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The Worst Argument In The World

lesswrong.com

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Re: The Worst Argument In The World

#21

Post by Confusion »

tedunangst wrote: post #16
tikhonj wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think pointing out a logical fallacy is not a refutation. Rather than saying "your argument is wrong", it says "your argument is not well-formed". This is much like the difference between a program that has a bug and a program that has a parse error. To take the most glaring example: "my point is true because my point is true". Obviously, nobody actually says this seriously. But some arguments are isomorphic to thi…

As humans, we can do better than a compiler that gives up at the first missing semicolon. We can keep reading and respond to the rest of the comment with more than a link to the wikipedia article on ad hominem.

Sure, if there is a 'rest of the comment'. Usually, there isn't anything else to go by. There's just the fallacious argument. It doesn't matter whether you can think of all kinds of ways to support the point of view the other espouses: you're not in his head and you can't know whether he thought all the things you can think of in favour of his position. There's only the fallacious argument and that needs to be struck down. If someone else wants to support the position, he'll come along.

Re: The Worst Argument In The World

#22

Post by mturmon »

scarmig wrote: post #8
ojbyrne wrote: post #4

Slighty more reasonable, but perhaps more insidious is the "slippery slope" argument. So the first example, about Martin Luther King being a criminal - could be more subtly argued by saying something like "well obviously he doesn't count, but where do we draw the line between 'good' criminals and 'bad' criminals, and invoking slippery slopes. Then the argument ends up basically being the same, but seems on the surfac…

Certainly some slippery slope arguments are good, though! For instance, suppose a terrorist starts demanding a large sum of money not to blow up a plane. Suppose also that the direct risk-corrected value of the plane, even excluding passenger lives, also exceeds the price the terrorist is asking for. We still make it policy not to negotiate with the terrorist, because doing so would create a positive feedback loop th…

When you start looking into terrorist incidents, however, you find that ransoms are indeed often paid (even by governments, even by the US government). They try to keep this secret; sometimes it works, sometimes not. One example is Iran/Contra, but there are many others (e.g., http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,48779,00.html , http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns... , http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/18-10, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritime_history_of_the_United_...)

Secretiveness, in this case, is a mechanism to avoid the slippery slope. As a sister comment to your comment points out, often other effects will step in so we don't go all the way down the slippery slope, and the "secret ransom" is one such effect.

Re: The Worst Argument In The World

#23

Post by jvm »

breckinloggins wrote: post #13

The article could use some more neutral and left-leaning "Worst argument in the world (TWAITW)" examples. I'm fairly neutral politically, and the piece sounded left-biased to me. Note that I'm not stating my opinion here; the author even apologizes for it in the article. Perhaps he is simply at a loss for examples? We could help. Here's a neutral one (from the comments): - "George Washington was a traitor !" (should…

Ha, and here I thought it was too libertarian leaning so I must really be off the deep end. Maybe the author should have stuck to non-political examples since the examples are really not the point of the article, though I know all the fun ones are political.

Re: The Worst Argument In The World

#24

Post by codehotter »

Thanks to this article, I can finally put into words what bothers me about "Copyright infringement is theft"!

Yes copyright infringement share some of the properties of theft, but they are sufficiently different that we shouldn't apply our intuitions about theft to copyright infringement, just like we shouldn't apply our intuitions about theft to taxation.

Re: The Worst Argument In The World

#25

Post by breckinloggins »

jvm wrote: post #23
breckinloggins wrote: post #13

The article could use some more neutral and left-leaning "Worst argument in the world (TWAITW)" examples. I'm fairly neutral politically, and the piece sounded left-biased to me. Note that I'm not stating my opinion here; the author even apologizes for it in the article. Perhaps he is simply at a loss for examples? We could help. Here's a neutral one (from the comments): - "George Washington was a traitor !" (should…

Ha, and here I thought it was too libertarian leaning so I must really be off the deep end. Maybe the author should have stuck to non-political examples since the examples are really not the point of the article, though I know all the fun ones are political.

Which is why it's so funny, given that the very article on the same blog he linked to in his apology [1] is why we're even having this conversation!

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/

Re: The Worst Argument In The World

#26

Post by Evbn »

mturmon wrote: post #22
scarmig wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly some slippery slope arguments are good, though! For instance, suppose a terrorist starts demanding a large sum of money not to blow up a plane. Suppose also that the direct risk-corrected value of the plane, even excluding passenger lives, also exceeds the price the terrorist is asking for. We still make it policy not to negotiate with the terrorist, because doing so would create a positive feedback loop th…

When you start looking into terrorist incidents, however, you find that ransoms are indeed often paid (even by governments, even by the US government). They try to keep this secret; sometimes it works, sometimes not. One example is Iran/Contra, but there are many others (e.g., http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,48779,00.html , http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns... , http://www.commondreams.…

I like how your example of a secret ransom completely failed at being a secret and proved the fallacy of secret ransom.

Re: The Worst Argument In The World

#27

Post by adrianbravo »

If someone points out someone else I admire is a criminal, I would approach it a different way. It has less to do with what I want to call archetypal and more to do with the historically observable fact that what is legal is not always what is moral. Murder, torture, slavery, etc. These have all been legal in some past (or present) context. The possibility that someone who is acknowledged as a decent person could be a "criminal" is no surprise to me, and I'd rather argue to that point than dismiss the whole argument.

And even if I support abortion rights, the act is technically killing. A 'life' is terminated. Regardless, I'd point out that murder holds a different connotation that implies hatred or ill-will (or "malice aforethought") toward the victim. Same with euthanasia.

Why not take these as opportunities to explore the meanings and limits of a word? One person's definition of what is the archetypal murderer or thief or racist may easily differ from yours depending on their own experiences.

Re: The Worst Argument In The World

#28

Post by Xcelerate »

I wonder if there's some sort of way to definitively defeat someone's argument in issues other than math and science. I doubt it -- I suspect all arguments essentially boil down to moral relativism based upon gut feelings (environmental or genetic factors).

I guess a more optimistic question is whether there's a statistically significant process to convince* your opponent that your argument is correct. I would actually be more interested in knowing this.

*By process, I mean a general purpose algorithm that someone could follow that's more effective than alternative algorithms at making your opponent say "you know what, you're right".

EDIT: While I'm at it, I would really like to see more articles/analyses on the nature of arguing. It seems like argument could be a study in its own right, though I doubt there exist any strong efforts in the field.

EDIT 2: You know what, if someone got really good at analyzing the way people argue, they could optimize their own argument strategy to become a very powerful/dangerous person. I suspect this happens naturally (political leaders) but I think there's a huge potential if someone were to go about this consciously and objectively.

Re: The Worst Argument In The World

#29

Post by angrycoder »

breckinloggins wrote: post #13

The article could use some more neutral and left-leaning "Worst argument in the world (TWAITW)" examples. I'm fairly neutral politically, and the piece sounded left-biased to me. Note that I'm not stating my opinion here; the author even apologizes for it in the article. Perhaps he is simply at a loss for examples? We could help. Here's a neutral one (from the comments): - "George Washington was a traitor !" (should…

I have two issues with your comment:

1) It is a blog post not a scientific study or an article in the newspaper.

2) Everyone knows republicans can't read.

Re: The Worst Argument In The World

#30

Post by d4n3 »

breckinloggins wrote: post #13

The article could use some more neutral and left-leaning "Worst argument in the world (TWAITW)" examples. I'm fairly neutral politically, and the piece sounded left-biased to me. Note that I'm not stating my opinion here; the author even apologizes for it in the article. Perhaps he is simply at a loss for examples? We could help. Here's a neutral one (from the comments): - "George Washington was a traitor !" (should…

> but the creationist has a point that some of the more fantastic parts of evolution are harder to directly observe in the same way as, say, gravity.

Honest question: which parts?

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