That is a pretty shitty thing to do, blowing off your daughter’s birthday to go get high.
Uh what?! I thought you are the legalize all drugs guy.
Just cuz I think drugs should be legal I have to approve of anything just because it somehow involves drugs?
Pretty much yea, if you’re going to take that position.
I don’t have to sit here and listen to this garbage.
Uh wait you are the free speech guy, that means you can’t refuse to listen to someone.
I think a lot of people have trouble with nuance when it’s not one of their or their close friends or family member’s position. They had you sitting their in their head with the nice, tidy label, in the nice, tidy box “drug and free speech guy” and then you had to go and make it so you had some nuance in your position (and perfectly reasonable nuance that almost any sane person would have). That broke his nice, tidy box that shoved you into a predictable corner and the reaction was sort of “you… you can’t do that!”
I don’t think it’s people thinking in excluded middle so much as thinking in labels. It’s more along the lines of my Grandpa almost falling over when there’s a hard working Mexican, egads :eek:! :rolleyes:
Sometimes it verges into the “no true Scotsman” fallacy. I have at leas two acquaintances who say things about how much they despise “immigrants,” but also are perfectly happy with each of their actual living, breathing immigrant friends.
This is a very common trait I’ve noticed with racist people. Of course all blacks are good fer nothins! Well, except for <laundry list of every black person they know, and possibly some black person they admire like Tiger Woods or Obama>. Of course all Mexicans are lazy, except for <laundry list of every Mexican they’ve ever worked with>. Of course Asians are bad at driving! Except for that nice Chinese lady who drives the bus, oh and that Korean person who gave that tour in New York! And so on and so forth.
In my experience, this sort of thing seems to come up most often when it’s related to concepts and beliefs that are defining to people. For instance, with politics. I don’t want to derail the thread, so I’ll be vague, but I’ll be talking to someone about some political issue and they’re a strong Republican or Democrat and if I disagree with them, it’s quite common for them to just assume I’m a supporter of the other party.
I think there’s a few things at play. A big part of it is, sort of a natural “us vs. them” thought process. As with a political party, whatever party one associates with is “us”. Thus, when someone disagrees, they can’t be one of “us” and must be one of “them”. And, whether you are or not, “them” is often defined as a hyperbolic version of everything that “us” isn’t.
I think another part is, as the first response mentions, is about nuance. At least for me, I’ll tend to sort of have a mental model concept of what fits and doesn’t fit with who someone is. It’s not necessarily something that I can just list out data points for, but I can more or less imagine how someone will respond to a particular situation with my mental model of who they are. The thing is, people I know really well will have really good resolution and I’ll very seldom be surprised by how they react; wheras someone I don’t know very well will have much poorer resolution. Thus, to reuse the OP’s analogy, someone could get branded as a very generic “free speech” guy in someone’s head because they either don’t know them well enough, or don’t care enough, to have refined it further. As a corollary, I think this is also why people we’ve known for a long time will seem to have difficulty adjusting to certain things about us that we’ve either changed or is just jarringly different than they knew.
I actually think humans are naturally wired to think in a binary way. Excluded middle is just one symptom of this habit. Another symptom is our tendency to assume that in any given scenario which has two possible outcomes, the probability of getting one outcome vs another is always 50:50.
It’s been suggested that Orientals are much less “Aristotelian” in their thinking than Occidentals are. As an example, the “fuzzy logic” used in control system design (a temperature need not be either hot or cold, but can be partly each) has been widely used in Japan, yet not in U.S.
That baseball games can end in a tie in Japan is also cited as an example of their non-Aristotelian outlook. 
You seem to be under the impression that “excluded middle” is the name of a fallacy. It is not. Quite the contrary, it is one of the fundamental laws of classical logic.
What you are probably thinking of is the fallacy of false dichotomy. The problems with the example of “reasoning” given in the OP surely go far beyond the commission of one simple fallacy, but I guess false dichotomy is in there.
By who? Turn of the century British explorers? Who uses the term “oriental” these days?
Are you really curious about the source of my comment or did you just want to snark about the term “Oriental”? In the latter case, let me hijack to wonder if that word is now politically incorrect and if so, why.
And since we’re snarky, who writes “by who” instead of “by whom” these days? 
Uh…my mom? The woman whose sole and deciding argument against an Obama administration is, “They’ll never get the smell out of The White House.”
Septimus, I’d like to know the source of your comment. This sounds very interesting to me (and I didn’t even notice the use of the term, “Oriental.” Guess I’m not very PC.)
Oh, Inigo. I’m so sorry. That attitude stinks.
The “non-Aristotelian” nature of “Oriental” thought has been noted by many thinkers, though in different ways. A popular treatment of physics, The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra, makes the connection, noting that (A or not-A but not both) may not apply in quantum physics. As a computer scientist, I became aware that Fuzzy Logic was a widespread and productive paradigm among Japanese computer engineers and scientists, but largely ignored in U.S.A. American scientists tend to insist that fuzzy logic is just probabilistics in disguise; but that view is opposed by the theory’s founder, Lotfi Zadeh, a Persian(!) who didn’t emigrate to U.S.A. until he’d already graduated from University.
One can find many discussions of differences between Western and Asian thought, though some will contrast “linear” or “causal” thinking with an “holistic” Asian approach. You’ll need to “connect dots” to relate these discussions to the Law of Excluded Middle. Googling might help, though much of the discussion will be about rhetoric or morality rather than logic, e.g.
Even the objection to the term “Oriental” may demonstrate a flaw in rigid logic devices like “Excluded Middle.” If msmith537 could articulate his aversion to the term, I’d guess ambiguity might be a major objection: “East Asian,” “Islamic,” “Southeast Asian,” etc. are much crisper terms. Yet the fuzzy ambiguity of “Oriental” has some utility due to its very fuzziness. “Oriental” is widely construed to include Islamic culture, whose center in Egypt is only slightly East of Greece.
Do these scientists actually use fuzzy logic? Because they can be used in tandem. Fuzzy logic capitalizes on notion such as “like” or “similar to” that western people use use all the time. It’s just a measure of “likeness”. If you have some ghost-like creature, you may have a notion of “is it a ghost?” Well, it is “.8 a ghost” which is kind of hard to understand, but can (sort of) be restated as “it fits roughly 80% of the things I think of when I think of a ghost.” (To be clear though, perhaps I should state it’s likeness to a logical statement rather than likeness to an actual thing).
There is a big difference between the statement “that thing is .8 a ghost” and “There is an 80% chance that thing is a ghost.” If you’re using both, both statements can be restated “There is a 100% chance that it is 80% a ghost” and “There is an 80% chance that thing is 100% a ghost.”
I’m not sure why one would insist they’re the same, they have rather different uses and are actually very useful to use in conjunction (especially in things like machine learning, for instance the more “similar to” something is to being destroyed, the more likely it may collapse and become “completely the same as” destroyed, you can’t easily model that notion using only fuzzy logic or only probability).
ETA: Huh… even Wikipedia says it can be called a form of probabilistic logic, I’ve never heard anything other than that they’re different.
I’m afraid I’m too Westernized (or Aristotelian) myself to fully appreciate fuzzy logic as it applies to cybernetics. I once worked closely with several American computer scientists but don’t recall any express interest in fuzzy logic. (Most adopted the usual “Phoo, same as probability.”) The closest I ever came was in image processing. For example, if edges and texture are treated differently but a given pixel combines both characters, you can output a weighted average of the two cases. In this calculation, where subexpressions are themselves fuzzy, do probability and fuzzy logic give different arithmetic results? I don’t know; I never got into it that far. (In a classification subexpression like A = p B + (1-p) C, it is often useful to introduce a non-linearity, e.g. A’ = logistic(A). But I can’t relate that competently to Fuzzy.)
Yes, but do they lead to a different results? I think fuzzy logic might provide a more direct route to useful classification than probability does.
Googling “probability vs fuzzy logic” gives results including a 2002 article by Zadeh.
I live in rural Thailand and have heard it suggested that a “fuzziness” is apparent in their culture, language and diction. I see examples of this myself.
Yeah I haven’t used that word for at least 12 years.
I still say “whom”, however 
It’s funny how people I know can’t comprehend that I’m pro-choice AND pro-death penalty. And what’s weird is that it is an automatic and complete exclusion. Having one area of difference with a group totally negates membership in that group. I can agree with 90% of what they say, but the 1% makes me an outsider. When I get on the plane here in Fort Myers, I am apparently a flaming liberal. But when I get off the plane in DC, I’ve somehow transformed into an arch-conservative without ever changing any of my opinions. All because I don’t toe the line for either party.
Yeh, that’s false dichotomy.
Just don’t mention the excluded middle around Schrödinger. He tends to get a bit testy, and a bunch of cats end up dead.
Punch this person in the face