thanks for posting the article. was interesting, though long-winded. for all the rest of you, shut up. you're making the internet worse. go away.
The Worst Argument In The World
81–90 of 152 posts
Re: The Worst Argument In The World
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
If we came from monkeys, why are the monkeys still there??
Because we didn't come from monkeys, we both came from a common ancestor that is no longer around.
Re: The Worst Argument In The World
#83Earlier 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.
I have to take issue with this. I think it's an important and useful rhetorical tool that, while sometimes can be used in a petty way to score points, can elevate the debate. If half of your counter-argument is "compiler warnings" for your competitor's argument, I think that's valuable.
I, for one, would wildly prefer a world where every debater was a nit-picking SOB when it comes to logical fallacies and the average debate "compiled cleanly without warnings". It would be like heaven compared to where we are today.
Re: The Worst Argument In The World
#84I read the interesting submitted article and its comments right after it was submitted here on Hacker News. The worst argument in the world (a general FORM of argument) is described this way in the submitted article: "I declare the Worst Argument In The World to be this: 'X is in a category whose archetypal member has certain features. Therefore, we should judge X as if it also had those features, even though it does…
> The most powerful form of disagreement is to refute someone's central point. Which is denied you when the person's argument is so ill-formed that it does not have a central point. At that point, you either point out the flaws or you walk away, apparently conceding the point to the pointless one. (Also: I love the word point, apparently.)
That's a good, uhhhh, point. There are many people who form their arguments so poorly that it can be hard to refute them because they'll just move the goal posts or completely change the playing field.
Re: The Worst Argument In The World
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. The number of people who are responding to any of my little strawman arguments on their merits is surprising, and frankly disappointing on Hacker News. If you have replied to any of these "arguments" and asked me how I could possibly believe them, then you: - Have not understood the meta-topic of the post - Are unable to resist attacking silly arguments even when it is stated in my post that they are caricatures…
I'm not sure why you thought it was constructive to turn HN into a sounding board for your personal complaints about 'left-leaning argumentoids'. Setting aside the utility of providing more 'examples' of inflammatory political statements on HN, why maintain such thoroughgoing political bias? If the intent is to discuss forms of argument then the bias is only distracting. If the intent is to catalogue stereotypes or c…
That was exactly his point. It was illuminating to hear some Worst Arguments in the World that I have sometimes used without realizing. I don't see why everyone is getting so riled up.
Re: The Worst Argument In The World
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
Examples from Michael Behe's book Darwin's Black Box: Blood's ability to coagulate is a cascading system with over 30 parts. Remove one part and it's fatal for the individual. How could a system like that evolve gradually over time? He lists quite a few such systems. Bacteria having motors, the cell's operational system, the anti-body system (again a cascading system of large complexity).
The motors are not just motors, they just happen to be motors right now. I think it is the selfish gene that describes the path from a protein structure that facilitates the movement of molecules across the cell's membrane into a motor with a flagellum attached.
These things that are claimed to fall apart when a single step is removed were not there from the ground up to provide that specific function, separately they would have provided different functions and when they fell together in a certain way provided a huge benefit. The little bones in our ears were a part of our skulls before they were requisitioned by the ear.
The issue seems to be that the argument looks at how things are and assumes that it was the only thing that these parts have ever been working towards. That any steps in between were useless until put together in this way. Where it is more accurately a bunch of different things coming together to perform all these different functions.
Re: The Worst Argument In The World
#87When I reached "Taxation is theft!" I was moved to come here and comment on it. It only took about a second for me to stop myself and laugh. Apparently others here weren't quite so levelheaded.
Re: The Worst Argument In The World
#88The 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…
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.
He's suggesting adding them to the article which would have made it less off putting for the other side of the author's political fence....which wouldn't be a bad group to target if you want to actually change anyone's mind.
Re: The Worst Argument In The World
#89Great point!
But stop reading when you come to the examples, they just derail the whole thing and everyone forgets what the original point was.
"..the urge is to respond "Martin Luther King? A criminal? No he wasn't! You take that back!" This is why the Worst Argument In The World is so successful. As soon as you do that you've fallen into their trap. Your argument is no longer about whether you should build a statue, it's about whether King was a criminal. Since he was, you have now lost the argument"
Re: The Worst Argument In The World
#90This 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 bein…
> The argument for abortion isn't that it's somehow OK to kill really young human Not true! At least, if you asked me to make an argument in favor of abortion, that's the argument that I would make. No human within the first year or so after conception has any of the distinguishing features which give intelligent beings a higher moral status: Tool use, language use, abstract thought, logical reasoning, permanent memo…
> Therefore, the moral status of a human immediately after the time of conception t_0 is akin to that of an animal. It's not okay to torture, abuse, or injure them for fun; it's not okay for people outside their family to interfere with them; it's morally and socially acceptable and even admirable for individuals to form very deep emotional attachments with them and spend enormous resources helping and protecting them; but it is okay to kill them humanely if there simply isn't a place for them.
However, the human at t_0 will become a person at t_I and the animal won't; the fact that the human is a potential person seems to be very important to the anti-abortion side of the argument.
Besides saying "well, potential things don't count because I say so", is there a strong argument for rejecting the idea that we should consider the human at having the moral status of the person they'll later be? (Clearly we do this already in law, starting at birth or soon before.)