The Worst Argument In The World

This post has so much flame-bait in it I almost wonder if it's a meta-post-- a practical joke to see how many people go after these various politically-charged statements rather than comment on the article itself.

I'll assume it's not though. In which case, I really don't see how adding more politically-charged examples to this discussion, or any other for that matter, is at all productive.

This seems disingenuous to me. Already by calling what's essentially rhetoric "arguments", he's building a huge strawman.

Take abortion - according to opponents a fetus is a living human being, and actively and purposefully killing a living human being is murder in the Charles Manson style. The argument for abortion isn't that it's somehow OK to kill really young human, it's that fetuses aren't independent human beings, they're an extension of the mothers body. It's really not a relevant metric for wether murder is murder if there are grieving friends and family, or if people live in fear - it seems every other crime show deals with the murder of a miserable, lonely homeless guy or a prostitute. According to this argument, that's not murder at all.

The eugenics example is even worse. In the 1930s, people were absolutely certain eugenics was the best thing since sliced bread, then Hitler showed the world how bad that could go. To deny "Those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it" as a guiding principle seems rather hubristic to me.

"Evolutionary psychology is sexist!" is a different beast: some people have decided, not through science, but though politics, that material differences between men and women (or the races for that matter) doesn't exist. Thus science finding otherwise is unacceptable. Of course it's a bad argument to reject science because it doesn't fit your political agenda.

> arguments essentially boil down to moral relativism based upon gut feelings (environmental or genetic factors)

There are many pieces of this problem. A few of them at random:

1. The US education system doesn't do a good job of teaching people to think rigorously and analytically. Up to 12th grade, math is largely memorizing specific algorithms, science is memorizing vocabulary words, real programming courses are usually optional and don't exist at most schools.

2. Our education system actively beats down original critical thinking and encourages people to do what they think the teacher wants.

3. In college, a vast majority professors and students are very liberal. I have never heard or come up with a satisfactory explanation for the causes of this; for me personally, many of my innate leftward biases actually declined through high school and college as my logical reasoning abilities became more acute through application to harder problems, and I gained more experience of the world.

But the prevalance of a single political point of view in our institutions of higher learning may actually cause great damage to our country's political problem-solving abilities: Many people who are highly intelligent and formally trained to think critically avoid questioning liberal ideas because everyone they know and respect thinks the same way, while they are overly dismissive of conservative ideas because many of their proponents don't have the tools to effectively argue their positions.

And as far as I can tell, it's never been objective.

Where's the studies comparing multiple styles of argument and determining which had the highest percentages of "wins"?

When someone says that piracy or taxation are theft, they are not necessarily appealing to intuitions about theft. They may literally hold and mean to state that they share with carjacking whatever makes carjacking theft, WITHOUT sharing other properties of carjacking... in effect, this is a thesis statement rather than a knock-down argument.

Of course, it is also possible that it is not even an honest appeal to intuition, rather just an emotional tarring which will never be substantiated. This is usually what is irritating about hearing those arguments.