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The infamous coin toss

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Re: The infamous coin toss

#231

Post by Retric »

dragonwriter wrote: post #230
Retric wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not the main attack but you can have many fallacies in a single argument. Attacking the length of an argument rather than the thrust of the argument is an Ad hominem fallacy. It’s also snarky.

> Attacking the length of an argument rather than the thrust of the argument is an Ad hominem fallacy. Its a fallacy but its not ad hominem . (Its non sequitur , but than most fallacies are specialized forms of non sequitur , so that doesn’t really narrow it down much beyond saying it is fallacious.) There's not, AFAIK, a common catchy name specifically for “argument to the peripheral stylistic features of the oppone…

> though maybe maybe should be, because in practice its a common fallacy

That’s why it was. Ad hominem is based on what is being attacked not how.

Attacking the person not the argument is deeper than simply dismissing something because of their political party, race, or educational history. When you attack stylistic elements of an argument you’re attacking the person as someone who made an argument in that form.

Re: The infamous coin toss

#232

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

LeonB wrote: post #105
robertlagrant wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> owning media Who should own media? Private people, or the state? > lobbying the government If lobbying the government is effective, it's either because the lobbying was correcting a wrong, or the government is allowing itself to be corrupted. > owning the means of production The "means of production" was barely relevant when Marx found out what a factory was from his factory-owning mate. A plumber owns "the means o…

> Who should own media? Private people, or the state? I mean of course — who should own media.. we have precisely two choices, and no possibility to imagine anything else! What you’ve put forward is known as a false dichotomy. That is a situation where you present two options as if they are the only options. Oh wow — in your response Re government you have literally stated a dichotomy. Alright. I feel bad now. I have…

> Oh wow — in your response Re government you have literally stated a dichotomy. Alright. I feel bad now. I have to let you know that there are more than two options (your preferred and a horrible alternative) in just about every situation in life. Please my friend - go out into the world and seek out the alternatives - they are infinite. This false dichotomy business is harmful to everyone around you.

> If lobbying the government is effective, it's either because the lobbying was correcting a wrong, or the government is allowing itself to be corrupted.

This seems like "correcting a wrong" or "not correcting a wrong and therefore the government is allowing itself to be corrupted". The second part has an argument that effective lobbying which does not correct a wrong is necessarily government corruption. There seems to be a regular old dichotomy here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichotomy). Not all dichotomies are false.

But I also want to highlight a part of the comment:

> Please my friend - go out into the world and seek out the alternatives - they are infinite.

If these alternatives are so infinite, it should be easy to name one. That is something that is yet to be provided in this thread, seemingly despite your confidence that this dichotomy is false.

Re: The infamous coin toss

#233

Post by Retric »

robertlagrant wrote: post #228
Retric wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is far more than just 3 options and suggesting any specific option is again falsely limiting the discussion. (1) Government ownership, (2) ownership by a single rich person, (3) ownership by a nonprofit, (4) ownership by the employees, (5) ownership by the readers… However, suggesting just one additional options focuses excessive attention to that specific option. Mentioning how much Twitter has changed going f…

(1) is state ownership; all the others are private. Those are the same two options I listed; you just mentioned some subcategories of private.

You didn’t set the categories, the original post was: “Imagine if — on top of that - we let the undeserving rich invest their wealth in things such as: - owning media”

You can have private ownership without the owners automatically being rich. Further the owners could be rich without qualifying as undeserving rich by whatever metric the post’s author had in mind.

That said, thanks for providing my point ;-)

Re: The infamous coin toss

#234

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

digging wrote: post #220
robertlagrant wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Media could be owned by the staff Agree. That would be private people owning it, though.

Well, the state is also people, so state-owned is also private people owning it then. Either that, or you could acknowledge the dramatic material differences between workers owning their own output and a rich individual not-worker owning their output.

> so state-owned is also private people owning it

This is wrong by definition. There is an actual "true" dichotomy between public ownership and non-public ownership. Two criteria:

- "jointly exhaustive": the two subsets contain all possible scenarios

- "mutually exclusive": the two subsets do not share any possible scenarios

These criteria are met with the subsets of "the state" (meaning "public") and "private people" (meaning "non-public").

Re: The infamous coin toss

#235

Post by dragonwriter »

Retric wrote: post #231
dragonwriter wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Attacking the length of an argument rather than the thrust of the argument is an Ad hominem fallacy. Its a fallacy but its not ad hominem . (Its non sequitur , but than most fallacies are specialized forms of non sequitur , so that doesn’t really narrow it down much beyond saying it is fallacious.) There's not, AFAIK, a common catchy name specifically for “argument to the peripheral stylistic features of the oppone…

> though maybe maybe should be, because in practice its a common fallacy That’s why it was. Ad hominem is based on what is being attacked not how. Attacking the person not the argument is deeper than simply dismissing something because of their political party, race, or educational history. When you attack stylistic elements of an argument you’re attacking the person as someone who made an argument in that form.

> When you attack stylistic elements of an argument you’re attacking the person as someone who made an argument in that form

No, you aren’t.

“This argument is false because ofn the way it is presented” is fallacious, but it does not rely on the reader rearranging it into “This argument is wrong because anyone who would present an argument this way is a bad person whose arguments should be dismissed”.

Its definitely a non sequitur, but calling it ad hominem is interpolating things that aren't there.

Re: The infamous coin toss

#236

Post by Retric »

dragonwriter wrote: post #235
Retric wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> though maybe maybe should be, because in practice its a common fallacy That’s why it was. Ad hominem is based on what is being attacked not how. Attacking the person not the argument is deeper than simply dismissing something because of their political party, race, or educational history. When you attack stylistic elements of an argument you’re attacking the person as someone who made an argument in that form.

> When you attack stylistic elements of an argument you’re attacking the person as someone who made an argument in that form No, you aren’t. “This argument is false because ofn the way it is presented” is fallacious, but it does not rely on the reader rearranging it into “This argument is wrong because anyone who would present an argument this way is a bad person whose arguments should be dismissed”. Its definitely a…

Not that kind of person or attack. What in your mind separates mocking someone’s speech impediment with mocking a website’s font?

A website isn’t literally a person, but what’s being attacked is the thing making the argument. It kind of break down because this isn’t directly equivalent to two people debating before the Roman senate, but western philosophy really didn’t care much about such superficial differences.

I can’t think of the phrase but there is the platonic ideal of an argument and individual who voiced it. Something about after an argument has been spoken it, as in the argument, needs to be addressed directly not the person who said it.

PS: Similar idea in a different context don’t judge a book by its cover. Not directly relevant, but I find it fascinating how often the idea of superficial as unimportant is used while people focus on it so much. Sort of a humanity has changed less than you might think in the last several thousand years kind of thing.

Re: The infamous coin toss

#237

Post by robertlagrant »

Retric wrote: post #233
robertlagrant wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(1) is state ownership; all the others are private. Those are the same two options I listed; you just mentioned some subcategories of private.

You didn’t set the categories, the original post was: “Imagine if — on top of that - we let the undeserving rich invest their wealth in things such as: - owning media” You can have private ownership without the owners automatically being rich. Further the owners could be rich without qualifying as undeserving rich by whatever metric the post’s author had in mind. That said, thanks for providing my point ;-)

> You didn’t set the categories

This whole conversation has been about my "false dichotomy" of state and private ownership.

E.g. from LeonB:

> I mean of course — who should own media.. we have precisely two choices, and no possibility to imagine anything else! What you’ve put forward is known as a false dichotomy. That is a situation where you present two options as if they are the only options.

Re: The infamous coin toss

#238

Post by robertlagrant »

LeonB wrote: post #226
robertlagrant wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You were claiming that I was being paid per word. Please quote where I claimed that.

I thoroughly disliked every moment spent interacting with you. You’ve admitted above that you were being snarky. That’s what you put into the world. I want you to understand that when you use your time to be snarky to people it is hurtful and wrong. Please do better.

You saying sarcastically how I could be so silly as to claim only two options, rather than simply saying "hang on, what about option X" and us having a conversation is where this went wrong. A tiny bit of snark is much less rude than that, and particularly when it's in response to the initial unpleasant sarcasm.

Re: The infamous coin toss

#239

Post by credit_guy »

svnt wrote: post #118
credit_guy wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The obvious conclusion: increasing wealth concentration is an unavoidable consequence of capitalism that probably has very little to do with merit. Not really. P implies Q is not the same as Q implies P. The fact that you can get a large gap between rich an poor with pure coin toss does not mean that when you have such a gap the gap resulted from pure randomness. It could have resulted from any combination of merit…

If you change the equation slightly and place a fixed resource consumption requirement (take 1-10% of the initial amount to pay to flip a coin) on each person’s continuation, and then unevenly distribute the initial balance, it will become apparent that your ability to become “that guy” is dominantly determined by your initial balance. In this version people do not end up at some small fraction of the initial balance…

With the wrong analogy you can prove anything.

In this analogy the coin flip results in 150% your net worth or 60%. In real life, we make thousands of decision per day, but very few people make a single decision like that in their entire life. And this analogy goes for 1000 such decisions.

In the real world, most of our decisions are not like a coin toss actually: if I do this homework, I might become a bit smarter and boost my lifelong learnings by 0.001%, and if I don't I will enjoy an extra half an hou of TikTok. The outcome is anything but a coin toss, still most kids go for the second choice. The kids who go consistently for the first will end up in the top 1%, but unfortunately, they'll hear from their TikTok-loving friends that their success is just due to pure coin flips.

Re: The infamous coin toss

#240

Post by x-complexity »

TheCleric wrote: post #175
robertlagrant wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people are rich because they own stock that's valuable, because they made or did something that's valuable. Collapse that chain and you replace value creation as a form of mild power with political ability as a way to access direct and high levels of power and things start going wrong fast[0][1][2]. [0] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Stalinism [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward#Consequence...…

> Most people are rich ... because they made or did something that's valuable. This assumption is doing a LOT of heavy lifting here.

> > Most people are rich ... because they made or did something that's valuable.

> This assumption is doing a LOT of heavy lifting here.

Value is determined by the people. I personally find Pokemon & MTG cards to be worthless, but other people do, and they're where that value is derived.

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