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Weak Men Are Superweapons (2014)

263 points by skinkestek 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
colechristensen 6y ago
The way to “win” an argument these days is to make a claim which is more complex to refute than the attention span of the audience. You achieve this by making claims which are somewhat true and not particularly representative of reality. These tend to be the vast majority of arguments that people see because controversy gets clicks and the more reasonable people are straight up afraid to appear to support the other side by disagreeing with the more unreasonable folks with a shared alignment.
- the_only_law 6y ago
  > The way to “win” an argument these days is to make a claim which is more complex to refute than the attention span of the audience. This is a good description of something I’ve failed to put into words myself. Thanks for this.
- hi5eyes 6y ago
  to a degree i think zoomers parody this phenomenon with memes using a wall of text/dense and almost indecipherable text with the caption of "leftist memes be like"
  - SuoDuanDao 6y ago
    A family member of mine is interested in what makes the worst cultures in the world tick, and according to him, Daesh memes be like that too.
- john-shaffer 6y ago
  This is very perceptive. Attempts at honest discussion often seem to be derailed in exactly this way. Discussion of the actual issue is avoided by loud assertions that take a lot of time to refute. Which "side" derails it does seem to depend on who the "weak man" would hurt. Is there any way to avoid this?
  - theinverseidea 6y ago
    I would say bring back empiricism as a big component of knowing if something is true, or at least before you discuss it as something that is right. People are aligning with complex theories with no underlying basis, other than their feelings and utopian visions, and then getting emotional about it.
  - colechristensen 6y ago
    Just don’t participate once the conversation gets derailed. Learn to exit gracefully, and usually if you did make a point addressing the complexity, likely someone got something out of it. Surround yourself with people who disagree with you, but are good at it.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- korethr 6y ago
  I had to look it up again to check, but does this not fall under the dictionary definition of sophistry[1]? It seems especially appropriate to call it that given the 2nd definition of sophisticated[2] as something at a high degree of complexity, and "sophisticate"'s common root with "sophistry". By making a complex argument, you deceive others into thinking that you have refuted another argument, when in fact you have not done so; the fallacy of your argument was hidden by it's complexity. 1. "the use of fallacious arguments, especially with the intention of deceiving." -- Oxford languages, via Google; https://www.google.com/search?q=sophistry https://www.google.com/search?q=sophistry (retrieved 2021-01-22) 2. "(of a machine, system, or technique) developed to a high degree of complexity." -- Same as [1], above.
  - colechristensen 6y ago
    Eh, the whole sophist thing is a 2500 year old beef that philosophers (i.e. aristotle, plato, socrates) had with professional teachers hired by upper class people, for everything but especially rhetoric. So it took on this meaning of an insult insinuating the target was a second rate intellectual teaching a cheap bag of tricks to rich idiots. I’m never a big fan of using these words that take some ancient group of people or school of thought and turn the name into an adjective which has at best a loose connection with the reality of what they were. Does the dictionary definition fit? Somewhat, but maybe not the best choice.
    - scruple 6y ago
      Thank you for saying this out loud. I've had the same visceral reaction to words like "sophistry" but have never taken the time to process why or articulate it. This is exactly how I feel about it, as well.
- Leszek 6y ago
  I don't necessarily disagree, but there's a certain irony in presenting a claim of "how things are these days" in such a matter-of-fact way. I certainly wouldn't know how to refute your statement in a sufficiently short way. Thus, is it the presentation of claims that is the issue, or is it their content? Or both? I struggle with avoiding hypocrisy when trying to pinpoint the underlying problem.
  - colechristensen 6y ago
    Well somebody could try to do a representative study, but this is a HN comment, not a scientific publication. I could also try to deconstruct some of the common complex-to-refute arguments, but I'm afraid the message would get lost in the following controversy. What I'm saying is my perceptions following experiences I have had myself. I suppose one could disagree with me by showing counterexamples of generally recognized public arguments for this and that and how they can be refuted simply. You have a point though. I'm not sure how I could avoid that criticism and still make an effective argument.
    - selestify 6y ago
      > I could also try to deconstruct some of the common complex-to-refute arguments, but I'm afraid the message would get lost in the following controversy. That would be quite interesting to read nonetheless, if you’re willing to do so.
- deeviant 6y ago
  It doesn't seem to me that its most often making a "more complex" claims, but making so many claims as to overwhelm any attempt to refute them, aka "Gish gallop".
  - colechristensen 6y ago
    To clarify, perhaps confusing language, I don't mean the claim must be complicated, it can be a simple claim. In order to refute the claim though requires an appreciation for subtlety which the people doing the arguing don't often have. The refutation is complicated, the claim doesn't need to be.
- camjohnson26 6y ago
  Well clearly you’re wrong and don’t understand Karl Popper’s “Theory of Falsification” or the ways that radical mid 18th century propaganda groups led to a rise in authoritarian group think.
l0b0 6y ago
Original post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweap...
throwaway894345 6y ago
> The weak man is a terrible argument that only a few unrepresentative people hold, which was only brought to prominence so your side had something easy to defeat. This reminds me of the Buzzfeed story circa 2012 about how Christians were campaigning against Starbucks for their holiday cups unadorned with Christmas paraphernalia. It became a meme right away to the delight of people who already weren't very fond of Christians. I thought this was particularly strange because even my most conservative Christian friends held opinions in the vein of "If you're a Christian and are getting upset about these cups, you're way off". I was really curious to figure out who all of these Christians were that held this opinion and, lo-and-behold, it was one single Christian from Arizona. This particular "weak man" argument was the basis for much criticism of Christian culture for a couple of years. Maybe this seems less significant nowadays after the media has shown us consistently over the better part of the last decade exactly what level of depravity it will sink to in order to gain a click, but at the time it was really surprising.
- chc 6y ago
  I don't know if this is a great example, because Fox News actually incorporated Starbucks' lack of Christmas messaging into the weird "War on Christmas" narrative it tries to manufacture every year.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    I don't know how that would invalidate the example; that still doesn't show that there were Christians who felt that way, rather that Fox believed the BuzzFeed story and leaned into it.
    - Spivak 6y ago
      Yeah, assuming that Fox News is representative voice for Christians seems way off. They are just as hungry for manufactured outrage and clicks at everyone else. Fox running a bit telling their viewers they should be angry about something isn’t evidence that anyone was actually angry.
ndiscussion 6y ago
Interesting, and not what I expected. I presumed it was something about slave morality ala Nietzsche's Will to Power. Useful idiots and all that. It seems the strongest way to win arguments nowadays is to simply go on the offensive and ignore their claims. The opposite side has millions of tricks. First, they hope you are stupid. If not, they will pretend to be stupid, and not understand what you are talking about. And even if you refute them, they may come back the very next day and claim that they won the argument. When you post online, hundreds of lurkers may read your comment. If you don't even dignify the enemy with a response, they are much more likely to buy in to your emotional rhetoric.
motohagiography 6y ago
This "weak man," tactic is taught in undergrad, the idea is to destabilize an opposing view to neutralize the person holding it. The emphasis is on "neutralize," because the underlying strategy is based on the premise that there is no truth, only power, and for an opponent to be neutral, or do nothing, means there is no resistance to your agenda. When "everything is political," it is sufficient to isolate an opponent from a conversation because in that view, all power comes from attention and approval of others, because they have been trained to be psychologically actuated by shame. It's why, "not a good look," has become a standard put down, even among some men. This idea of litigating for power is why many people don't like lawyers, and when half the middle class is educated to act like the seediest of prosecutors, you get that thing that's wrong with someone you just can't put your finger on. I have some actual friends like this, and we find a way, but part of why there is so much hostility in the culture is because one side never thought they would need a new bare-metal up critical framework to conceive of how awful we've educated some people to become. One of the SSC rules was "be charitable," which is the value that the weak-man style of argument throws out. It's basically being uncharitable. So glad to see Alexander articles on HN lately.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  a couple random responses. I don't think I hear "not a good look" the same way you do. in particular, I don't hear it as a putdown, more of a cynical comment that expresses something like "I don't necessarily oppose what you are saying/doing, but I hope for your sake that other people don't notice". > This "weak man," tactic is taught in undergrad, the idea is to destabilize an opposing view to neutralize the person holding it. The emphasis is on "neutralize," because the underlying strategy is based on the premise that there is no truth, only power, and for an opponent to be neutral, or do nothing, means there is no resistance to your agenda. I'm having trouble fitting this in with what I currently see in the world. it doesn't seem like either "side" would be content with my neutrality/silence. they seem to want nothing less than full and vocal alignment on every issue.
  - DangitBobby 6y ago
    In my experience, "not a good look" is definitely supposed to be a bitter indictment if whatever it is you are apparently doing.
jxramos 6y ago
Central examples, that's a great concept, the "average joe" basically but with an emphasis on abstract categories.
wcerfgba 6y ago
The superweapon post: https://web.archive.org/web/20121007160623/http://squid314.livejournal.com/329171.html https://web.archive.org/web/20121007160623/http://squid314.l... because it is now behind an authwall.
- wcerfgba 6y ago
  I don't think the take on feminism in this article is particularly good. The author discusses feminism as "a memeplex that provides a bunch of pattern-matching opportunities where a man is in the wrong and a woman is in the right", but feminism is about analysing the power dynamic between the _classes_ of 'man' and 'woman'. Any system of class-based power analysis can be abused by supposed adherents to attack _individuals_ in a given class, but that doesn't mean that the system isn't itself valuable as a critique of power dynamic that exists between the classes.
  - vorpalhex 6y ago
    Unless the system is actually open to inverting the power relationship, then it's just pattern matching and isn't anything more powerful than a slightly fancier way of saying "X > Y". Everything else is window dressing and post-hoc vindication. Or to put this another way, there are people in my orbit who feel perfectly comfortable spouting "Men are the worst!" and "all men are stupid!", but would be extremely upset with you if you swapped the gender in those statements.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - strken 6y ago
    I don't have particularly strong opinions on feminism, but it's many things to many people. You've listed two of those things, but both seem like good characterisations of different aspects. I don't think he's criticising the academic aspect that analyses the power dynamic between men and women, I think he's criticising the everyday aspect that caused a woman to feel so offended when he asked her out that she cut off all contact with him and then told his friends he was being a jerk. Him choosing that specific aspect might itself be a weak man.
intrepidhero 6y ago
I found this enlightening, and disheartening at the same time. Is there any further discussion on how we can evolve past this, as individuals and as a society?
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  Individually, by being aware of it you can recognize it in your own statements more readily (though probably requiring deliberate attention). Then you can choose to use the form of argument or rewrite to avoid it. When seeing it in others you may be able to present better responses, especially if you're aware of how your response might be perceived.
  - MauranKilom 6y ago
    > rewrite to avoid it. (Not disagreeing with your post, just discussing a complication.) Looking at this thread and how people are (respectfully) pointing fingers at each others (and their own) arguments, it seems clear to me that avoiding such arguments is generally hard. When you want to support or illustrate an assertion you make with an example, the example will virtually never apply to everything the assertion covers. Often it might not even be possible to find an example that covers the majority of some group/trend/phenomenon (or know what constitutes a majority in the first place). Maybe this means to be more judicious in making general statements (probably not a bad idea). But in some respects, for example a trend among recent occurrences of something, you have nothing but isolated events to discuss in the first place. Even if there is some objective quality behind it, requiring yourself to never refer to individual data points (as that could be construed as weak-manning) might make it impossible to get at the core of it. And that's before going into how your arguments are perceived. And yes, the above is intentionally (overly) general. Examples would help illustrating the argument, but are immediately subject to weak-manning. I wonder what others think on this.
major505 6y ago
I love that this start as an argument on tumblr and it only go foward with people being more and more offended with each other.
michaelmrose 6y ago
Good article just want to make one point. Approximately 72% of Americans are Christians. https://news.gallup.com/poll/200186/five-key-findings-religion.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/200186/five-key-findings-religi... 40% of Americans not only 40% of Christians are young earth creationists. https://news.gallup.com/poll/261680/americans-believe-creationism.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/261680/americans-believe-creati... This means 55%, a majority, of Christians in America are young earth creationists. To use his term which I love ignorant people who believe crazy things are the center of the category.
- karaterobot 6y ago
  Where did you get the statistic about young earth creationists? It's not part of the linked article.
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    You are correct I forgot to add the second link. It is fixed.
matthberg 6y ago
A few of the details of the construction of this argument make me uneasy (in a roughly parallel way to the discomfort mentioned in section V). Particularly the assertion (end of section IV) that: > Likewise, when a religious person attacks atheists who are moral relativists, or communists, or murderers, then all atheists have to band together to stop it somehow or they will have successfully poisoned people against atheism. This seems like a bit of a major step. While I agree that "weak men" are a slippery trick to argue against a movement, I don't think that they necessitate a total defense of all aspects of the movement. Saying that atheists should defend murderers or Christians should defend the Westboro Baptist Church because they share the label of Christian is taking a good base idea and following it to false conclusions. What I took out of the argument around "weak men" was that communities need to be more self-policing rather than more broadly defensive. I was waiting for the point where Scott Alexander would say "thus Christians must declaim the Westboro Baptist Church instead of allowing themselves to be lumped under the same label." Additionally, there are parallels drawn between feminism and mens rights ideas that seem to be false-equivalencies, or at least false-parallels. In the comments I encountered a blog post that addresses some of these uneasy feelings I had https://heartheretic.blogspot.com/2014/06/talking-about-problems-is-not.html https://heartheretic.blogspot.com/2014/06/talking-about-prob...
- d--b 6y ago
  Yes, but the point is that people do this all the time. The catholic church covers up cases of priests who rape children because they know that it’s going to make the whole church look bad. I am pretty sure that the person who orders the cover-up finds the rapists despicable. But they still do it, because scandals “splash” and tarnish way more than the peeople involved...
brundolf 6y ago
The only solution I think is to not engage. Focus on long-lived relationships with people who actually have gotten/will get to know you. Save your complex and nuanced thoughts and feelings for those people; random strangers will always see you through a cartoonized lens. When you do have micro-interactions with strangers - which, never forget, includes all public social media posts whether you want it to or not - keep things inoffensive. If someone else inflames the situation, quietly and diplomatically withdraw from it. Beyond just being a strategy for individuals, doing this contributes in a tiny way to lowering the temperature of the whole room.
- georgyo 6y ago
  The article addresses with a chain of events of small concessions that eventually lead to so much splash damage that the public mind is swayed against you. The conclusion is that people must always fight to defend against splash damage because as left unchecked it is a "super weapon." I think this is a pretty interesting viewpoint.
- GurnBlandston 6y ago
  This has been my strategy for a long time, and it works. The hard part is the bar for opening up is impossibly high. There's also the chicken/egg problem: someone can't get to know you without you opening up, and you can't open up until someone gets to know you. I feel like this is a big factor in increasing loneliness among adults.
d--b 6y ago
I’ve been saying things like this to my family for years! These arguments are everywhere, all the time, and they work so well! It definitely shouldnt be called “weak-man” though, it should be called something like “evil synecdoque”...
- brundolf 6y ago
  It's a horrible name; I thought this article was going to be about something wildly different "False majority" seems descriptive
- rufus_foreman 6y ago
  In the old school blogging world it used to be called "nutpicking": https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nutpicking https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nutpicking.
  - d--b 6y ago
    Nice one
jariel 6y ago
Our media industry industry operates this by virtue of Twitter. "People are saying such-and-such" and then showing a Tweet from some random nobody (i.e. 'weak man') to validate the fact - is how so many narratives are created. Or - by simply taking the tiniest, most innocuous bit of human interaction ('some guy on a plane did what?') and blowing it up into a national story, as though it is in any way representative of anything. This is how in a sea of actual facts, the general truth can easily be distorted, and they are, all day long. Part of the reason for this is because we connect with human stories, not data. Steven Spielberg's advice to Mike Bay about Transformers, was 'It should be about the relationship between a teen boy and his car'. We like Judge Judy and TMZ, just all frazzled up in ornamental ideology that makes us feel smart for reading the New Yorker. If we were really boring and sober, the world would be a different place. (I'm looking at you, German politics, which someone maintains it's sanity even with 'actual Nazis' in the midst, not these America yahoo versions.)
shmageggy 6y ago
I’ve actually thought for a long time that this cognitive bias is very near a root cause of so many of the problems in the world, especially in the social media era. Once you know what to look for, you can see it absolutely everywhere. Virtually all political discourse, nearly all journalism, casual conversation, it all feels tainted by misrepresentation and overgeneralization.
- DangitBobby 6y ago
  I've long thought that a tendency to exaggerate is harmful and when done often enough turns into habitual deceit. I see this in that same light.
analog31 6y ago
In my view, there is one antidote to arguments that centralize a minority viewpoint, to borrow from the terminology of the article: People vote. I think this is one of the side benefits of democracy. When a party gets more than, say, 10% of the vote, then it can no longer be dismissed as a fringe party. Granted this is complicated by a two-party system giving people only two realistic choices, but the primaries within each party can similarly serve as a barometer of sentiment within that party. If a "wing" of a party gains more than, say, 20% of the primary vote in that party, then it can no longer be dismissed as a fringe.
permo-w 6y ago
I was all ready to read about the kind of people on 4chan, and all of a sudden I’m presented with the kind of argument made on 4chan. A surprise to be sure
- austhrow743 6y ago
  He has that as well https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-romanceless/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-roman...
- anchpop 6y ago
  I’m curious what makes you feel like this is the kind of argument made on 4chan. Are you a regular?
  - permo-w 6y ago
    I dip my toes in and out. It’s not healthy to spend too much time on there
mrfusion 6y ago
So what’s the solution? Any ideas?
maxwells-daemon 6y ago
This seems true about smallish groups, like the example of a Jew in czarist Russia, but when the group is big enough to divide into multiple public-opinion subgroups, I'm not so sure. I think the feminism argument doesn't work here for that reason -- there are enough men that saying bad things about some of them doesn't necessarily disparage the rest.
- DangitBobby 6y ago
  I disagree. It's a mental association trick. If you say you don't like it when people do something, you are calling out a behavior. If you say you don't like it when men do something, you are (intentionally or not) causing the listener to associate men with that action when they may not have otherwise. You are proposing a negative association for them. It makes no difference how big the group is or how many subgroups there are. There are definitely worse things that people can say about men than "I hate that some men do x", such as "all men are trash." (I've actually heard someone acting men should not be offended by this). I'm more offended by that sort of talk, but I think when people stop being careful about the words they choose, it will easily devolve into the latter.
howsocietyworks 6y ago
The Atheism/religion examples are such a blast from the past. It seems like that whole conflict is no longer in the public consciousness at all, and instead we have some more directly politically aligned conflicts instead! Atheists vs religious people was not so cleanly split between Democrats and Republicans.
- jackcosgrove 6y ago
  I must say reading this article evoked some nostalgia for that time, simply because the ideas were well-worn and comfortable. (I didn't feel nostalgic for the battles.) This was probably the first time I began to think of the mid-2010s as a past time to reminisce about.
hirundo 6y ago
If weak men arguments are a struggle to re-center the conversation, it makes debate more like Sumo wrestling. This actually sounds like a great way to think about rhetoric. Each statement is an effort to center your own perspective and toss your opponents' out of the Overton ring.
Blikkentrekker 6y ago
I must say that I felt quite enlightened after reading this. I never quite noticed this. It's certainly an interesting thing to look out for.
autocorr 6y ago
I think this is the most salient point for the increasingly polarized discourse we have online nowadays: > So the one problem is that people have a right not to have unfair below- the-belt tactics used to discredit them without ever responding to their real arguments. [i.e., the Jew in czarist Russia or "not all men are like that"] > And the other problem is that victims of non-representative members of a group have the right to complain, even though those complaints will unfairly rebound upon the other members of that group. [i.e., the guy that complains about the Westboro Baptist church] So how can one hold bad actors accountable without discrediting the larger group? For that to be possible, I think one has to know the critic is acting purely in good faith, to know that their aims are just, e.g., to target Westboro and not as a wedge to undermine organized religion. Unfortunately, most of Twitter seems to be bad faith by people seeking affirmation for call-outs and satisfaction from venting.
- johncessna 6y ago
  Social media gives tribes a battlefield to fight on and it gives them something to win. At first it was Clicks, Likes, Hearts. Then they figured out how to turn those things into money, and money begets power. We're not going to find a way to punish a bad actor because the cost of risking the tribe is too great.
- DangitBobby 6y ago
  Yes, it seems to me that you can always count on some people to act in bad faith. If you go to that feminist tumbler blog her links within the article, you'll see great examples of it. People want to make a difference, but are not disciplined enough to do so without doing splash damage to hurt those who don't deserve it. I think the only way to combat the issue that the author discusses is for everyone to discourage bad faith discussions at all times.
yowlingcat 6y ago
It's really unfortunate that SSC is gone, and somewhat ironic that the death-knell was the attraction of a kind of heat spoken about in this specific article. It is disappointing to see how quickly the climate of so much of the public commons has become so weaponized, so corrosive to participate in without some kind of a psychic jumpsuit. Maybe it was inevitable, anyways, with the rise of centralized social media. When I think about centralized social media, I think about an ultra-fine grain subdivision and liquidation of human social interaction into a digitally mediated and transparently priced attention economy. I see an infinite screen pixelated by individual smartphones manned by individual human beings, being driven by a PageRank algorithm like a display controller. To visualize something like that is to visualize an incredible feat of human engineering. But it is also to visualize an intrinsically uncanny valley and a hellish cacophony of synthesized speech and high-strung puppets. Do you get the sense that all the interaction is ginned up to seem more compelling than it really is, that it's sort of an arms race. Well, maybe it is. Maybe it is the same cold war which never really ended, simply accelerated in a new era with new weapons, and of course horrific new ways to enact the same old brutalities.
- andredz 6y ago
  He recently returned: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25865062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25865062
jl2718 6y ago
Reminder that, regardless of what you see on the Internet, most people agree or at least understand each other on most issues when they meet in person.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 6y ago
Shameless click bait. Most people reading the title would assume it's about incels or something.
cyansmoker 6y ago
All the examples in this article are about people not understanding the use of the oxford comma.
kalonis 6y ago
This article sounds convincing but I don't find it really hard to refute these weak man arguments: “I hate people who frivolously diagnose themselves with autism without knowing anything about the disorder. They should stop thinking they’re ‘so speshul’ and go see a competent doctor.” - "you're so right! That is why I did a lot of research before I diagnosed myself. I'd really like to see a doctor about it as soon as I can." "I am a proud atheist and I don’t like religion. Think of the terrible things done by religion, like the actions of the Westboro Baptist Church. They try to disturb the funerals of heroes because they think God hates everybody. But this is horrible. Religious people can’t justify why they do things like this. That’s why I’m proud to be an atheist.” - "these people are totally nuts! I as a Christian can not understand how they can justify their actions. No way this is something real Christians would do." And so on...
- MauranKilom 6y ago
  What would be your goal in "refuting" these arguments? Is it not just another form of taking the bait (albeit making it slightly harder for the other side)? As the article states: > Alice, for her part, didn’t bother bringing up that she never accused Beth of being careless, or that Beth had no stake in the matter. She saw no point in pretending that boxing in Beth and the other careful self- diagnosers in with the careless ones wasn’t her strategy all along. The whole conversation is opened with the thinly-veiled intention of discrediting (all) self-diagnosed autists in an uncharitable bad-faith argument. Do you think you'd be somehow able to steer it away from this very specific intention of the original author? I will admit that this opens the door for other readers to not be swayed by the original "argument" (at least not to the same degree). But overall the question remains how you avoid fighting a losing battle.
sandspar 6y ago
"Every movement has fugheads, and the fugheads will get all the press." Can't remember who said or how the quote goes. (Any help? Some kind of eponymous law?)
- duckerude 6y ago
  Larry Niven. "There is no cause so good or noble that it will not attract fuggheads; and the fuggheads will get all the press."
tremguy 6y ago
Article is basically a rant against feminism. What does this have to do with "gratifying one's intellectual curiosity"?

263 points by skinkestek 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

The way to “win” an argument these days is to make a claim which is more complex to refute than the attention span of the audience. You achieve this by making claims which are somewhat true and not particularly representative of reality. These tend to be the vast majority of arguments that people see because controversy gets clicks and the more reasonable people are straight up afraid to appear to support the other side by disagreeing with the more unreasonable folks with a shared alignment.

the_only_law 6y ago
> The way to “win” an argument these days is to make a claim which is more complex to refute than the attention span of the audience. This is a good description of something I’ve failed to put into words myself. Thanks for this.
hi5eyes 6y ago
to a degree i think zoomers parody this phenomenon with memes using a wall of text/dense and almost indecipherable text with the caption of "leftist memes be like"
- SuoDuanDao 6y ago
  A family member of mine is interested in what makes the worst cultures in the world tick, and according to him, Daesh memes be like that too.
john-shaffer 6y ago
This is very perceptive. Attempts at honest discussion often seem to be derailed in exactly this way. Discussion of the actual issue is avoided by loud assertions that take a lot of time to refute. Which "side" derails it does seem to depend on who the "weak man" would hurt. Is there any way to avoid this?
- theinverseidea 6y ago
  I would say bring back empiricism as a big component of knowing if something is true, or at least before you discuss it as something that is right. People are aligning with complex theories with no underlying basis, other than their feelings and utopian visions, and then getting emotional about it.
- colechristensen 6y ago
  Just don’t participate once the conversation gets derailed. Learn to exit gracefully, and usually if you did make a point addressing the complexity, likely someone got something out of it. Surround yourself with people who disagree with you, but are good at it.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
korethr 6y ago
I had to look it up again to check, but does this not fall under the dictionary definition of sophistry[1]? It seems especially appropriate to call it that given the 2nd definition of sophisticated[2] as something at a high degree of complexity, and "sophisticate"'s common root with "sophistry". By making a complex argument, you deceive others into thinking that you have refuted another argument, when in fact you have not done so; the fallacy of your argument was hidden by it's complexity. 1. "the use of fallacious arguments, especially with the intention of deceiving." -- Oxford languages, via Google; https://www.google.com/search?q=sophistry https://www.google.com/search?q=sophistry (retrieved 2021-01-22) 2. "(of a machine, system, or technique) developed to a high degree of complexity." -- Same as [1], above.
- colechristensen 6y ago
  Eh, the whole sophist thing is a 2500 year old beef that philosophers (i.e. aristotle, plato, socrates) had with professional teachers hired by upper class people, for everything but especially rhetoric. So it took on this meaning of an insult insinuating the target was a second rate intellectual teaching a cheap bag of tricks to rich idiots. I’m never a big fan of using these words that take some ancient group of people or school of thought and turn the name into an adjective which has at best a loose connection with the reality of what they were. Does the dictionary definition fit? Somewhat, but maybe not the best choice.
  - scruple 6y ago
    Thank you for saying this out loud. I've had the same visceral reaction to words like "sophistry" but have never taken the time to process why or articulate it. This is exactly how I feel about it, as well.
Leszek 6y ago
I don't necessarily disagree, but there's a certain irony in presenting a claim of "how things are these days" in such a matter-of-fact way. I certainly wouldn't know how to refute your statement in a sufficiently short way. Thus, is it the presentation of claims that is the issue, or is it their content? Or both? I struggle with avoiding hypocrisy when trying to pinpoint the underlying problem.
- colechristensen 6y ago
  Well somebody could try to do a representative study, but this is a HN comment, not a scientific publication. I could also try to deconstruct some of the common complex-to-refute arguments, but I'm afraid the message would get lost in the following controversy. What I'm saying is my perceptions following experiences I have had myself. I suppose one could disagree with me by showing counterexamples of generally recognized public arguments for this and that and how they can be refuted simply. You have a point though. I'm not sure how I could avoid that criticism and still make an effective argument.
  - selestify 6y ago
    > I could also try to deconstruct some of the common complex-to-refute arguments, but I'm afraid the message would get lost in the following controversy. That would be quite interesting to read nonetheless, if you’re willing to do so.
deeviant 6y ago
It doesn't seem to me that its most often making a "more complex" claims, but making so many claims as to overwhelm any attempt to refute them, aka "Gish gallop".
- colechristensen 6y ago
  To clarify, perhaps confusing language, I don't mean the claim must be complicated, it can be a simple claim. In order to refute the claim though requires an appreciation for subtlety which the people doing the arguing don't often have. The refutation is complicated, the claim doesn't need to be.
camjohnson26 6y ago
Well clearly you’re wrong and don’t understand Karl Popper’s “Theory of Falsification” or the ways that radical mid 18th century propaganda groups led to a rise in authoritarian group think.

l0b0 6y ago

Original post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweap...

throwaway894345 6y ago

> The weak man is a terrible argument that only a few unrepresentative people hold, which was only brought to prominence so your side had something easy to defeat. This reminds me of the Buzzfeed story circa 2012 about how Christians were campaigning against Starbucks for their holiday cups unadorned with Christmas paraphernalia. It became a meme right away to the delight of people who already weren't very fond of Christians. I thought this was particularly strange because even my most conservative Christian friends held opinions in the vein of "If you're a Christian and are getting upset about these cups, you're way off". I was really curious to figure out who all of these Christians were that held this opinion and, lo-and-behold, it was one single Christian from Arizona. This particular "weak man" argument was the basis for much criticism of Christian culture for a couple of years. Maybe this seems less significant nowadays after the media has shown us consistently over the better part of the last decade exactly what level of depravity it will sink to in order to gain a click, but at the time it was really surprising.

chc 6y ago
I don't know if this is a great example, because Fox News actually incorporated Starbucks' lack of Christmas messaging into the weird "War on Christmas" narrative it tries to manufacture every year.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  I don't know how that would invalidate the example; that still doesn't show that there were Christians who felt that way, rather that Fox believed the BuzzFeed story and leaned into it.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    Yeah, assuming that Fox News is representative voice for Christians seems way off. They are just as hungry for manufactured outrage and clicks at everyone else. Fox running a bit telling their viewers they should be angry about something isn’t evidence that anyone was actually angry.

ndiscussion 6y ago

Interesting, and not what I expected. I presumed it was something about slave morality ala Nietzsche's Will to Power. Useful idiots and all that. It seems the strongest way to win arguments nowadays is to simply go on the offensive and ignore their claims. The opposite side has millions of tricks. First, they hope you are stupid. If not, they will pretend to be stupid, and not understand what you are talking about. And even if you refute them, they may come back the very next day and claim that they won the argument. When you post online, hundreds of lurkers may read your comment. If you don't even dignify the enemy with a response, they are much more likely to buy in to your emotional rhetoric.

motohagiography 6y ago

This "weak man," tactic is taught in undergrad, the idea is to destabilize an opposing view to neutralize the person holding it. The emphasis is on "neutralize," because the underlying strategy is based on the premise that there is no truth, only power, and for an opponent to be neutral, or do nothing, means there is no resistance to your agenda. When "everything is political," it is sufficient to isolate an opponent from a conversation because in that view, all power comes from attention and approval of others, because they have been trained to be psychologically actuated by shame. It's why, "not a good look," has become a standard put down, even among some men. This idea of litigating for power is why many people don't like lawyers, and when half the middle class is educated to act like the seediest of prosecutors, you get that thing that's wrong with someone you just can't put your finger on. I have some actual friends like this, and we find a way, but part of why there is so much hostility in the culture is because one side never thought they would need a new bare-metal up critical framework to conceive of how awful we've educated some people to become. One of the SSC rules was "be charitable," which is the value that the weak-man style of argument throws out. It's basically being uncharitable. So glad to see Alexander articles on HN lately.

leetcrew 6y ago
a couple random responses. I don't think I hear "not a good look" the same way you do. in particular, I don't hear it as a putdown, more of a cynical comment that expresses something like "I don't necessarily oppose what you are saying/doing, but I hope for your sake that other people don't notice". > This "weak man," tactic is taught in undergrad, the idea is to destabilize an opposing view to neutralize the person holding it. The emphasis is on "neutralize," because the underlying strategy is based on the premise that there is no truth, only power, and for an opponent to be neutral, or do nothing, means there is no resistance to your agenda. I'm having trouble fitting this in with what I currently see in the world. it doesn't seem like either "side" would be content with my neutrality/silence. they seem to want nothing less than full and vocal alignment on every issue.
- DangitBobby 6y ago
  In my experience, "not a good look" is definitely supposed to be a bitter indictment if whatever it is you are apparently doing.

jxramos 6y ago

Central examples, that's a great concept, the "average joe" basically but with an emphasis on abstract categories.

wcerfgba 6y ago

The superweapon post: https://web.archive.org/web/20121007160623/http://squid314.livejournal.com/329171.html https://web.archive.org/web/20121007160623/http://squid314.l... because it is now behind an authwall.

wcerfgba 6y ago
I don't think the take on feminism in this article is particularly good. The author discusses feminism as "a memeplex that provides a bunch of pattern-matching opportunities where a man is in the wrong and a woman is in the right", but feminism is about analysing the power dynamic between the _classes_ of 'man' and 'woman'. Any system of class-based power analysis can be abused by supposed adherents to attack _individuals_ in a given class, but that doesn't mean that the system isn't itself valuable as a critique of power dynamic that exists between the classes.
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  Unless the system is actually open to inverting the power relationship, then it's just pattern matching and isn't anything more powerful than a slightly fancier way of saying "X > Y". Everything else is window dressing and post-hoc vindication. Or to put this another way, there are people in my orbit who feel perfectly comfortable spouting "Men are the worst!" and "all men are stupid!", but would be extremely upset with you if you swapped the gender in those statements.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- strken 6y ago
  I don't have particularly strong opinions on feminism, but it's many things to many people. You've listed two of those things, but both seem like good characterisations of different aspects. I don't think he's criticising the academic aspect that analyses the power dynamic between men and women, I think he's criticising the everyday aspect that caused a woman to feel so offended when he asked her out that she cut off all contact with him and then told his friends he was being a jerk. Him choosing that specific aspect might itself be a weak man.

intrepidhero 6y ago

I found this enlightening, and disheartening at the same time. Is there any further discussion on how we can evolve past this, as individuals and as a society?

Jtsummers 6y ago
Individually, by being aware of it you can recognize it in your own statements more readily (though probably requiring deliberate attention). Then you can choose to use the form of argument or rewrite to avoid it. When seeing it in others you may be able to present better responses, especially if you're aware of how your response might be perceived.
- MauranKilom 6y ago
  > rewrite to avoid it. (Not disagreeing with your post, just discussing a complication.) Looking at this thread and how people are (respectfully) pointing fingers at each others (and their own) arguments, it seems clear to me that avoiding such arguments is generally hard. When you want to support or illustrate an assertion you make with an example, the example will virtually never apply to everything the assertion covers. Often it might not even be possible to find an example that covers the majority of some group/trend/phenomenon (or know what constitutes a majority in the first place). Maybe this means to be more judicious in making general statements (probably not a bad idea). But in some respects, for example a trend among recent occurrences of something, you have nothing but isolated events to discuss in the first place. Even if there is some objective quality behind it, requiring yourself to never refer to individual data points (as that could be construed as weak-manning) might make it impossible to get at the core of it. And that's before going into how your arguments are perceived. And yes, the above is intentionally (overly) general. Examples would help illustrating the argument, but are immediately subject to weak-manning. I wonder what others think on this.

major505 6y ago

I love that this start as an argument on tumblr and it only go foward with people being more and more offended with each other.

michaelmrose 6y ago

Good article just want to make one point. Approximately 72% of Americans are Christians. https://news.gallup.com/poll/200186/five-key-findings-religion.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/200186/five-key-findings-religi... 40% of Americans not only 40% of Christians are young earth creationists. https://news.gallup.com/poll/261680/americans-believe-creationism.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/261680/americans-believe-creati... This means 55%, a majority, of Christians in America are young earth creationists. To use his term which I love ignorant people who believe crazy things are the center of the category.

karaterobot 6y ago
Where did you get the statistic about young earth creationists? It's not part of the linked article.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  You are correct I forgot to add the second link. It is fixed.

matthberg 6y ago

A few of the details of the construction of this argument make me uneasy (in a roughly parallel way to the discomfort mentioned in section V). Particularly the assertion (end of section IV) that: > Likewise, when a religious person attacks atheists who are moral relativists, or communists, or murderers, then all atheists have to band together to stop it somehow or they will have successfully poisoned people against atheism. This seems like a bit of a major step. While I agree that "weak men" are a slippery trick to argue against a movement, I don't think that they necessitate a total defense of all aspects of the movement. Saying that atheists should defend murderers or Christians should defend the Westboro Baptist Church because they share the label of Christian is taking a good base idea and following it to false conclusions. What I took out of the argument around "weak men" was that communities need to be more self-policing rather than more broadly defensive. I was waiting for the point where Scott Alexander would say "thus Christians must declaim the Westboro Baptist Church instead of allowing themselves to be lumped under the same label." Additionally, there are parallels drawn between feminism and mens rights ideas that seem to be false-equivalencies, or at least false-parallels. In the comments I encountered a blog post that addresses some of these uneasy feelings I had https://heartheretic.blogspot.com/2014/06/talking-about-problems-is-not.html https://heartheretic.blogspot.com/2014/06/talking-about-prob...

d--b 6y ago
Yes, but the point is that people do this all the time. The catholic church covers up cases of priests who rape children because they know that it’s going to make the whole church look bad. I am pretty sure that the person who orders the cover-up finds the rapists despicable. But they still do it, because scandals “splash” and tarnish way more than the peeople involved...

brundolf 6y ago

The only solution I think is to not engage. Focus on long-lived relationships with people who actually have gotten/will get to know you. Save your complex and nuanced thoughts and feelings for those people; random strangers will always see you through a cartoonized lens. When you do have micro-interactions with strangers - which, never forget, includes all public social media posts whether you want it to or not - keep things inoffensive. If someone else inflames the situation, quietly and diplomatically withdraw from it. Beyond just being a strategy for individuals, doing this contributes in a tiny way to lowering the temperature of the whole room.

georgyo 6y ago
The article addresses with a chain of events of small concessions that eventually lead to so much splash damage that the public mind is swayed against you. The conclusion is that people must always fight to defend against splash damage because as left unchecked it is a "super weapon." I think this is a pretty interesting viewpoint.
GurnBlandston 6y ago
This has been my strategy for a long time, and it works. The hard part is the bar for opening up is impossibly high. There's also the chicken/egg problem: someone can't get to know you without you opening up, and you can't open up until someone gets to know you. I feel like this is a big factor in increasing loneliness among adults.

d--b 6y ago

I’ve been saying things like this to my family for years! These arguments are everywhere, all the time, and they work so well! It definitely shouldnt be called “weak-man” though, it should be called something like “evil synecdoque”...

brundolf 6y ago
It's a horrible name; I thought this article was going to be about something wildly different "False majority" seems descriptive
rufus_foreman 6y ago
In the old school blogging world it used to be called "nutpicking": https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nutpicking https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nutpicking.
- d--b 6y ago
  Nice one

jariel 6y ago

Our media industry industry operates this by virtue of Twitter. "People are saying such-and-such" and then showing a Tweet from some random nobody (i.e. 'weak man') to validate the fact - is how so many narratives are created. Or - by simply taking the tiniest, most innocuous bit of human interaction ('some guy on a plane did what?') and blowing it up into a national story, as though it is in any way representative of anything. This is how in a sea of actual facts, the general truth can easily be distorted, and they are, all day long. Part of the reason for this is because we connect with human stories, not data. Steven Spielberg's advice to Mike Bay about Transformers, was 'It should be about the relationship between a teen boy and his car'. We like Judge Judy and TMZ, just all frazzled up in ornamental ideology that makes us feel smart for reading the New Yorker. If we were really boring and sober, the world would be a different place. (I'm looking at you, German politics, which someone maintains it's sanity even with 'actual Nazis' in the midst, not these America yahoo versions.)

shmageggy 6y ago

I’ve actually thought for a long time that this cognitive bias is very near a root cause of so many of the problems in the world, especially in the social media era. Once you know what to look for, you can see it absolutely everywhere. Virtually all political discourse, nearly all journalism, casual conversation, it all feels tainted by misrepresentation and overgeneralization.

DangitBobby 6y ago
I've long thought that a tendency to exaggerate is harmful and when done often enough turns into habitual deceit. I see this in that same light.

analog31 6y ago

In my view, there is one antidote to arguments that centralize a minority viewpoint, to borrow from the terminology of the article: People vote. I think this is one of the side benefits of democracy. When a party gets more than, say, 10% of the vote, then it can no longer be dismissed as a fringe party. Granted this is complicated by a two-party system giving people only two realistic choices, but the primaries within each party can similarly serve as a barometer of sentiment within that party. If a "wing" of a party gains more than, say, 20% of the primary vote in that party, then it can no longer be dismissed as a fringe.

permo-w 6y ago

I was all ready to read about the kind of people on 4chan, and all of a sudden I’m presented with the kind of argument made on 4chan. A surprise to be sure

austhrow743 6y ago
He has that as well https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-romanceless/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-roman...
anchpop 6y ago
I’m curious what makes you feel like this is the kind of argument made on 4chan. Are you a regular?
- permo-w 6y ago
  I dip my toes in and out. It’s not healthy to spend too much time on there

mrfusion 6y ago

So what’s the solution? Any ideas?

maxwells-daemon 6y ago

This seems true about smallish groups, like the example of a Jew in czarist Russia, but when the group is big enough to divide into multiple public-opinion subgroups, I'm not so sure. I think the feminism argument doesn't work here for that reason -- there are enough men that saying bad things about some of them doesn't necessarily disparage the rest.

DangitBobby 6y ago
I disagree. It's a mental association trick. If you say you don't like it when people do something, you are calling out a behavior. If you say you don't like it when men do something, you are (intentionally or not) causing the listener to associate men with that action when they may not have otherwise. You are proposing a negative association for them. It makes no difference how big the group is or how many subgroups there are. There are definitely worse things that people can say about men than "I hate that some men do x", such as "all men are trash." (I've actually heard someone acting men should not be offended by this). I'm more offended by that sort of talk, but I think when people stop being careful about the words they choose, it will easily devolve into the latter.

howsocietyworks 6y ago

The Atheism/religion examples are such a blast from the past. It seems like that whole conflict is no longer in the public consciousness at all, and instead we have some more directly politically aligned conflicts instead! Atheists vs religious people was not so cleanly split between Democrats and Republicans.

jackcosgrove 6y ago
I must say reading this article evoked some nostalgia for that time, simply because the ideas were well-worn and comfortable. (I didn't feel nostalgic for the battles.) This was probably the first time I began to think of the mid-2010s as a past time to reminisce about.

hirundo 6y ago

If weak men arguments are a struggle to re-center the conversation, it makes debate more like Sumo wrestling. This actually sounds like a great way to think about rhetoric. Each statement is an effort to center your own perspective and toss your opponents' out of the Overton ring.

Blikkentrekker 6y ago

I must say that I felt quite enlightened after reading this. I never quite noticed this. It's certainly an interesting thing to look out for.

autocorr 6y ago

I think this is the most salient point for the increasingly polarized discourse we have online nowadays: > So the one problem is that people have a right not to have unfair below- the-belt tactics used to discredit them without ever responding to their real arguments. [i.e., the Jew in czarist Russia or "not all men are like that"] > And the other problem is that victims of non-representative members of a group have the right to complain, even though those complaints will unfairly rebound upon the other members of that group. [i.e., the guy that complains about the Westboro Baptist church] So how can one hold bad actors accountable without discrediting the larger group? For that to be possible, I think one has to know the critic is acting purely in good faith, to know that their aims are just, e.g., to target Westboro and not as a wedge to undermine organized religion. Unfortunately, most of Twitter seems to be bad faith by people seeking affirmation for call-outs and satisfaction from venting.

johncessna 6y ago
Social media gives tribes a battlefield to fight on and it gives them something to win. At first it was Clicks, Likes, Hearts. Then they figured out how to turn those things into money, and money begets power. We're not going to find a way to punish a bad actor because the cost of risking the tribe is too great.
DangitBobby 6y ago
Yes, it seems to me that you can always count on some people to act in bad faith. If you go to that feminist tumbler blog her links within the article, you'll see great examples of it. People want to make a difference, but are not disciplined enough to do so without doing splash damage to hurt those who don't deserve it. I think the only way to combat the issue that the author discusses is for everyone to discourage bad faith discussions at all times.

yowlingcat 6y ago

It's really unfortunate that SSC is gone, and somewhat ironic that the death-knell was the attraction of a kind of heat spoken about in this specific article. It is disappointing to see how quickly the climate of so much of the public commons has become so weaponized, so corrosive to participate in without some kind of a psychic jumpsuit. Maybe it was inevitable, anyways, with the rise of centralized social media. When I think about centralized social media, I think about an ultra-fine grain subdivision and liquidation of human social interaction into a digitally mediated and transparently priced attention economy. I see an infinite screen pixelated by individual smartphones manned by individual human beings, being driven by a PageRank algorithm like a display controller. To visualize something like that is to visualize an incredible feat of human engineering. But it is also to visualize an intrinsically uncanny valley and a hellish cacophony of synthesized speech and high-strung puppets. Do you get the sense that all the interaction is ginned up to seem more compelling than it really is, that it's sort of an arms race. Well, maybe it is. Maybe it is the same cold war which never really ended, simply accelerated in a new era with new weapons, and of course horrific new ways to enact the same old brutalities.

andredz 6y ago
He recently returned: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25865062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25865062

jl2718 6y ago

Reminder that, regardless of what you see on the Internet, most people agree or at least understand each other on most issues when they meet in person.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 6y ago

Shameless click bait. Most people reading the title would assume it's about incels or something.

cyansmoker 6y ago

All the examples in this article are about people not understanding the use of the oxford comma.

kalonis 6y ago

This article sounds convincing but I don't find it really hard to refute these weak man arguments: “I hate people who frivolously diagnose themselves with autism without knowing anything about the disorder. They should stop thinking they’re ‘so speshul’ and go see a competent doctor.” - "you're so right! That is why I did a lot of research before I diagnosed myself. I'd really like to see a doctor about it as soon as I can." "I am a proud atheist and I don’t like religion. Think of the terrible things done by religion, like the actions of the Westboro Baptist Church. They try to disturb the funerals of heroes because they think God hates everybody. But this is horrible. Religious people can’t justify why they do things like this. That’s why I’m proud to be an atheist.” - "these people are totally nuts! I as a Christian can not understand how they can justify their actions. No way this is something real Christians would do." And so on...

MauranKilom 6y ago
What would be your goal in "refuting" these arguments? Is it not just another form of taking the bait (albeit making it slightly harder for the other side)? As the article states: > Alice, for her part, didn’t bother bringing up that she never accused Beth of being careless, or that Beth had no stake in the matter. She saw no point in pretending that boxing in Beth and the other careful self- diagnosers in with the careless ones wasn’t her strategy all along. The whole conversation is opened with the thinly-veiled intention of discrediting (all) self-diagnosed autists in an uncharitable bad-faith argument. Do you think you'd be somehow able to steer it away from this very specific intention of the original author? I will admit that this opens the door for other readers to not be swayed by the original "argument" (at least not to the same degree). But overall the question remains how you avoid fighting a losing battle.

sandspar 6y ago

"Every movement has fugheads, and the fugheads will get all the press." Can't remember who said or how the quote goes. (Any help? Some kind of eponymous law?)

duckerude 6y ago
Larry Niven. "There is no cause so good or noble that it will not attract fuggheads; and the fuggheads will get all the press."

tremguy 6y ago

Article is basically a rant against feminism. What does this have to do with "gratifying one's intellectual curiosity"?