It seems that people have more and more difficulty with logic these days. I just interacted with a Facebook friend who posted a Zeitgeist-style montage about September 11 that uses inductive reasoning to lead the viewer to infer that 9/11 was an inside job. Yes, we've heard this rubbish before.

The interesting thing is that there was not one positive fact to support what the video was implying. It was just a string of false statements, mischaracterizations and warping of the truth to present a skewed view of what happened. "Are we really supposed to believe 19 guys with boxcutters led by a dialysis patient in a cave managed to..." is how it starts.

Of course, Zeitgeist was a bit more sophisticated. It just lied to the viewer and presented the lies as "facts". That it became as popular as it did is a testament to a failure of critical reasoning rather than logic. People accept things told to them as "facts" as true (unless, of course, the person is anti-American and the facts are presented in mainstream media sources; the flip side is also true, cf. "death panels").

However, this reminded me of Camilla's post about the Jewish professor who was pilloried for trying to discuss the difference between valid and invalid opinions.

I think the Internet is drastically reducing the critical thinking and logic skills for a great number of people. This site is perhaps an exception, as people are far more careful in their arguments, but a cursory review of the comments at CNN, the BBC, the Guardian or (shudder) Twitter will show a mass of ignorance, unbroken by even the faintest hint of actual intelligence.

Seriously, let's push for logic classes. Teach Euler circles, Occam's Razor, sets, Hell - drag Star Trek into the classroom and find examples of Spock using logic in the series (as opposed to just categorizing something as "illogical" or "highly illogical"). We need logic in the Internet age, and we need it badly.