Daily Verse | Leviticus 10:2
So fire came out from the presence of the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord.

Monday’s Reading: Leviticus 16-17

Monday and I have an example of thinking that contributes to the noise in our society.

I am on a social media app on which a member was complaining about the heating bill she got from he energy company. She wrote:

Anyone get an outrageous bill from [the energy company]? I’ve had my thermostat set at 65 and occasionally bump up to 67. $170 bill for this is insane. I’m freezing!

Lots of people responded to her comment. Some expressed the same amount of outrage as she did. Some tried to help her figure out what was causing the high heating bill by asking her questions about her home. Insulation? Two stories? Good windows? How many square feet are you heating? Others shared their heating bills for the last three years and showed how they had increased. One suggested we vote for socialism so that the energy company wouldn’t be profiting off grandmas just trying to stay warm.

I responded,

Talk to Brandon in Washington, D.C.

That got a few reactions including 💗 😄  😮 . It also generated a few comments including this one:

Dave Olsson -talk to Mother Nature. She is RED & BLUE. & Purple. The January temps are in the teens. We are talking about weather so qwitcher [sic] tunnel vision.

This is a failed argument once you cut through the snark to the premises, and all of us–even if you agree with her–need to get good at recognizing poor reasoning and learn how to clap back at people like this to blunt their opinion from influencing others who may not be as thoughtful.

Her argument offers two premises and a conclusion which, broadly speaking, is a syllogism (associated with either deductive or inductive reasoning). I’ve provided my response to each.

• Our climate affects everyone (no matter their political preferences). True.
• January temperatures are in the teens. True.
• (Implied) Therefore, it’s the colder temps that result in higher pricing. Does not necessarily follow.
• Therefore further, stop seeing everything through political lenses. Irrelevant.

Do you see that neither of her premises support her conclusion absolutely? Her conclusion that colder temperatures result in higher pricing may be true, but it does not follow absolutely from her two premises.

The best she can say is that a factor in the original complaint is that using more gas results in a higher bill. Undeniably true. But it’s not the only thing that might lead to a higher bill. Gas might actually cost more per therm and therefore result in a higher gas bill. Indeed, higher prices and colder temperatures will likely result in a more expensive bill.

We can’t control the weather. Weather is variable and will do what it will do. There’s nothing we can do about how cold, hot, rainy or humid or snowy it gets (don’t @ me about climate change … that’s a whole different topic).

It’s not like we haven’t had temps in the teens before here in the Midwest. Some winters are colder than others. The best we can do is look at the average temperature across several winter seasons.

However, the one thing we can affect is the price of energy. That’s what we need to look at when we’re complaining about high gas prices. Low temperatures might be a factor, causing us to use more energy, but it’s the price of the energy that truly counts.

And who has affected the price of natural gas more than anyone?

Brandon.

Hence my suggestion. On average, the temperatures are not outliers this winter. They’re within a “normal” range of what we would expect.

My antagonist’s discourse is one of the reasons that we have such a fog in our national conversation. Don’t let poor logic go unchallenged.