Unrelated (but related to lesswrong.com) If you haven't heard of "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" I highly recommend it (hpmor.com). It is written by Less Wrong author Eliezer Yudkowsky. I am about half way through and it is a great read. It is a fan fiction about the Harry Potter world except Harry Potter is a boy genius and a trained scientist. Each chapter is a new lesson in some method of rationality and it is an amazingly easy read and especially enjoyable if you liked the Harry Potter series to begin with. It is a work in progress and new chapters get added every once in a while. Definitely check it out if you like lesswrong.com and/or Harry Potter.
The Worst Argument In The World
111–120 of 152 posts
Re: The Worst Argument In The World
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow - evolution has been directly observed and is the overwhelming consensus among biologists, if not among fundamentalists whose theology is threatened by it... yet you have carefully impugned its existence by referencing "fantastic parts," as if evolution were a matter of unicorns or Roswell or something. Go learn about Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, then come and lecture us on how evolution isn't really a fact. I wil…
I replied in general to this and other comments above, but I wanted to directly respond to this: > I will never understand why basic facts of biology are supposedly left-wing. It does seem to be the case that "reality has a liberal bias", but you really have to embed yourself in the culture of the religious right to fully "grok" it. I've lived in the Bible belt all my life, and quite frankly the reason basic facts of…
"these basic facts of biology simply aren't taught. Well, if by "taught" you mean "talked about with a derisive sneer" then yes, I suppose they are "taught"."
Yes, obviously YECs are pinnacles of logic and every liberal science teacher is straight out of a Chick tract.
The problem is not as it exists solely in your head.
Re: The Worst Argument In The World
#113The 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…
It's pretty disappointing to me that people would downvote you for saying what seemed so obvious.
Conservatism in America is always associated with a decision making process dictated by religion. He attacks creationism with evolution and the Christianity's disapproval of euthanasia and abortion. These generalizations are neutral since the right will stand by these fallacies.
Where the bias comes to play is when he says "affirmative action is racist" and "taxation is theft". This is not what conservatives believe but instead either skewed to easily argue a liberal point of view or just a lack of understanding of what the right thinks.
Most of the right don't support affirmative action not because it creates a disproportionate amount of minorities but because it creates a disproportionate amount of smart people. For every average minority that gets into an above average school, an above average non-minority must now go to an average school. This aligns with the liberal ideal that "Since life isn't fair, we must intervene to make it so".
When Republicans get elected to office they don't try and put legislation into place that does away with all taxation. Simplified: the left supports a higher less equal taxation and the right supports a lower more equal taxation. When the right is lowering taxes that's only because they are balancing out programs implemented by the left that don't align with their economic policy.
It's a tired argument. The left finger points that wealthy Republicans are selfish for not being willing to support people that are poor. The right says "It creates a net negative because it results in a lack of economic incentives for individuals. Feel free to support them yourself if you're so selfless". The left reply "No, were only going to help if you do".
Re: The Worst Argument In The World
#114Earlier 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…
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 replies trying to tell the GP that evolution is fact, the very fact that these examples are politically charged help obscure the author's point.
Implications are important, and as we see time and again, people read whatever they want to read in these articles. I wonder how many people will read this and think I'm an ultra-conservative.
Re: The Worst Argument In The World
#115Earlier 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.
In fact, even computers can often do better these days. Classical logic as implemented by theorem-provers is not anywhere near the state of the art in AI argumentation systems.
Re: The Worst Argument In The World
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
I replied in general to this and other comments above, but I wanted to directly respond to this: > I will never understand why basic facts of biology are supposedly left-wing. It does seem to be the case that "reality has a liberal bias", but you really have to embed yourself in the culture of the religious right to fully "grok" it. I've lived in the Bible belt all my life, and quite frankly the reason basic facts of…
I was reading an article on the BBC that was an opinion piece wondering why the level of people identifying as Christian in the US was going down and the number of identifying atheists was going up. I don't want to dig for that article back (it's irrelevant in this argument). My point is, while it might seem like the number of people denying evolution is going up, its entirely plausible that they may just be getting…
Of course, it's also entirely possible that both the number of atheists and the number of evolution-denying people are rising at the expense of a third group, religious people who believe in evolution.
Re: The Worst Argument In The World
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If we're talking about the formal fallacies, I agree, but my experience with people name-dropping compiler errors for informal fallacies is that they're often not very useful or accurate diagnoses. Ad hominem is one that is often useful, mostly as a sort of meta-rule about debate etiquette. But things like "slippery slope" are used to characterize a wide range of arguments of which only a subset are strictly fallacious. And some informal fallacies are only fallacies in the specific context of purported logical proofs, but not necessarily in other kinds of arguments. For example, it's true that an "appeal to authority" in an argument means it's not a valid logical argument that proves its conclusions from its premises. But people sometimes raise that objection in contexts where the authority is being invoked as an epistemic authority that raises the likelihood of its conclusion being true (because we have reason to believe that the authority's judgments have non-zero epistemic value), not as part of a logical proof. For example, while it's true that "the consensus of physicists is that X" doesn't prove anything about X, if I'm not a physicist and have a background belief that the consensus of physicists is generally a good guide on what is likely to be true about physics, it's a good inference that I should at least provisionally believe X.
Re: The Worst Argument In The World
#118The 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…
It's pretty disappointing to me that people would downvote you for saying what seemed so obvious. Conservatism in America is always associated with a decision making process dictated by religion. He attacks creationism with evolution and the Christianity's disapproval of euthanasia and abortion. These generalizations are neutral since the right will stand by these fallacies. Where the bias comes to play is when he sa…
..."affirmative action is racist" and "taxation is theft". This is not what conservatives believe...
You must not get much chain email. Not to disagree that some examples of lefty dumbness would have improved the article. Plenty of dumb in the world to go around. But I've seen those exact points argued by conservatives on Hacker News, let alone the fox news discussion forums.
Re: The Worst Argument In The World
#119I 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…
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…
A logical fallacy does imply that an argument is wrong. It doesn't mean that the conclusion is wrong, but it means the argument is wrong. If an argument rests on a logical fallacy, then it does not provide evidence for its conclusion.
Re: The Worst Argument In The World
#120Earlier 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…
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 pattern, but representative of a common set of opinions representative of the opposing political collective".
It is so very very awesome that you are too emotionally driven to see that things you agree with could possibly follow poor form - It really highlights the underlying problem the author is working with: emotional response is illogical and, to put it bluntly, stupid. Blasting someone because he shows examples that are bad arguments you agree with even though you will gladly discuss the same fallacy applied to the points you disagree with is the human political problem in a microcosm.
You know what? I agree with the general position represented by a lot of the gp's argumentoids, but completely disagree with the form they take. When my fellow left-leaning people make these points, I cringe, and even argue against them because the form is so piss poor.