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This is a non-sequitur. The (apocryphal, IMO) “centrist” that’s saying everything is “between the two extremes” is not the same thing as someone saying “no, the
by mokus 7y ago
This is a non-sequitur. The (apocryphal, IMO) “centrist” that’s saying everything is “between the two extremes” is not the same thing as someone saying “no, there’s actually more than 2 positions”.
Your statistical example actually takes things the wrong direction. The person you are responding to is positing a distribution with more than two modes, not fewer, and by suggesting there are two your example actually is closer to the “centrist” straw man.
- anigbrowl 7y agoSure...if you ignore that I also mentioned a normal distribution, which includes a variety of opinions with a rough clustering around the center. Why did you just ignore that?
- mokus 7y agoI didn’t ignore it, I called it a straw man. That’s the entire point of my comment. The argument you are calling “centrist” is not claiming there is a “truth somewhere in the middle”. It’s claiming there are plausible positions (concentrations of probability in your metaphor) in more than just two locations. I also considered adding that the assumption of a one-dimensional parameter space is also overly reductionist and not representative of the majority of positions people take when they feel like the mainstream choices are both wrong.