Symbolic logic stickers

[simont]

A silly thought that came up at post-pizza last night was that it'd occasionally be nice to have a sheet of sticky labels to hand for guerrilla fallacy-highlighting. The idea is that you'd have two sticker designs, looking roughly like this:

and you'd peel off the appropriate one and stick it on any publicly posted text which you felt deserved it :-)

Comments

[k425.livejournal.com]

Remind me what P means!

[simont]

It's just an arbitrary predicate, like A and B are arbitrary statements. "The fact that there exists one thing with property P does not imply that all things have property P".

[sunflowerinrain.livejournal.com]

Great idea! Well volunteered, that man ;) Put me down for a few.

[k425.livejournal.com]

Cheers!

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

Oooh, I think I'd find those useful :-).

(Not for making friends though)

[simont]

But hopefully for influencing people :-)

(One could argue, I suppose, that part of the point of having them be standard stickers was so that the culprit couldn't so easily be identified from their handwriting. Someone sticks one up, and as soon as they vacate the crime scene, anyone could have done it.)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure there there is a point, in that almost all publicly posted text seems logically fallacious, if not downright false. (Well, all advertising.)

[1ngi.livejournal.com]

"But hopefully for influencing people"

Don't bank on it. I understand the first equation but certainly don't have enough maths to understand the second without sitting there for ages cudgeling the grey matter. Presumably your target audience here is only going to be the top 5% of the population ;-) x

[simont]

Well, I did say it was a silly thought! Just because several people have posted comments saying "put me down for some" doesn't mean I actually had any intention of really producing and using them; it was a silly thought to have a giggle at. (Though I might run off a sheet or two from my printer now this much enthusiasm has been shown, admittedly.)

beckyc, of course, might very well be (notionally) intending to use the stickers within some specific context where the people involved are likely to understand them.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Well, you'd make friends with people like us! :)

[lnr]

Love it!

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

In a slightly less specific vein (http://biphenyl.org/blog/2008/01/01/citation-needed/)...

[gerald_duck]

I'm still waiting for this to happen at a real political rally.



…might also bear using on a sticker.

Putting a whole bunch of them on a t-shirt could work, too!

[simont]

Hmm. I did go through a website full of logical fallacies looking for ones which could be snappily rendered into symbolic logic. I considered "correlation does not imply causation" but discarded it on the basis that I couldn't think of a snappy way to describe causation. I'm not entirely convinced by your answer; implication, after all, also does not imply causation. Smoke implies fire (yes yes, except where it doesn't), but smoke doesn't cause fire!

[synthclarion.livejournal.com]

This is 100% brilliant. If you find somewhere that'll do custom vinyl stickers, let me know :)

[aldabra]

CafePress?

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

The people who did the [citation needed] stickers (http://biphenyl.org/blog/2008/01/01/citation-needed/) used http://www.uprinting.com; http://contagiousgraphics.com/ was also suggested in the comments.

[crazyscot.livejournal.com]

My brother, though he may still be a bit busy. http://www.stickermonkey.co.uk/

[atreic.livejournal.com]

*grins*

[kaet.livejournal.com]

I've often thought it would be worth making up stickers for public responses. "(Bedsit)" for all the various euphamisms used on estate agents signs, "Why?", "No", "Who gave you this authority?" "whose security?", and "This is not a legal requirement" for regulatiory signs. "Was it all worth it?", "Doesn't it inspire despair?" and "This is a fake stone facade" for public buildings. Also, it would be fun to print out laminated maps to put on lampposts demarkating an area as one where laws of karmic payback apply, or [verbatim] the wrath of an implausibly literal old testament deity, on the authority of some portentous sounding body, in the style of police ASBO areas, or whatever they're called.

Your stickers I'd find really annoying, because I'd have to have my own made up asking what exactly you meant by =>, how you justified assigning linguistic assertions to boolean variables, the basis on which falsity of superficial meaning negates a communication's purpose, etc. But, it would probably be not nearly as annoying as the original, :).

Oh, and I've often been tempted to attach an essay on the ethical and hedonic basis for actions to that annoying sign about not feeding the ducks on Jesus Green!

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

I often think this too. I want to go around the tube with stickers that have your "Help help if I stop grinning they will shoot me" on to all the grinning-moron adverts, and "You're beautiful just as you are" to the cosmetic surgery ones.

The ducks, however, die a painful constipated death if they eat bread instead of more unprocessed plant parts.

[kaet.livejournal.com]

But why start with ducks, and not with McDonalds?

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

We do have public health campaigns. Perhaps the problem would be ok if there had been signs at all major ports saying "please do not feed the British people fibre-free food, it is not good for them" around the time when McDonalds imported itself here.

[kaet.livejournal.com]

I guess that's fair enough. I guess I anthropomorphise them too much, but I always think "let 'em choose" or "live and let live". I guess I should think a bit more that the ducks don't actually choose, and are more automatic than that.

[uisgebeatha.livejournal.com]

Personally I'd find stickers like this more fun (http://xkcd.com/356/)... ;)

[pne.livejournal.com]

What about one for people who get their scoping mixed up once negation enters into it?

(The "all cats don't scratch the furniture" brigade who really mean "not all cats scratch the furniture".)

[simont]

Like this, you mean?

[pne.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I'm not sure about the scoping and precedence, but something like that! I'll trust you got it right.

[metamoof.livejournal.com]

How about

(∀x: ¬P(¬x)) ≠⇒ (∀x: ¬P(x))

For the "I Can't get no satisfaction, cos I ent dun nuffink" crowd?

(with apologies for the slightly borked "does not imply" sign, though "does not equal" may be a better fit anyway)