison capacity do not even purport to reflect empirical judgments about the demographic composition of inmate populations, the measurable psychological effects of certain density levels, and the trends in inmate violence, or normative judgments about the tolerable level of inmate discomfort in light of the penological objectives of prison."

Other definitions reflect these judgments in only a fragmented or indirect way. Nationally, measurements of prison crowding derive from largely inconsistent criteria, reflecting disparate goals and different concepts of crowding. As a result, definitions of prison capacity have often proved to be functionally meaningless.

...

Design capacity represents the actual number of inmates that a prison's architects planned for it to hold. In virtually every state, this number is expressed in terms of minimum floor space per inmate. In 1973, the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals recommended that prisons provide inmates with single rooms having a floor area of at least eighty square feet. Shortly thereafter, the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the National Clearinghouse for Criminal Justice Planning and Architecture each offered a different, lower standard. The American Correctional Association, however, adopted the lowest-and more frequently cited-benchmark requiring a minimum of sixty square feet of space per prisoner. Two federal district courts have adopted this standard as part of their remedies for constitutional violations by state prisons." However, as discussed earlier a prison's capacity-that is, the point at which prisoners experience the psychological and physiological effects called "crowding"-is a function not merely of the space provided, but also of psychological and environmental factors. The level of perceived crowding will vary depending upon conditions other than mere spatial density.

The variety of factors involved in determining crowding underscores the difficulty of establishing uniform, objective criteria to address this complex and ultimately quite elusive problem. Perhaps it is for this reason that there is no consensus as to the minimum square footage per prisoner required to avoid "crowding." This may also explain in part why almost every state has ignored the "minimum" spatial requirements dictated by its own measure of design capacity. The reluctance of states to adhere to rigid floor-space requirements is understandable. In practical terms, prisoners are unaffected by most states' small deviations from the required standard; no studies have found a statistically significant difference in crowding indicia between prisons that provide fifty-five square feet per inmate and those that provide sixty square feet. Prison administrators concede that these standards are fairly arbitrary because many factors other than floor space affect crowding, including the layout and operations of a prison. In fact, some researchers have concluded that floor space, standing alone, has virtually no impact on crowding. 

Existing standards of design capacity appear particularly inappropriate because they do not reflect the dramatic variance among models of prison facility. The awkwardness of a uniform design capacity for these various models is revealed when one considers that under most design capacity standards, a lone prisoner who spends most of the day outside his fifty square foot cell would be "crowded," whereas two inmates who are locked down for most of the day in their 120 foot cell would not. Not surprisingly, then, despite its prevalence in crowding debates and newspaper articles, design capacity has had little direct impact on prison operations. Prison officials have treated it as a mutable figure; some states have changed design capacity seemingly at will to comport with fluctuations in prison populations. For example, although Texas prisons were originally designed for single-celling, "official" capacity is now based upon double-celling. Even those states that do rely on a fixed design capacity generally use it as a benchmark for calculating a different capacity figure: rated capacity.

Rated capacity is the highest number of inmates that a facility can house while providing a minimum level of safety and services. Thus, even among prisons of the same physical size and design, rated capacity may vary depending on the manner in which they are operated. For example, theoretically at least, it would be possible for one prison to house three times as many inmates as another prison of the same size with no increase in crowding-simply by having inmates sleep in shifts: three inmates could sleep in the same bed for eight hour turns as long the prison could adequately provide activities to occupy them during the remaining sixteen hours (and, of course, as long as no need arose to confine all inmates simultaneously). On the other hand, if a prison is locked down twenty-four hours a day, then even partial double-celling is likely to increase dramatically the perception of crowding. 

Rated capacity, then, may vary with a prison's physical configuration, staffing patterns, available services, and program design. Because of the numerous variations in prison operations, rated capacity has proved difficult to determine and easy to manipulate. Michael Sherman and Gordon Hawkins, in their discussion of Stateville Penitentiary in Illinois, offer a striking example of the manipulation of rated capacity." They note that rated capacity at Stateville changed to accommodate the actual prison population at any given time. Stateville was originally designed and built to hold 1,392 inmates--one sixtysquare-foot cell for every prisoner. Yet only ten years after it opened, the prison housed 3,952 inmates. Even so, during the next fifty years, no court found Stateville to be crowded. At the time of a federal government survey in 1978, prison officials gave rated capacity as 2,700, a figure that coincidentally matched a court ordered ceiling. Ironically, since Stateville's actual population was 2,678 prisoners, it was operating under capacity at that time, even though it housed nearly twice its original design capacity. 

Rated capacity figures may be manipulated on the system-wide level as well as in individual institutions. For example, although California has set rated capacity as 120% of "design bed capacity," its prison population has remained consistently between 150% and 170% of design capacity since 1983. Those who participated in setting the 120% figure now acknowledge that its selection was largely arbitrary. Moreover, despite maintaining populations consistently above this level, California's prisons have seen violent incidents, illness, disruptive acts, and escapes drop to a historic low." As a result, at least one of the officials who helped set the 120% figure has recommended that California's Blue Ribbon Commission on Inmate Management raise rated capacity to an even higher percentage of design capacity. Thus, many prisons currently called "overcrowded" have held more prisoners in the past without raising any concern. Moreover, what one state defines as crowded, other states may consider acceptable.”     

-  Jeff Bleich, “The Politics of Prison Crowding.” California Law Review, Vol. 77, No. 5 (Oct., 1989), pp. 1138-1142.