Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Era Of Logical Fallacies Near An End?

In the week before Christmas I talked about the association fallacy and chronological snobbery as they're commonly used in discussions about religion, and as promised I will now put one of them into a rather ripe political context, along with another logical fallacy.  First as in all cases previous we start by posting the definition as found in Wikipedia.

"Association fallacy (guilt by association) – arguing that because two things share a property they are the same."


This particular fallacy is running amok through our current political climate.  Prime evidence being exit polls from the recent election showing that at least half the people who voted believe our current economic woes are the fault of former president George W. Bush.  The belief that economic down turns are the fault of politicians is, besides being an example of the regression fallacy, a prime example of the association fallacy.  While it is common to blame downturns on the president who happened to be in office when it happened, pretty much all economists and historians would be quick to agree that whoever was president was not the cause.  They recognize the logical fallacy in this assumption and the facts that come available through time show that this association of presidents with downturns is not only bad logic but in all past cases thus far wrong on all rational fronts.


In this example of the association fallacy Bush and his policies are assumed to be the cause of our current woes because they were in force when it started.  Now on the other hand, there is evidence in history that supports the argument that presidents who preside over downturns, as Barack Obama has been doing, can cause the downturn to last longer than it would have without him or his policies.  So logically the only blame for the current economy that could have been ascribed to any president would have belonged to Obama , but based on certain exit polls at least half the people who voted were swimming in a logical fallacy or two and blamed Bush, the logically un-blamable in this case.


To be totally fair I must say to assume Obama's policies have lengthened the current economic downturn solely because other presidents before him have done so would be a sloppy use of logic as well.  To definitively determine if his policies have done that or not would require economic analysis, and the complete data needed to do that wont be available until long after Obama has left office.  That said, there is at least sound reason to believe his policies have lengthened the downturn, though that reasoning is open to debate.  Unlike the argument that Bush and his policies got us here, which is based on a logical fallacy.  There should be no debate there.  Bush and his policies didn't get us here.  Contrary to the popular refrain, it is not Bush's fault.


Ah but we live in an era defined by logical fallacies.  Here's another relevant one.


"Reductio ad absurdum - Extending an argument to ridiculous proportions and then criticizing the result."


The Bush administration's policies, like most presidential administration's, was a very mixed bag of good, bad, conservative, liberal, and moderate policies.  His infamous tax cuts are a prime example.  On one hand they've been commonly seen as an outgrowth of conservative governing principles, since lower taxes usually are.  However there's something extremely un-conservative about them.  They were intentionally designed to shift the proportional tax burden onto the rich.  The progressive nature of the United States' income tax code is most definitely not conservative and the Bush tax cuts were even more progressive than the rates they replaced.


While conservatives favor breaks for the poor they don't favor a tax system that makes people pay a higher and higher percentage of their income as their income grows, and more importantly they don't favor a system where most of the income taxes are payed by a very small percentage at the top.  This sets up democracy to be at its worst where a majority can vote themselves goodies from a treasury they make virtually no contribution to.  The fact that the Bush tax cuts pushed the code in this direction was a huge flaw.


During the last campaign conservatives were tasked with defending a tax code they actually object to more than their critics do.  This task was assigned to them through the use of the reductio ad absurdum fallacy.  Since they're conservatives and didn't want to raise taxes they must favor the current tax code established through the Bush tax cuts.  That last step, chaining them to the Bush tax cuts, was extending an argument to ridiculous proportions so as to criticize the result.  There is nothing conservative about the Bush tax cuts other than they were tax cuts.  They are now the current tax code, one that just happens to have a built-in mechanism to restore its rates to where they were before they were cut.  Conservatives actually want a distribution of burden more like the old rates, they just don't like the idea of raising taxes.


This situation is very ironic.  It would have been immensely unpopular and difficult to have passed legislation to restructure the tax code to spread the burden down the income latter, and that's pretty much what a Romney administration would have been tasked with.  But, since Obama won re-election the task of correcting the major wrong of the Bush tax cuts is literally as simple as doing nothing.  The rates with their unfair burden on the rich will expire on their own.  And even more ironic, the fact that the tax rates going up will hurt the economy will be a burden born by an electorate that chose this very route.


That is not to say we all deserve the coming pain and suffering because a majority of voters amongst us chose it, but it is rather to say the blame for not doing this in a better way will rest clearly in the laps of those who voted for Obama.  Oh sure, the blame is already being prepared to be laid in the laps of conservatives, but logic wont support it, and this era of logical fallacies has to come to an end some time.  Until then allowing the Bush rates to expire is clearly the least of evils for conservatives.  At least we will be done with what was wrong about them, and that will be a step in the right direction a Republican president may very likely have not been able to achieve, at least not this quickly.


Like Obama's campaign slogan says, "forward", and in this case it will be in spite of him, and against his goals.  This is what happens when the foundations of one's agenda is built on faulty logic.  Here's to a new year and the eventual end to this era of logical fallacies.

Friday, December 21, 2012

Association and Chronological Snobbery Fallacies

Here are some other logical fallacies that see heavy use in the atheist verses theist debates.

"Association fallacy (guilt by association) – arguing that because two things share a property they are the same."


Many horrible episodes in history are popularly blamed on religion or the lack there of when often times the only thing the given religion has to do with the event is that it was there and its leaders cooperated with the event happening.  Similar association fallacies are used against atheism as well (see the human rights legacy of Marxism as an example).


Religion has demonstrated an unusual ability to unify a large population behind a cause, and thus it should be little wonder that political leaders have sought to enlist the popular religion of their realm into their causes.  It also follows that once a cause becomes unpopular and the used religion becomes so too or at the very least less so, that politicians and the historians that defend them should attempt to blame the religion for the whole event.

Thus we are expected to believe that all of Western Europe launched several crusades into the Middle East just because they thought it was a good way to spread their religion.  The fact that the Papacy had become a center of immense political and financial power and felt threatened by the rise of monarchies must have been a small influence by comparison.  Keeping these rising monarchs distracted far away from the Papal realm, the prospects of securing a major trade hub, or looting a wealthy region of the world?  Certainly that all paled in significance to the Pope's desire to spread the faith by the sword, right?  After all, it says right there in the Bible that Christians are to spread their faith by threat and might of arms, right?  That's why when Matthew, a first hand witness of Jesus's teachings, spread Christianity into India he became known as a great military strategist?  Well, no.  He used the same persuasion his teacher used, that carried by words.  That's because there is absolutely no place in Jesus's teachings or anywhere else in the Bible that says Christianity should be or even can be spread by force.  Popular history's attempt to blame Christianity for the crusades is an association fallacy.


The fact that the same guy who headed up the church also headed up Europe politically doesn't mean his politically inspired decisions were religious ones, even if he dressed them up as such.  The Church was his tool, not him the church's tool.  If you don't quite see this, I can understand why.  It seems so obvious to think a religious leader's decisions must be an effect of that religion rather then his effect on that religion's followers.  If a religion is based on the teachings and edicts of its current leaders you could make that argument, but Christianity isn't and no major world religion is.  You can't blame Jesus Christ for the decisions of popes or any other Christian leader unless you can show a direct link between their teachings and those decisions.  In the case of the crusades and the inquisition for that matter, no such direct link can be found.

Likewise, I should add that blaming the human rights atrocities of Marxism on atheism is also an association fallacy.  The Marxists that committed these atrocities were atheists because most popular religions would frown upon their dehumanizing ways.  For them atheism was a convenient place to park that part of their mind and heart that might have otherwise questioned the authority of Marxist teachings.  And, to be fair to atheists, they don't have any self-appointed leaders to denounce atheism's misuse.


"Chronological snobbery – where a thesis is deemed incorrect because it was commonly held when something else, clearly false, was also commonly held."


[I'm going to re-use both of these before the year is up because they're extremely relevant to another set of commonly held beliefs.  That will be getting back to politics.]


I've read critiques of ancient documents in general, not just the Bible, that deliver the chronological fallacy in spades.  The argument goes something along the lines of, 'how can we take seriously the writings of people who thought the world was flat and that the Earth was the center of the universe?'.  Another is to suggest the Bible says pi equals three. There are more, but after this they're logical faultiness should also be obvious without having to list them all.


Before I get to the logic there are factual problems in these too I feel compelled to address.  Europeans didn't discover the Earth is round because most of western civilization knew it already, at least several centuries BC and it's highly probable it has been pretty much obvious to any human being that has ever seen a large body of water.  Secondly, pi does equal three if you're rounding and ancient scribes were frequently prone to doing just that.  Such rounding would be pretty treacherous for an artisan, but scribes weren't artisans and nor was most of their audience.  What we would consider excessive rounding was very common in those days.  Thirty three thousand one hundred and twenty eight would be lucky to be reported as precisely as five thousand.  They tended not to be numbers people, much like modern day journalists reporting the size of protest crowds.  In a very real sense, that's what ancient scribes were, the journalists of their days.  The numbers were there more to be descriptive then to be precise.  Ten thousand meant there was a lot of people there, and a circumference three times the diameter meant it was the perimeter of a circular shape and not a square one, which would be four times the distance across.

Much more to the point though, even if the writers of the Bible believed the Earth was flat, nowhere did they codify that, and the writings of the Bible never attempted to have anything to do with geography.  The Bible is a religious document with historical and ideological significance, and there is absolutely no evidence that its authors intended it to be anything else.  Now whatever may have been believed about astronomy, geography, or biology at the time it was written in no way effects its merit in the areas of religion, history, and ideology.  Thus those who attempt to discredit with claims about its accuracy on other subjects or the supposed beliefs of its authors on those subjects is an example of the chronological snobbery fallacy.


It's a very appropriately named fallacy as well, I might add.  Knowing more about the nature of the universe's dimensions and where it all is in relation to where we stand doesn't make us superior in anyway except in a certain area of trivia.  There are people who actually demand other people demonstrate knowledge with no contextual reelvence to advice sought in order for them to consider them a worthy source, but these people are generally thought of as snobs, and not as good judges of people's merits.








 

Monday, December 17, 2012

Shifting the Burden of Proof and the Definist Fallacy

[Note: I'll return to logical fallacies of a more political flavor next week, but this week seemed to be a good one to address the logical fallacies I have observed in modern discourse about God and religion]

"(shifting the) Burden of proof (see – onus probandi) – I need not prove my claim, you must prove it is false."

This one is commonly found wherever someone wishes to challenge or defend a view supported by tradition.  Both sides of the argument step in it and believe the other has instead.  It's like being on a teeter-totter in space where there is no agreed upon up or down.  Context is everything.


An atheist insists that someone who believes in the existence of a god is making an assertion by doing so and thus must prove it.  Meanwhile someone who defers to a time tested, and still currently popular line of tradition believes the assertion in the argument is that there is no god, and the burden of proof is thus on the atheist instead.


They both could be right depending on the context.  If the theist's belief were new to the context then the atheist would be correct.  In that case the assertion that must be proved is being made by the theist.  This would be the context if the theist was trying to change the atheist's mind, for example.  But, if the atheist's beliefs were new to the context then the theist would be correct.  This would be the case if the atheist was trying to change many public policies regarding religious expression for example.


More specific examples would be the content of science curriculum and the use of public places for religious reasons.  A Christian, for example, cannot simply insert religious teachings into a science curriculum unless they are prepared to prove the existence of God solely through the use of the scientific method.  Otherwise they are forcing poor logic onto science.


In the same way an atheist who insists that a religion, that most members of a community through long years of tradition believe and practice, should not be publicly acknowledged is also going to be the one needing to prove things.  Before one demands that governments not acknowledge tradition they must first prove that tradition is wrong.  The very fact that something becomes a tradition means that many people over many years came to see value and efficacy in it to such a degree that they thought it should be passed on, and several generations arrived upon the same conclusion until it came to be deferred to almost without question.  Traditions are not all that unlike scientific theories in that way, and both should only be changed when those asserting they are wrong present proof to their assertions.


Context is everything and yet it is almost always, it seems, what people in the atheist verses theist debates lose track of.  They both often make the mistake of assuming the burden of proof is always on the other side.  Not so.


One of the most common ways they get to this wrong conclusion is through yet another logical fallacy.


"Definist fallacy – involves the confusion between two notions by defining one in terms of the other."


One might say this isn't exactly an example of the definist fallacy, but I think it is.  The Christian who wants "God created the heavens and the earth" in science textbooks defines science's mission in terms of all knowledge and all things, when science is limited only to those things that can be both observed and quantified.  That's a classic example of the definist fallacy.


Once you define science as dealing with all things, even those things unobserved and unquantified, it becomes like a train off its rails.  It not only can't defend itself from those who wish to impose unscientific ideas onto it, but it becomes useless completely, no longer a tool for objective study.


Likewise when an atheist demands that the Christian god's existence be proven using only things that can be observed and quantified, this is also a prime example of the definist fallacy.  Functional and rational people, by most people's understanding of such, make effective decisions every day using more inputs than just those that the scientific method could make use of.  Things like tradition, personal but unreproducible experiences, and what we call intuition are just a few.  Religions purpose, which addresses all things, requires this of it, since those things are part of that set.


To use my psychology and education backgrounds here, I can tell you that religion forms a mental construct, like a model in science, into which an individual organizes all aspects of their life.  It doesn't step on science, preclude emotions, or insist that someone pretend they didn't see something they saw.  Instead it gives each and every aspect of a person's life a place to fit into the larger whole.  Studies have shown it to be a very effective life tool.  To be this tool it must address all rationally valid inputs including those observable and quantifiable.  Just as science cannot retain its objectivity if it must address all things at all times, religion cannot be as holistic as it needs to be if it is limited only to the observable and quantifiable.


Now I've talked to atheists enough to know that some of them would insist that science can eventually address all things, at least in theory if given infinite time, and all the things it can't currently address are best not addressed at all until it can be done in a purely objective way.  I'll resist the temptation to pounce (at least for right now) on the rather religious sounding talk about science eventually addressing all things given infinite time, and instead present something that drives home my point about people having good reason to want something to address all things today and not just at some indefinite time in the future.


The unreproducible personal experience is one very good example.  It is something that is useless within the scientific method.  It cannot be used to advance any objective study, but it is still very important to the person who experienced it.  There is a psychological need to rationally fit it together with the rest of their life.  Failing to do so can cause psychological discomfort and possibly even interpersonal impairment.  It's likely they will need something to put it all together with, something that is either called religion or at the very least plays the same role, which can't be science.  Some atheists cope with some sort of substitute for religion while others prefer to deny the existence of such things and insist the experience must have been a miss-perception of some kind.  Of course the miss-perception approach is to ask someone to exchange faith in what they actually believe themselves to have experienced with faith in that theory about science being given infinite time to eventually explain everything, and we're some how better off waiting for the explanation that may never come in their life time.  And to think many of them don't believe in teaching kids about Santa Claus.  I don't know about you, but I think the odds of me seeing Santa's workshop at the North Pole far exceed the odds of science ever managing to explain all things.  


It's that whole matter of infinity.  What do the latest and greatest scientific theories have to say about the dimensions of the universe in regards to infinity?  Now compare that to the track record of human creativity and perhaps my point starts to become clear.  Science may very likely not have infinite time to deal with but the potential of human creativity on the other hand does seem infinite based on all valid inputs available to us.

Now before any atheist gets too offended by what I'm saying here, remember I gave the Christians who want to muck with science as though it's religion their medicine for using the definist fallacy.  Now I just gave you yours for trying to get religion to play by science's rules, and thus using the same fallacy.  It just took a bit longer in your cases because some of you actually try to do the same thing some of my fellow Christians do, treat science as though it's a religion.  That's a bad practice and I'm sure many of your well educated and well thought fellow atheists can drive home that point for me, so I wont belabor it further.


While I'm not sure anyone can quantify the exact degree of sin on both sides, I think it should be pretty clear that both sides are guilty of using heavy doses of shifting the burden of proof and the definist fallacy.

Monday, December 10, 2012

Our Current Economic Crisis And The Regression Fallacy

Understanding Today Is To Understand Logical Fallacies


I am fond of telling people I am simply applying logic in order to arrive at my conclusions.  I  then go on to present a line of reasoning which to many may seem like just another opinion.  One  that is no better than anyone else's.  Those who see it this way may think I'm just puffed up and  full of myself.  It is for those people and anyone who finds themselves in a discussion with  those people that I provide the content of this series of blog posts.


Many of today's popular views are heavily based on well acknowledge logical fallacies.  By "well  acknowledged" I mean logicians and other scholars who's professions depend on the use of logic  have long since come to agree certain ways of arranging facts or the lack there of are  completely wrong.  I will list some of my favorites with relevance to many popular views.  I  will deal with a couple, perhaps three or four if they're short enough, in each post across the rest of this month.


I will be quoting Wikipedia's List of Fallacies page for the actual fallacy definitions and then adding my discussion of the far too common examples of it in much of today's thinking.


Our Current Economic Crisis And The Regression Fallacy


"Regression fallacy – ascribes cause where none exists. The flaw is failing to account for  natural fluctuations. It is frequently a special kind of the post hoc fallacy."


Popular view number 1:  Our current economic downturn was caused by _______. 
You can fill in the blank depending on one's politics, but unless that blank is filled by  something along the lines of, "the inevitable ups and downs of the economic cycle", we have an  example of a regression fallacy.


The Bush tax cuts didn't cause this.  Lack of regulation of the mortgage industry didn't cause  this.  Excessive government spending didn't cause this.  The size of the national debt didn't  cause this.  Nothing caused the down turn.  


It was inevitable.  This is basic macro- economics.  Economies contract from time to time because they become too full of weak or bad  business ventures.  When large numbers of these ventures fail or get downsized around the same time, investors, lenders, and  consumers very reasonably become cautious and there's a downward momentum in the economy.  Many  reasonably solid ventures also start to suffer because of the lower availability of investment  funds and the reduction of income (due to less consumer spending).  At this point it looks like  a never ending vicious cycle, but eventually it stops.  

Eventually the  accumulation of idle investment funds is lured out by the increasingly solid business ventures  that remain.  These ventures are seen as solid precisely because they've survived thus far.   Once the investment funds start to not only flow more easily but are doing so into largely solid  ventures, the corner is turned.  The economy now begins to grow again.  Good new ventures and  the relaunching of some unfairly halted ones enter the picture and add to the growth even more.   The new jobs and greater incomes lead to more consumer spending which leads to even more  growth, and now we have momentum going the other way, a boom.  

This momentum inevitably starts  to carry even more weakly conceived and/or managed ventures, and they go further than they deserve to because of it.  This sort  of thing accumulates until ... you guessed it, we have a new economic contraction resulting from  all the eventual failures.  This is the economic cycle.  Not only is it inevitable but even if we had a way to stop it we wouldn't want to.  An economy without ups and downs would be very much like a person that can't feel pain.  We'd keep hurting ourselves and never know it.  Economic downturns are inevitable and even good in the long run.  What we can and should be concerned with is not making them more severe or longer than they need to be.

Government can't stop the cycle but it  can effect it.  If government does something to either encourage, prop up, or create weak  businesses it will cause the boom to be artificially high and the following bust to be more  painful.  These are the sorts of things we should be asking ourselves about.

Relevant to our current situation, we should be asking if bad mortgage loans had been  encouraged by government policies, propped up by government, or created by government?  The  answer is yes, yes, and pretty much yes.  The lack of regulations are pretty much a red herring.

"Red herring – a speaker attempts to distract an audience by deviating from the topic at hand by  introducing a separate argument which the speaker believes will be easier to speak to."


The regulations were a problem, but they were regulating a kind of loan that had essentially been created  by government policies and actions and were also encouraged by them, and not only were there too  many of these loans but they wouldn't have even existed without government intervention.  Blaming the lack of regulations is a lot like blaming a forest for a fire, when the better question is who started the fire.


The  government policies that gave birth to these loans came into place back in the 70's as a an  outgrowth of the civil rights movement, the Community Reinvestment Act most notably.  Not to fault the civil rights movement.  I'm just  pointing out that it wasn't just the lenders' greed and the politicians' lust for power that  created these bad policies, it was also misguided good intentions.

I suspect that's why neither major political party is willing to talk about the real major cause of this recession's severity, because to do so would be to admit that both of their sets of rhetoric about  how best to govern for most of the last fifty years has all mostly been wrong.  Both tax cuts and government spending can  stimulate economic growth but at least some times growth shouldn't be encouraged, lest we make  the inevitable bust bigger.  Likewise economic forces and their outcomes are not always  fair, but when government steps in to try to make them fair they will inevitably just move the  pain to another place, another time, perhaps another generation and while doing so make it greater.  The only way to overcome the unfairness of market forces is in the aggregate of all events.  Individuals must win some to compensate for the times they lost and shouldn't have, and government should try to stay out of the way.


People can disagree with me about that last conclusion, but that the current economic policy debate in Washington D.C. is all based on logical fallacies is undeniable.  Most notably they are based on the regression fallacy and red herrings.

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

A Day My Life Changed


Some times I look back at my late and short teaching career and wonder if I ever should have done it. Perhaps, I consider, the time could have been better spent, say, getting my computer science degree sooner, or I could even have started to write sooner, but no. Without that experience there are certain very important things I never would have learned.

As a teacher I was driven to take an interest in the character and destiny of each of my students. I know it sounds a little corny, but what exactly is the universal job description teachers have? Are we not there to help our students by encouraging high character in them, and then to train them in what they need to know and master in order to achieve the personal goals that derives from that high character? These are the sorts of things only a teacher or parent is likely to ever commit to, and having never been a parent, teaching was the reason for me. So in spite of my normal tendency to simply allow fools to be fools, I was driven by a job description to try and save them.

I remember in particular one middle-school student of mine that was a free spirit. He was smart, got good grades on his assignments, and was generally respectful toward his teachers, but from the point of view of my lead teacher and the school's principal he was sorely lacking in two very important areas. He was terribly disorganized to the point that the contents of his desk often overflowed into other students' spaces. That really annoyed them, but the second area of lacking was what really worried them. He tended to be a loner. He seldom associated with other students and when he did, the other students would become annoyed with something he'd say or do. Nothing serious. They were little things I don't remember exactly, but like say playing four square and not seeming to try, or starting to do his imitation of a flying saucer sound. The only thing I do remember is that there was little to no consistency or pattern in these things. He might frustrate students not trying one day and then compete in earnest the next, or just not play on another. In a nut shell, he was not just a loner, but a very creative one.

The moment of my enlightenment came as I was grading papers after school and he and his parents were meeting in the next room with the principal and my lead teacher. I heard bits and pieces of what was being said at first. It was an old story. For years he had attended this K-8 school, and for years the faculty had worked with him on his two shortfalls. The parents said things I could tell they realized they had said several times before, but the teacher and the principal sounded more determined to make progress. They noted it seemed that none had been made.

The principal, a woman I had great respect for, was talking when suddenly this young 7th grade fellow shouted “shut up!”. I was horrified, both because he was being so extremely disrespectful and because I was worried for him and his future at the school. I was tempted to charge into the room, but wasn't sure what I could or would do, calm him down or scold him. I decided to stay at my grading work, but couldn't avoid hearing what was going on in the next room. He went on to tell them how it made him feel to be continually picked at, and asked them, still yelling and angry, to “just leave me alone!”. I heard adult voices, occasionally his parents but mostly my co-workers, attempting to reason with him, but he wasn't having any of it. He only continued to tell them off.

It was then that it happened, the thing that really mattered to me and my future, the proverbial lights came on. The words came out of me like an involuntary sneeze, “you tell them”. I caught them enough that I couldn't be heard through the walls. It scared me for a split second, but then I felt something quite different than fear. I felt free and enlightened.

This young man had spent the last several years of his life under constant attack for in essence just being an individual. Sure, organization is important, but not enough to justify years and years of nit-picking and threats. And sure, it's wise to worry a little when a child is left out of social circles, but not when it's his choice and when he has no ill will or feelings toward anyone. His stand in that meeting, taken out of context is just a student being extremely disrespectful and insubordinate, but in context it was the Boston Tea Party, Lexington-Concord, Rosa Parks in the front of the bus, and Robert the Bruce at the Battle of Bannockburn. He was expelled that day, and I called the parents shortly after to offer any and all help I could give them. My help was minor, but I was there to see him go on with his life, free of those who had sought to take away his individuality. To the best of my knowledge he's been very successful at being himself, and more than that.

One of the most significant measures of success in a person's life is who they've effected in positive ways, and just how positive. In this young man's case, he effected me. His moment of taking that stand that day showed me just how important the individual is. Without his stand, I probably wouldn't be writing right now. As a matter of fact I hate to think of what I might be doing, something meaningless, something depressing, something wrong.

I'd be so bold as to thank him by name, but I don't want to draw in the people I worked for and with at that time. That moment was also the moment I realized I was working with the wrong people, at least for someone like myself who cherishes the individual. So I'll leave it at this until I manage to contact him again more directly and less publicly, thank you, and sorry I was unable to see things before that day, but that wasn't going to happen without you doing it. The individual is bigger than all of us.