> I don't know the particulars of the claims...

You confess that you don't know anything about the subject at hand,

> but I do know that... the wsj is barely distinguishable from anti-government propaganda

but you're happy to throw around an ad hominem attack on the site that published the story.

Right.

ad hominem : rolleyes :

known liars make all their analyses useless: you can't tell what crucial facts they elided or what quotes they selectively quoted; it's worse than uninformative, because you have to question every fact presented and go dig, as I said, for a first-party source to verify.

Interestingly you just quoted the very definition of ad hominem. What someone tends to say makes no statement about their current argument. You can choose to dismiss them out of hand because they tend to lie, but to claim that what they are currently saying is false because they are liars is a fallacy.

Remember the boy who cried wolf? The take away from that story should be that every statement has to be evaluated in isolation.

> What someone tends to say makes no statement about their current argument.

Not so. If someone has lied in the past, that is evidence that their conscience permits them to lie, and so they are more likely to lie in the future.

> The take away from that story should be that every statement has to be evaluated in isolation.

Again no. The takeaway is that you should not lie, because if you do people will be less likely to believe you in the future.

> Not so. If someone has lied in the past

Fine. It makes no conclusive statement about their current argument. You still have to check it if you want to know if it's true or not.

> The takeaway is that you should not lie, because if you do people will be less likely to believe you in the future.

This is the over simplified view of the story. In my opinion, the subsequent attack on the village was 100% the fault of the others. The boy did his job and warned them of a wolf and they engaged in an ad hominem and dismissed his argument without even a cursory check. If they weren't willing or able to work with the boy then it's their fault again for giving him a job they didn't trust him to do.

You need to brush up on your Bayesian reasoning. In the story, the boy lies repeatedly before finally telling the truth once. If you do the math you will see that the villagers acted properly (or at least rationally). The Bayesian prior on P(wolf) is pretty small to begin with, and the posterior probability of P(wolf|boy-cries-wolf) gets smaller with every observation of ~wolf|boy-cries-wolf.

You are being distracted by the fact that the data comes from a boy rather than an impersonal predictor like, say, some astrological sign. Your Bayesian prior on P(X|someone-says-X) is high, and that is as it should be. Evolution sees to it that people are basically honest. But evolution produces a lot of variation, including pathologies like lying. You're failing to update your estimate of P(Y-is-a-pathological-liar|Y-lied).

It has nothing to do with Bayesian, we're talking logic here. An astrological sign would not fall under logic, but rather the domain of science where it can be demonstrated to have no predictive power. A human can decide to stop lying, a sign can't decide to suddenly have predictive scientific properties.

The village could certainly reason that the boy usually lied. But it is a fallacy to say "this argument is false because he is a liar". He might not be lying this time (indeed, the last time he was not). It would have been wise of them to get someone else to do the wolf watching, however, since they couldn't work with this boy.

> It has nothing to do with Bayesian, we're talking logic here.

You really don't understand this at all. There is no such thing as single Platonic "logic" independent of any qualifier. There are many different kinds of logic. There is propositional logic, first order logic, higher order logic(s), modal logics, extensional and intensional logics. Bayesian reasoning is a (particular kind of) logic. Specifically, it is a logic of probability, which is to say, the kind of logic that applies when you don't know for certain whether something is true of false. Which is to say, the only kind of logic that actually applies to real-world situations.

> A human can decide to stop lying,

Can they? All of them? Are you sure? There are humans who can't decide to (say) stop smoking, how can you be certain that there aren't humans who can't decide to stop lying?

> a sign can't decide to suddenly have predictive scientific properties.

Of course a sign can't "decide" anything because it doesn't have a brain, but that doesn't mean it couldn't suddenly start to have predictive power. You can't rule out the possibility that the laws of physics could change tomorrow on any logical basis. The best you can (logically) do is observe that there is a ton of EVIDENCE that thaw laws of physics don't change capriciously, and conclude that therefore the probability they will change tomorrow is low (and Bayes's theorem will tell you exactly how low if you want to crunch the numbers).

Likewise, there is a ton of EVIDENCE to support the theory that the boy in the story is a pathological liar who is not capable of deciding not to lie, or for whatever reason chooses to lie notwithstanding that he might have the ability not to. The only issue is how many lies it would take before one's estimate of the posterior probability of the boy telling the truth was indistinguishable from zero. This has to do with one's Bayesian prior on the probability of a particular random individual being a pathological liar, but that's beside the point. The point is that there is some finite number of lies after which the theory that what the boy says is in any way correlated with the truth (except by chance) is no longer logically tenable.

The WSJ's rep, last time I checked, was a solid newsroom, and a insane, frothing at the mouth editorial team, with a strict wall between the two.

Any evidence for the idea that the news section of the WSJ is corrupted so absolutely that they cannot be relied on in any story?

Unfortunately this is in the Opinion section which has been known to be reliably frothing at the mouth, anti-goverment, ayn randian propaganda machine.

Oh, that does make a very big difference.

I think it's trite to say 'ad hominem' in cases like this. Ad hominem refers to the quality of the reasoning.

Here, we depend on the WSJ for the facts as well. If they are an untrustworthy source, that's very relevant.

> you have to question every fact presented and go dig

Isn't that true of every assertion of "fact"? Perhaps it's because I'm British. Our press make no attempt to hide their political views.

re 2: So? Kids hurt themselves and swallow dumb things all the time. It's your job as a parent to keep those things away from them. It's not the government's job, and it's certainly not the manufacturer's job.

Proof by insistence? In a different time Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, and that book set the forces in motion that gave the country inspection of meat products and also the FDA. I do realize that there are problems with that public authority, nevermind that it is intentionally underfunded, but no public oversight of the food and drug supply would be even worse. We know that for a fact, because we have seen it.

That's regulation ensuring products are safe when used as intended, not regulation ensuring products can't be used unsafely. It's a key difference. The government should ensure bottled water is free from E. coli. It shouldn't ensure you can't drown in it.

- Their authority the problem. Increasingly authoritarian being the issue. - As they should be underfunded. Keeps their power in check.

> As they should be underfunded. Keeps their power in check.

No, changing laws keeps their power in check. Underfunding them simply makes them less effective and more arbitrary.

This is not a food or a drug.

2. The fact that this happened is in fact quite relevant to the product's regulation, but there are larger issues here about the way that the regulators actually interact with regulated entities (e.g. suits that a skeptic may worry are motivated by revenge, attempts to tear down the limited-liability structure underpinning the modern corporation's ability to interact effectively with the economy)

1. The WSJ, reporting on things which could affect Business in the general case, is opinionated, but - that notwithstanding - generally quite reliable, doubly so by news-organization standards. That's why they're still in business. That said, I am awed at some of the screed that makes it to their Review and Outlook opinion section (the pro-SOPA piece which was nearly slanderous in impugning the motives of the likes of Jimmy Wales comes to mind) and can express a modicum of sympathy.

In the meantime, while you're consulting the government agencies in question for your "first-party sources", here is some third-party coverage, which is also opinionated but does have more citations. http://www.wlf.org/upload/legalstudies/legalbackgrounder/08-...

A quick search of: kid swallow lego

Returns about 1.9 million results on google, I'm guessing more kids swallow legos, where is the recall order there?

Two things:

1) Lego bricks are targeted at a specific age group (there's a reason why Duplo blocks are larger, and thus, targeted at a younger age group)

2) Lego bricks aren't attracted to each other and burrow through soft tissue to meet. Buckyballs, made of rare earth magnets, are attracted to each other and can cause tissue damage if two or more are swallowed.

Granted, Lego bricks might cause irritation going through the digestive system, but not nearly cause the damage that rare earth magnets can.

2) Unless you have a gastric bypass they should be attracted to each-other in the stomach, before going anywhere where you can squeeze stuff, well assuming they where eaten during the same time.

Also I think the sharp edges are a thread, if they go trough wrong, I think there is a risk of it ripping apart the gut. BUT I'm not a doctor.

Of course there is the simple solution of not buying unsafe toys (or letting kids play unsupervised.)

You might think, but no, they might not necessarily attract each other in the stomach. An ex-girlfriend's kid ate two magnets (http://boston.conman.org/2006/01/12.1) and they ended up separating, then attracting each other in different parts of the body (http://boston.conman.org/2006/01/20.1).

The stomach wall is a possible point of damage as well, with its many soft tissue folds...

Linked report is cool, but a rough skimming doesn't peg it at 80 kids for this product, just these small neodymium magnets in general.