Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I think I’ve finally wrestled the yellow into the format I want. When I reactivated comments, I took the opportunity to tweak the stylesheets one last time. The font sizes got out of whack back when I tweaked it to work better with Jurassic Netscape. There’s a massive WinIE5 bug for font sizes that I haven’t fixed, because the work-around is the ugliest hack I’ve ever seen. It’s an insult to CSS to hack them that way; I refuse. If you insist on using IE you deserve whatever you get (in this case, fonts that are one size too ).

Pardon the geekiness. On to the peeve of the day: a while back the partial logic test spread here from Lori’s blog (If P then Q). Today, I realized that one of my biggest fandom peeves is an example of the very same bad conditional reasoning.

Everybody has words or catch-phrases or old saws they can’t bear hearing trotted out time and again - the fingernails down the blackboard of the English language. I cringe whenever Catherine Asaro uses “gentle” as an intransitive verb, and I want to strangle someone whenever I hear, “If you weren’t in it for the feedback, you’d lock your fic in a dark closet somewhere instead of posting it on the Internet.” This classic of bad conditional reasoning starts with a good (which is to say, true) conditional:

(1) If you particularly want to get feedback, then you post your fic somewhere public.

For any conditional statement if P then Q, there is another conditional that follows from it: if not Q then not P. It’s called the contrapositive. The contrapositive of statement (1) is:

(2) If you don’t post your fic somewhere public, then you don’t particularly want to get feedback.

Statements (1) and (2) are equivalent, although one of them may seem more obvious or intuitive than the other. They are a single, simple fact of publicity.

No other statements can be derived from (1) or (2). Most notably, if P then Q does not, in any way, imply if Q then P. So we come to the old saw,

(3*) If you post your fic somewhere public, then you particularly want to get feedback.

Statement (3*) is not true. (That’s what the star is there for.) It’s the conditional fallacy discussed at length in the results of the partial logic test. Statement (3*) has its own logically equivalent (and therefore equally false) contrapositive:

(4*) If you don’t particularly want to get feedback, then you don’t post your fic somewhere public.

Statement (4*) is the more common form of the fallacy - slightly restated, we get the original peeve: “If you weren’t in it for the feedback, you’d lock your fic in a dark closet somewhere instead of posting it on the Internet.” Starting with the true statements (1) or (2), fans apply faulty conditional reasoning to get statement (3*) or (4*). Sometimes they take the form of an innocent statement about fandom, and sometimes they serve as a vicious accusation of status-seeking, but whatever the point to be made, it cannot be made with (3*) or (4*) because they are fallacies. (Specifically, the fallacy is the converse error or the inverse error, depending on which true statement you start with and which false one you end up with.)

That’s the end of the logical argument, but the notes on the Wason test mentioned that people still believe conditional fallacies even after they’ve been pointed out. So it’s helpful to give some counterexamples for (3*), keeping in mind that anything which disproves (3*) also disproves (4*).

The Newbie Example: Say you’re a rank newbie. You read fanfiction on the J/C Index, but it never occurs to you to send feedback. Sure, you see the email addresses at the bottom of the stories you read, but you’re still in a pay-per-fic mindset where reading requires no interaction with the author. Say, in addition, that you get inspired to write your own fanfiction. You’re a geek, you know html, so you make a website and put up your new stories. You may even add your email address, because that seems to be what’s done. If you’re the sort of person who skips past authors notes and steers clear of mailing lists, you could, conceivably, write and post several stories without expecting or wanting to get feedback for it. You post, but you do not particularly want feedback, contradicting statement (3*).

The BOFQ Example: Say you’re a bitter old fic queen. You got feedback in your heyday, back when the show was young and the fans had taste. You played the mailing list circuit and won awards - been there, done that, got the graphic. One day, when you’re slightly inebriated, you write a vignette for old times’ sake. You post it, just in case anyone’s interested, but you have no newbie delusions anymore. You know exactly how little feedback gets sent in your fandom; you’ve posted short pieces before and gotten not a single email for it. Nor do you consider the vignette significant enough in comparison to your famous 800k novels to deserve a line of feedback - you’re just tossing it out there to prove you’re still in the game. You post, but you do not particularly want feedback, contradicting (3*).

I’m probably the only person who has ever been accused of not liking feedback (and it wasn’t true). No one objects to getting feedback, but that doesn’t make feedback everyone’s overriding motive for writing and/or posting fanfiction. There are plenty of other motives out there: the muse, politics, practice, spite, building up a Big Name, trading in the fanfic potlatch, individual fic gift giving, honor, glory, and so on. Feedback isn’t everything.

This concludes today’s free logic lesson.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 20th, 2002 at 10:51 pm and is filed under Meta. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.