Uncritical Thinking

The IOWA legislature was debating some legislation to stigmatize or otherwise harass gay parents, and a nineteen year old student (raised by gay parents)decided to share his experience in testimony against the bill. His testimony went viral and was widely praised. Steve Landsburg, blogger, economist, and a favorite punching bag of mine thought this would be a good occasion to demonstrate that he is obnoxious - he is good at finding such occasions, and published this critique.

Some people claim (perhaps rightly, perhaps wrongly, perhaps absurdly — I lean toward the latter) that gay people, on average, are less successful as parents. In a video that’s begun to go viral, University of Iowa engineering student Zach Wahls attempts to refute this notion without offering a shred of evidence beyond a single cherry-picked case (his own) to prove that children of gay parents sometimes turn out just fine (except, perhaps, for their ability to reason):

His complaint seems to be that Zach presented a personal story rather than some published statistics. More amusingly, Landsburg goes on to blame Zach's English professors, without, of course, citing so much as any bit of fact or experience.

What’s particularly disturbing to me is all the chatter about how eloquent this kid is, as if eloquence in the service of intellectual misdirection were somehow something to be admired. Odds are, this pernicious message was reinforced by the college writing courses that I complained about in Chapter 23 of The Big Questions.


Zach Wahls gives every appearance of being a likable and accomplished 19-year-old with a good command of the language, and, like many 19-year-olds much of the time, not much to say. Fortunately, that’s a curable condition. I’m counting on his engineering professors to undo whatever damage the English department has managed to inflict.

How dumb do you have to be to blatantly commit the same rhetorical error that the target of your rhetoric is accused of? As a point of fact and statistics let's consider the relative performance of various majors on the Graduate Record Exam. Note that English majors finish second only to Philosophy majors in the most relevant categories, verbal reasoning and analytical writing, though they do far less well in the quantitative. Economists tend to be solidly mediocre in every category.

I have to admit that I sometimes feel a twinge of guilt about bashing the old Stevadoreo. Maybe he has some intellectual defect that keeps him from seeing the relevance of the personal testimony of somebody like Zach - this is a guy who claims to evaluate his happiness by checking to see if he's acting happier than the people around him, after all - he surely has some kind of defect. So Steve, if you do have some kind of autism spectrum disorder that blinds you to much of human nature, my apologies and sympathies. But you still shouldn't really write about stuff you know nothing about. And you ought to check your arguments for internal consistency.