A Practical Heretic

In the beginning:

“When I see the city from my window–no, I don’t feel how small I am–but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would like to throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.”
– from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead

As Time Went On:

“Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche

and this:

“Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.”
– Tacitus

but eventually this:

“The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
The traveller hastens toward the town,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.

Darkness settles on roofs and walls,
But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls;
The little waves, with their soft, white hands,
Efface the footprints in the sands,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.

The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls
Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;
The day returns, but nevermore
Returns the traveller to the shore,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.
– “The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls” by Henry Longfellow

And Now Today:

“Jesus said to another man, ‘Follow me.’
But he replied, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’
Jesus said to him, ‘Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.’
Still another said, ‘I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say goodbye to my family.’
Jesus replied, ‘No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.’”
– Luke 9:58-62

And that’s all I have to say about that.

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Via Ann Althouse I came by this painfully poorly reasoned argument over at the Freakonomics blog, where Sanjoy Mahajan argues that Colonial Americans were more literate than modern Americans based on sales of Tom Paine’s Common Sense.

Read the whole thing. Then come back. In the meantime, I’ll play us a song to get us in the mood for some basic logical discussion:

Are you back? Great! Let’s break down the argument.

First, he notes that 500,000 copies of the pamphlet were sold, which was about 20% of the Colonial population. He then notes the “the sophistication of the writing and reasoning” of Common Sense. He then notes that according to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), only 13% of modern Americans have a “proficient” literacy level, which is defined as “reading lengthy, complex, abstract prose texts as well as synthesizing information and making complex inferences.” He therefore concludes that Colonial Americans might be more literate than modern Americans, based on the fact that 20% > 13%.

Broken into a syllogism, it might read:

1. Common Sense is a sophisticated work.
2. 20% of Colonial Americans bought it.
3. Only 13% of Americans read at a proficient literacy level.
4. Therefore, Colonial Americans were more literate than modern Americans.

BUT, and this is a big but, you can see that this chain of logic is incomplete. There are several unstated premises underlying this argument. Premises that go unjustified. Let’s insert those premises into the chain of logic.

1. Common Sense is a sophisticated work.
1(a). Common Sense requires a proficient literacy level to understand.
2. 20% of Colonial Americans bought it.
2(a). Everyone who bought Common Sense read it.
2(b). Enough of those people read it at a proficient literacy level to equal more than 13% of the Colonial population.
3. Only 13% of Americans read at a proficient literacy level.
4. Therefore, Colonial Americans were more literate than modern Americans.

See those premises in italics? They are essential to Mahajan’s argument. Knock out any one of them, and the entire argument falls apart completely. But he doesn’t justify a single one. Or even state them, for that matter.

The conclusion may be true (thought I doubt that very much), but the reasoning used to get there is pretty flawed.

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