Using Logical Fallacy Bingo to write about Tariffs
Help in writing your op-ed or social media post about Trump and Tariffs
Suffering from Ultracrepidarianism? (my new favourite word) Got a deadline or a need to publish an opinion somewhere about Trump and the Tariffs? Why not use the Marketthinker logical fallacy score card to help your prompts for Chat GPT?
We developed the scorecard to help us parse the clever and persuasive language and rhetoric used by politicians and stock promoters in order to make better, more informed investment decisions, but why not use it to sound smart and authoritative on your social media feed? You’re welcome.
(Regular readers may still choose to use it in the conventional fashion and only consider arguments that do not fit into the bingo card)
The Ad Hom attack. Always a good place to start. focus on the messenger not the message. In the case of your opinion piece on tariffs it is obviously important to start with the shibboleths (another favourite word) on Trump. These can be cut and pasted from any mainstream media piece on the US General Election, so you need no help on that. Important though to get Chat GPT to use the latest ‘D’ word rather than the traditional one used in the Climate change, Covid and other arguments, not ‘Denier’, but ‘Dumb’. This helps position yourself as the inverse. So just as a ‘Denier’ is a bad person (and thus you are virtuous), calling Trump and his team Dumb establishes you as being clever.
Appeal to Emotion. Trump has been talking about tariffs for a long time, but let’s be honest, your opinion piece is because the stock market has fallen sharply and the emotional level has risen dramatically. (Some) people are panicking and thus need to know your views.
If you are writing a blog post or doing a YouTube video, then prompt your AI for a montage of screens going red and headlines about the C words, crisis, crash and chaos. This will help your readership, particularly among non specialists and will help the social media algorithm generate lots of hits (including dopamine hits for you).
One word of caution, while most of your likely audience will have some money in the stock market, bear in mind that most of the people that voted for Trump couldn’t afford half a dozen shares in Nvidia and certainly not even a single share of Berkshire Hathaway. So be careful on overplaying the ‘human’ aspect. (Back in October 1987 there was an unintentionally hilarious interview on the BBC of a City gent in a chalk striped suit lamenting that “the average man in the street probably lost a couple of hundred thousand pounds today”. Don’t go there.)
Similarly, best not to pick on poor countries being ‘hurt by tariffs’ as somebody might ask how much the poor people of Lesotho actually benefit at the moment from exporting diamonds?
Bandwagon effect. By quoting and using other media you then benefit from the bandwagon effect; your argument is true because it is ‘everywhere’. It’s just your insightful take we are adding here.
Appeal to authority. This is ground zero for logical fallacy driven arguments. Simply by saying ‘98% of scientists’ or ‘all medical professionals’ you can generally shut down arguments, but also bolster your own perceived authority by quoting them.
This is a blend of the bandwagon effect as well obviously, as there are currently plenty of authoritative quotes about the positive effects of free trade, most of which have already appeared all over other people’s social media posts. Your point in quoting them is that Trump doesn’t understand ‘the science’.
Again, a word of caution. Don’t go too heavy on the academic side and talk about things like Ricardian Equivalence in case it exposes the fact that we don’t actually have free trade at the moment.
Correlation equals causality. Another useful fallacy to give ‘weight’ to your argument. Obviously this is the central pillar for the Climate Change ‘science’ and has proved very robust as a deflection of criticism. So get Chat GPT to give you some background on ‘Smoot Hawley’ tariffs and how they correlated with the Great Depression. This will allow you to put some gratuitous statistics into your opinion piece to back up your earlier assertions.
Slippery Slope. Here we can get into predictions to amp up the appeal to emotion and double down on the Ad Hom attacks on Trump that will appeal to the partisan political readers (and get lots of retweets). Prompt your AI to use terms like recession, dire consequences, disastrous.
Once again a word of caution, these need to be caveated at least a little bit. The list of countries that you may already have cut and pasted into your draft article, along with a nice ad hom quote about how ‘stupid’ the calculation methodology was, is already out of date. If you want your article to ‘age’ you might want to cover yourself by mentioning ‘on the other hand, this might be seen as the start not the end of the process’
False Middle fallacy. In a similar fashion, you might want to temper your False Dichotomy argument - whereby you present a complete wind back of tariffs as the only alternative to the current proposals - with some suggestion of a ‘compromise’. This would be important if, for example, you are working as some form of corporate lobbyist (or at least hoping to) and need to pivot into arguing why a particular US corporation should be exempted from siting its factory in an emerging market and then exporting back to the US whilst paying no taxes.
Not of course that this should be mentioned as perhaps the real target of these tariffs as that would undo the ‘Trump has no plan’ thesis.
Straw Man. On the flipside, it may be useful to get your attack in first, perhaps by saying that anyone supporting these policies ‘doesn’t care about inflation on main street’. Note, this probably won’t work if you have already spent time talking about the stock market. It also might risk people distinguishing between a cost increase and inflation - especially as the Fed has said that they won’t hike rates on this basis.
Alternatively, you could say that anyone supporting these policies ‘doesn’t care about driving the world into recession’, or even link the two and talk about ‘stagflation’.
Similar to ‘not caring about killing granny’ or ‘not caring about the future for our children when the world burns’, this usefully combines with the appeal to emotion and bolsters your own argument by appearing to counter the ‘only’ argument that the other side has. Even if it is one you made up specifically for that purpose.
Burden of Proof. A key one for the Covid, Climate and other guys, you posit that the Tariff policies have to unequivocally improve things, and thus assert that the existing policies are ‘Good’ (without having to prove the fact). Unless the opposition can conclusively prove otherwise, your assumptions are ‘true’.
Thus by ‘proving’ that anything that limits free trade is ‘bad’ you are implying that what we currently have is ‘good for America’, even if it is only really good for Globalists.
As before, careful on that , but given that most of your audience and almost certainly anyone in the Main Stream Media is a Globalist, you will be preaching to the choir.
Good luck!
Perhaps asking DeepSeek will give you the Chinese talking points 😆