People make mistakes when trying to figure out how everything relates together, just, truly all the time. You walk upon your nibling with strict parents, who expresses great distress because they can’t justify doing nothing when they could be doing more. After all, if there’s something more they can do, they have more reason to do it.
Credit: Sarah’s Scribbles.
Here you find yourself troubled, not just by their distress, but by a sort of reasoning you wish you could dispel because you know there is some mistake in it. You understand, of course, that the best thing you can do for your nibling is to provide the emotional and social support they need, but it helps a great deal to discuss what they believe seriously as well.
Moments like this may trouble you even more because they seem quite common. Are people so bad at reasoning? So prone to making mistakes in their logical processing? Dealing with enough of these cases can cause hopelessness and pessimism.
If so, then this series is meant to inspire hope and optimism. I will demonstrate that everyone, even your niblings, understand logic already. All you need to do is remind them.
The rest of the series
I made this series (and this blog) with a set of goals.
- To give people the logical tools they need to deal with very common problems.
- To resist pessimism about people’s ability to deal with those problems.
- To generalize from what most of us already know to help deal with those common problems.
- To enter into the Summer of Math Exposition 1 (SoME1) competition.
Here is a link to the rest of the series.
- Your Nibling Knows Logic: Introduction
- Your Nibling Knows the Logic of Possibilities: Visualizing the Modal Fallacy
- Your Nibling Knows the Logic of Decision-Making: Visualizing Beyond Obligation
- Your Nibling Knows the Logic of Conditionals: Visualizing Plausibility
- Your Nibling Knows Logic: Conclusion
