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The Worst Argument In The World

lesswrong.com

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Re: The Worst Argument In The World

#131

Post by jrajav »

alttab wrote: post #99
jrajav wrote: post #87

When 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.

I'm not sure what your comment is trying to imply, but this is also where I stopped reading. "Taxation keeps the first disadvantage, but arguably subverts the second disadvantage if you believe being able to fund a government has greater social value than leaving money in the hands of those who earned it." Using this argument, at least with the US Government, taxation is most certainly theft.

Yeah, my comment was a lot clearer in my head. I meant that I was about to launch into a minirant about fair taxation in the US. I did a double take and realized that I had hit an emotional trigger very similar to the kind the article is calling out. I think it's very valuable to examine our emotional attachments to words, and I think that's the best thing to take away from the article.

Re: The Worst Argument In The World

#132

Post by aidenn0 »

slurgfest wrote: post #50
Xcelerate wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

How do you objectively pin down the concept of "win"?

You get elected

Re: The Worst Argument In The World

#133

Post by DannoHung »

127 wrote: post #91
DannoHung wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Erm, well, what we saw was that using social programs to engage in eugenics was a problem. Allowing individuals to chang…

>Evolutionary psychology is a valid science, however, and this is an enormous however, untrained individuals attempting to use it to enforce social norms is absolutely 100% sexist. I personally believe that sexism is not immediately a negative thing, but neutral. Sex based discrimination is useful and can hold a lot of value in determining our next course of action. Using sexism as a moral axiom is illogical. What's…

Sexism implies discrimination. Every single word in your statement could substitute racism or ageism for sexism and it wouldn't make anything you're saying any more meaningful.

Does racism also mean something else in the dialect of English you speak?

Re: The Worst Argument In The World

#135

Post by StavrosK »

makomk wrote: post #124
StavrosK wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except for the first one (and even that's debatable - if memory serves me correctly, "George Washington was a traitor" is generally used by the left-wing to demonstrate why categories like "traitor" aren't useful, rather than as a serious argument against Washington) they're not actually examples of the Worst Argument in the World though. For instance, the fact that guns kill people is still just as effective as an a…

But isn't that exactly the argument? Evolution itself isn't a fact. Parts of it are a fact, and the other parts can be reasonably deduced from the facts. It's a bit presumptuous to say that it's a fact, as you could probably say that about Newton's laws too, which were proved to be inaccurate in the end.

Re: The Worst Argument In The World

#136

Post by pfedor »

I disagree that it is the worst argument in the world, or even that it is a bad argument in most cases.

There is something to be said for the simplicity of rules we adopt. If we say, "X is never allowed", then it is less likely that someone who wants to do X for their twisted purposes will be able to get away with it, than if we said, "X is not allowed, except when it does more good than harm."

Re: The Worst Argument In The World

#137

Post by klibertp »

Xcelerate wrote: post #28

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 actual…

> 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"

I'm 99% sure that there is such thing, that it was studied, described and used. It has it's own name even. I'm not talking about propaganda, rhetoric or marketing, it's something deeper, from which these emerge. I'm even sure there is a book considered 'canonical' on this topic.

Unfortunately, I don't remember any specifics. I more or less remember how I came to know this, but it was a blog post of a journalist, and, unfortunately, his archive spans multiple years and thousands of posts and I couldn't find the one about this topic now.

Summary: the process your looking for is well defined, although not widely known; and I will try looking for relevant info some more and I'll post it when I find it.

Re: The Worst Argument In The World

#138

Post by tygorius »

sophacles wrote: post #120
slurgfest wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wow, this is quite possibly the most disingenuous thing I've ever read, or it is the most brilliant troll ever: Poe factor: 1. The poster said "look I'm afraid too many people will miss the point about the form of argument because the article has a lot of examples against a common set of opinions representative of political collective of people. As such, here are some other arguments that follow the exact same patter…

"emotional response is illogical"

To compound the problem, emotional responses are faster, with rational arguments developed after the fact. The neocortex likes to think it's hot shit, but the lizard and mammal brains still control us to a surprising extent. Well, surprising to the neocortical parts of us at least.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, for example, developed a series of short scenarios designed to 1) trigger the disgust response of taboos and 2) pre-answer the typical logical objections. Even when reminded that their "reasons" for disapproving of a scenario didn't actually fit the story as presented, the subjects still felt that the described behaviors were wrong even if they couldn't articulate the exact reason why.

Re: The Worst Argument In The World

#139

Post by pbhjpbhj »

siganakis wrote: post #76
breckinloggins wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well from a personal perspective it's hard for me to distinguish, because evolution seems pretty incontrovertible to me. But I have many creationist friends, and the parts they don't seem to accept as "fact" are: - Speciation (how given any amount of time we could get things as distinct as flowers and dogs and humans from a common ancestor) - Emergent complexity (how given any amount of time, small changes in the gen…

Most of these points rely on the belief that evolution is always made up of slow, small changes in the genetic code. While this is the case most of the time (and enables the fine tuning that we see in many species), evolution can happen very quickly. Population bottlenecks cause species that were once very fit to no longer be fit for an environment, enabling vastly different organisms to become dominant very quickly.…

>The eyes from no eyes makes no sense to me, since the entire array of light sensing capabilities are seen in nature. //

A few articles addressing eyes from a creationist perspective, the first addresses your point most directly. I'll give author and credentials as it seems fitting.

* http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2009/01/13/eyes-hav... DeWitt (Ph.D in neuroscience);

* http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2010/09/14/darwin-a... Mitchell (MD, FACP, BA (cell bio & biochem)

* http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/cm/v18/n4/eye-for-c... interview with Marshall a PhD in Opthalmic science

These, indeed the first alone, should make sense at least of the argument from Christian creationist scientists against Darwinian evolution providing a convincing argument for the undirected formation of the eye.

Interestingly this, http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v3/n3/seeing-eye, answers a question that I've seen raised about the development of the retina and cornea+lens and how they can possibly combine if they develop separately; it gives a very brief acknowledgement of the retina and rearward parts forming from a brain "bud" and the cornea and lens forming from the over-covering flesh of the to-be-formed eye socket. Of course Haeckel's fraud makes one rightly nervous about assuming 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny' but it at least provides an insight in to a potential evolutionary process.

I found this http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v3/n3/seeing-eye from the same source quite interesting, on microscopic eye movements that are apparently essential to proper functioning.

Re: The Worst Argument In The World

#140

Post by dlikhten »

endersshadow wrote: post #114
psyklic wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like he's trying to make the original article more neutral-sounding to me. He is merely saying that some people may immediately dismiss the author's article as trying to show that right-wing arguments are flawed. Hence, he proposed a few additional examples which are not so right-wing.

Just to expound upon this a bit, I think it's important the GP gave counter-examples. The implication of the article being all right-wing straw men is that anybody who holds a view point that could be supported by the argument is actually living in a fallacy-filled fantasy land. Truthfully, these should have been fairly non-political examples to drive the point home, but c'est la vie. Given the immense amount of repl…

It's funny, the overall article is not about "how do we disarm conservative arguments" it's about a certain type of argument and how it is used. The examples were "liberal" but that is irrelevant, the point is identical.
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