Certainty without Basis
Sep. 6th, 2019 01:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unspeakablehorrorWas reading this article, which talks about the safety of elevators vs stairs:
https://www.livescience.com/17504-fatal-nyc-accident-elevators-safer-stairs.html
Now, I am personally already convinced of the thesis of this article, and have been for a long time. Whenever given a choice, I prefer to take the elevator instead of the stairs, and I prefer living in first floor apartments where I don't have to climb stairs. I think stairs are dangerous (and they are inconvenient for those who require wheelchairs or other mobility aids).
However, I'd like to point out some reasons why this article doesn't effectively argue it's point (a point which I already agree with) to show the difficulty of supplying good evidence for one's beliefs. One issue with the article is that it doesn't link the location of the source or otherwise make it easy to verify the number of fatalities caused by stairs that it gives. It only names the organization it obtained the information from. Another issue is that there is no number given for the estimated total number of stair trips made in the US annually. This is a major issue as it makes it impossible to compare the percentage of fatalities to stair trips to the percentage of fatalities to elevator trips. Just because the total number of deaths is larger from stairs than from the elevator doesn't mean the percentage is larger, and that's a very important distinction to make. For example, if I told you that I had injured myself several times via knives but never by grenades, it might be relevant to know that I have handled knives many times but that I have never handled a grenade when determining what this can tell us about the relative safety of knives vs grenades. There's also this line: "For comparison, while 27 people die in U.S. elevators annually..." which should most definitely either have an 'about' before the 27 or reference a particular year from which that statistic was obtained.
There are more issues with the article, but I think that's enough to demonstrate the difficulty of presenting good evidence for an argument. Evidence must be meticulously examined to determine its quality. We should all learn what questions to ask ourselves to interrogate if we can properly back up our beliefs. I certainly can't do that at this point for my belief regarding elevators and stairs.
https://www.livescience.com/17504-fatal-nyc-accident-elevators-safer-stairs.html
Now, I am personally already convinced of the thesis of this article, and have been for a long time. Whenever given a choice, I prefer to take the elevator instead of the stairs, and I prefer living in first floor apartments where I don't have to climb stairs. I think stairs are dangerous (and they are inconvenient for those who require wheelchairs or other mobility aids).
However, I'd like to point out some reasons why this article doesn't effectively argue it's point (a point which I already agree with) to show the difficulty of supplying good evidence for one's beliefs. One issue with the article is that it doesn't link the location of the source or otherwise make it easy to verify the number of fatalities caused by stairs that it gives. It only names the organization it obtained the information from. Another issue is that there is no number given for the estimated total number of stair trips made in the US annually. This is a major issue as it makes it impossible to compare the percentage of fatalities to stair trips to the percentage of fatalities to elevator trips. Just because the total number of deaths is larger from stairs than from the elevator doesn't mean the percentage is larger, and that's a very important distinction to make. For example, if I told you that I had injured myself several times via knives but never by grenades, it might be relevant to know that I have handled knives many times but that I have never handled a grenade when determining what this can tell us about the relative safety of knives vs grenades. There's also this line: "For comparison, while 27 people die in U.S. elevators annually..." which should most definitely either have an 'about' before the 27 or reference a particular year from which that statistic was obtained.
There are more issues with the article, but I think that's enough to demonstrate the difficulty of presenting good evidence for an argument. Evidence must be meticulously examined to determine its quality. We should all learn what questions to ask ourselves to interrogate if we can properly back up our beliefs. I certainly can't do that at this point for my belief regarding elevators and stairs.