10 ms·

I agree that pointing out fallacies can get excessive, but is mainly based on the intention for so doing. The difficulty is that there is an entire class of pe

I agree that pointing out fallacies can get excessive, but is mainly based on the intention for so doing. The difficulty is that there is an entire class of people who don't even care about being logically correct or in finding truth. They desire or "feel" something and will barge their way through to get it, even if it is antithetical to their stated goals and eventually results in their misery. Reasoning with such people is somewhat futile, even pointing out their fallacies in good faith will do nothing. They may even reject logic entirely, as is becoming more common in our society. In that case, pointing out that someone is committing a fallacy can be something of a canary test of their desire to reason. You could offer to help them with their argument, point out ways around the fallacy, engage with them in good faith, but if they are obsessively attached to their fallacy and their flawed position, then there isn't much you can do. There is no mathematical or logical solution to that problem, that is a "people problem". When dealing with such a person or class of people, using humour to make them look foolish can be more effective, since then the main goal should be to reveal to others how childish their position is or pressure them into abandoning their purely emotional position; or resorting to even better emotional fallacies. The name of the game is to get emotions on your side.

kragen 4y ago
There are cases where it's rational to reject logic entirely, for example, when you lack the necessary background knowledge in a field to apply it reliably. Classical logic fails very badly when one of its premises fails to be completely true, as numerous famous paradoxes illustrate, and we all know some people who have been convinced of false things through logical argument. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn... And, although Bayesian reasoning can deal with degrees of uncertainty other than "impossible" and "beyond the shadow of a doubt", it can still collapse under an onslaught of evidence chosen to favor one position: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chin... But the problem with taking the debate out of the logical realm and into the emotional realm is that, while you may win the debate, you will only win it if you are better at emotional manipulation than the other side is. In particular you will always lose if the other side is, for example, a Hollywood studio. And this is true whether you are right or wrong. Gandhi's greatest claimed advantage for satyagraha over coercion by armed struggle was not that it was more likely to win; it was that it was incapable of effectively promoting evil goals. Predictably, there's a Slate Star Codex post ascribing the same virtue to rational argument: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-c...
- jfoutz 4y ago
  Hey Sophistry! There's a big difference between convincing the person you're arguing with and convincing an audience. I may persuade you, or you may persuade me and I think in that situation we both get closer to the truth. But if we have an audience, our arguments are restricted to what might convince each other AND what might convince the audience. If the audience is the real decider, I can't really know how logical the audience is, so I'm going to play every dirty trick I can to win. it's subtle, and textured. If I gotta convince you - say for funding, I've got a broader array of arguments to use. if I've gotta convince you and the audience, I've got a fairly narrow range of options. If I gotta convince the audience, well, that's all analogies about how my dog died and it sucked, so if we'd done this my dog would still be around and it's better for everybody. historically you'd have to worry about the audience of 20 or so people that cared. and we'd probably both know them and how to sway their opinions. Kennedy Nixon is held up as a big example of persuading millions. You gotta scope in two dimensions. Your interlocutor and the audience. They have different weights. It's hard. Our ancestral heritage doesn't really give us much support for persuading a bazillion people. But that's sort of the table stakes today. Maybe not persuaded, but the audience must remain indifferent.
Bancakes 4y ago
Or you could mind your own life and not gaslight people from your patronizing point of view?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
MichaelCollins 4y ago
> The difficulty is that there is an entire class of people who don't even care about being logically correct or in finding truth. They desire or "feel" something and will barge their way through to get it, A malicious philosopher tells you that to move from point A to B, you must first pass through an infinite number of midpoints, and therefore motion is impossible. Do you: Invent/learn calculus to prove him wrong rigorously? Or do you walk away? For some few people, figuring out the matter rationally may bear a lot of fruit. But most people will be better served by walking away. For those people, wasting their time with rational arguments would be irrational. They have better things to do with their day. Irrational arguments can cut through solipsistic bullshit very fast and efficiently, and that makes them a valuable and productive tool for most people much of the time.
- elefanten 4y ago
  But not every appeal to logic comes from malicious philosophers. Most do not. So, in practice, you get a lot of lazy dismissals in service of selfish desires.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    > But not every appeal to logic comes from malicious philosophers. Most do not. Whether it comes from a malicious philosopher or somebody who means well but is confused, it is generally prudent to consider whether the discussion is actually worth your time. I haven't met many philosophers actually pitching Zeno's paradoxes at people, but some I've encountered recently for real: reasons why Jesus is the means to salvation, why the Earth is flat, and why we're probably living in a simulation. I brush these aside without giving them serious responses, because I selfishly want to spend my time in other ways.
    - conqueso 4y ago
      That's not selfish - we only have so much time. The expectation that one should engage with everybody all the time will lead to misery. It's totally okay to say " no thanks, have a nice day" Edit: I realize your pointing out the prudence of an upfront decision of whether or not to engage means we probably agree here, I just consider the word selfish to be a bit harsh
MrPatan 4y ago
It may be hard to figure out if somebody is nitpicking on irrelevant stuff as "pointing out fallacies" because they are sure about their conclusion and just want to barge their way through to it. When you're dealing with someone like that, there's very little incentive to continue arguing, they will latch onto whatever it is that makes them feel they were right without actually consider the issue at hand. It may actually be used as a test of their desire to engage with the problem. Throw them an irrelevant thing they can be right about (maybe even a typo or wrong grammar), and see the actual issue fade away from their mind.
bananamerica 4y ago
Pointing out fallacies in conversation, both online or IRL, is, and always will be, pointless. That is not because people don't care about being logical. Dropping fallacies is just lazy and makes you sound like a dick. It's lazy because you're trying to solve the problem without doing the work. It's a shortcut. The knowledge of fallacies is useful to identify common flaws in arguments and is particularly useful for you to construct a better, more persuasive counter-argument. No one should expect the "opposing side" to do that for them. You can't just shout "strawman!" and drop the mike. That's not how a conversation works.
- SantalBlush 4y ago
  >Dropping fallacies is just lazy and makes you sound like a dick. Yes, this happened in the tragic case of Fallacy Man [0], who demonstrated that simply announcing a fallacy is not a sufficient argument. [0] https://existentialcomics.com/comic/9 https://existentialcomics.com/comic/9
- throw0101a 4y ago
  > No one should expect the "opposing side" to do that for them. You can't just shout "strawman!" and drop the mike. That's not how a conversation works. It can be a useful heuristic to determine how much effort you want to expend on a topic with someone else. If someone is simply putting forward tu quoque / ad hominem statements, then pointing this out and asking if there are any other reasons can perhaps lead to focusing on more 'productive' areas of disagreement.
  - bananamerica 4y ago
    It's useful if you keep it to yourself and use it to redirect your own reasoning. If you say out loud that it's actually a fallacy, not only you won't convince anyone you'll immediately look like a dick. Guaranteed.
- BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  Pointing out fallacies doesn't work because doing so itself uses the fallacy of "I have proven you wrong, therefore I am right" when the most likely truth is both are horrendously off-base.
atoav 4y ago
If we are talking about internet discussions we should not forget that the act of finding truth does not only concern the person you are discussing with, but the silent bystanders and those who stumble upon the scene way after. I cannot imagine many situations where shouting ad hominem! would give you better chances at convincing the audience you were right, than for example explaining why you think the other person is misrepresenting your argument unfairly. If you play this the right way you might be even able to get the person opposite towards some realization. Humour is a good way, but another good way is pretending not to know things, have them explain things to you — all while naively asking the painful questions. This can be as simple as asking Why? till they come to the point where they suddenly have to talk about the base of their believes: A: I hate foreigners B: Why? A: Because they are stealing our jobs! B: Why are they doing that? A: Because they cannot get jobs in their home country. B: Why do you think that is? A: I think $Nationality is just lazier than us. At this point you can go on, or you could ask why he is afraid of them stealing his job when they are lazy. But the point is: this provides more insight to the emotion based thinking of the other side than any discussion where you were going against the guy from the start could have done. Of course it is not always the right move to start a discussion with someone just because they are saying something that is wrong. Just start a discussion if you are willing to follow through.
- gadders 4y ago
  I think that is perhaps the weakest strawman I have ever seen.
  - dasz 4y ago
    Three paragraphs and you dismiss it with a sentence. Since you're criticising I think you could have done better. The asking questions approach is a great way to dig out the weeds especially when someone's thinking appears to be a mess. Especially if you think they are somehow malicious or have a less than positive intent.
    - gadders 4y ago
      I was referring to the seven lines of dialogue.
tpoacher 4y ago
I would argue it's less about "a class of people", and more about "the context/aim of the conversation". If it's a "discussion", i.e. a conversation with the aim of improving the understanding of all parties involved, "winning" is the worst outcome, and fallacious arguments are likely to be done by accident and gladly corrected. If it's a debate, then by definition you're trying to win, and all bets are off. PS. It may be true however that a particular "class of people" enjoys plugging themselves in one type of conversation more than the other.
winReInstall 4y ago
Wow, its like watching somebody getting born. Now if we accept, that such variety of "castes" of unreasonable people exists and they do not want to "grow up", then society has to be adjusted for that, i guess. Making capability groups of neuro diverse people. Such persons would need a representative politically, to speak in there interests. Such a person would need limitations, to limit the damage they could cause. Reasonable people would have to be protected from this non-blue-blood class, to keep them productive and isolated. Systems need to created, to rile and cool the emotions of the non-logicals to make them steerable. There should be a science to differentiate the various types of illogical people, based upon the data collected by the big four. And steering unreasonable people should be a science too. We should call it something cool. Something witty. Leviathancybernetics. Get it. Hobbes, the leviathan, and the art to surgically implant synthetic structures and to turn society into a prothesis god. Now, lets talk about the negative side effects of knowing so much about society and humans. It turns you into a grandfather clock. All you hear is gears and mechanics, grinding your teeth, while all you observe your own instincts firing from the sub concious.
- winReInstall 4y ago
  Lets see how long we can keep this going, before the NDA gods hammer down. Life longs for the exponential. Intelligent life defeats the predation of life by other life (bacteria, virals, predators, etc.) and allows for a exponential curve bumping into the resource ceiling , the line that is the environment. Again and again. Starts the moment you become apex predator actually. Now darwinian evolution is blind, it just sees the merry go round spiral and adapts sub-groups of the population to it. Stable -> Exceeding Env Limitations -> Unstable -> Society Reassembling. Each of the four groups should in a cycling society be around 25 %. Each yearns for its natural situational habbitat and tries to push towards were it has advantages. Each has deep instincts, to not "waste" resources and step outside the god whorshipped which is a bloody wheel of butchering. A stable society is basically only possible for brief amounts of time, where the wheel is propped up and technology used to harness a surplus to keep the cyclic society from returning to the "default" of old. The amount of resources to do this, is enormous and some of the groups involved see this only as a "prolonged" recovery phase pre next conflict/collapse. Handing them the technology necessary to keep the peace, equals handing them apocalyptic weapons for conflict, should the peace break. So its a trap, unless one learns to implement societal self-control, one will forever hand more dangerous toys to us loop-deformed creatures. Which would make a great explenation for a universal filter, if there ever was one.
AmericanChopper 4y ago
> The difficulty is that there is an entire class of people who don't even care about being logically correct I don’t think this is the right perspective. Being logically correct doesn’t exist, the best you can do is be logically consistent with your chosen axioms. I would suggest the deeper problem is that people tend to not think too much about the foundational axioms of their world view, and think you can simply debate a topic with somebody who has a world view founded on a completely different set of axioms. No productive debate can take place in that context, because the controversy stems from the merit of your axioms, not how they apply to a given situation.
afarrell 4y ago
> the name of the game is to get the emotions on your side. In order to do this, you need to recognize your own emotional needs. You might say something like: “to move forward here, I need to trust that we are both willing to see reality clearly and use solid reasoning to make wise decisions even if those decisions are uncomfortable to think about. When I hear you say X, that I notice that it risks {name of fallacy} and I would not feel responsible unless I help us avoid stumbling into that. Could you please help me by clarifying what you mean here?” This imposes some discomfort on you by clearly revealing needs for responsibility and trustworthiness… but it also gives the other person a clear choice: A. Re-think what they’ve said and either follow your lead in avoiding the fallacy or asking you for help understanding. B. Explicitly deny your need to use logic to make responsible choices. And you can decide how much to trust the other person when the responsibility they have for making that choice wisely is made clear to them.
xtiansimon 4y ago
> “… make them look foolish … then … reveal to others how childish their position is or pressure them into abandoning their … position.” Yikes. I think the point of humor is to change the stakes, so people you’re working to persuade may think better. Humiliation in the face of peers is an emotional attack and highly immoral.
- Ma8ee 4y ago
  If someone spreads dangerous falsehoods (say, an anti-vaxxer) and refuses all rational arguments, public ridicule might actually be our most efficient weapon, and certainly morally defensible.
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    And in that case you're appealing to the crowd and trying to persuade your opponent is not very likely and not the point.
amelius 4y ago
Isn't it possible to get these people to come to their senses by showing them historical failures of people in a similar situation?
toss1 4y ago
Yup, when a person has abandoned reason, no reason can disturb their position. This is why we see so many anti-science movements.
kmeisthax 4y ago
The people who don't care about the truth and the people who will point out fallacies all day are the same people. Shouting "Ad hominem!" and pointing your wand at the opponent is just another way to "own people with facts and logic" (read: counterfeit the form of a winning argument without the substance of it). That's why pointing out fallacies to win an argument is called the fallacy fallacy.
plainnoodles 4y ago
I'll throw out another "class" of person - someone who believes something, and at least grasps the concept of philosophical reasoning enough that they'll attempt to build one of the basic forms of argument - usually an argument by analogy - and having done so, they'll trumpet their conclusion. Then, commenters will pile in, either being part of the class of people you mention (who will skip reading the argument and just check to make sure the conclusion is what they want) or being part of the same class who will review the argument, stamp a "lgtm!" on it, and upvote/concur. We're right! And look, it's got proof attached, too! But then even the most amateur student of philosophy, perhaps about 60% of the way through their freshman (mandatory) Philosophy 101 course, would be able to examine the argument and identify mistakes so appallingly obvious that they might be provided as practice problems in their homework. The analogy isn't appropriate; or it begs the question; or it assumes some predicate where their proof may hold if the predicate is true, but the predicate itself must be proven for the conclusion to be substantive. I see this a lot on reddit. Especially recently due to the abortion debates re-heating. Arguers - regardless of side - are so poorly equipped by our education system, and so poorly incentivized by the highly polarized/tribalistic nature of modern political discourse, that even when people try they're still not making any progress in reasoning about their positions.
- plainnoodles 4y ago
  Adding on: and sometimes, even when they manage to make an interesting point, they've gotten so lost in their appraisal of their argument that the philosophical question ends up not even being the one they actually care about. To that last point, I've lately seen a lot of arguments for abortion being ethical/unethical that end up just being modified Trolley problems. One I saw that stuck with me was: "Suppose there is a fire in a building. You have a test tube of 1000 human embryos in one hand, and a 4 year old girl in the other. The only possible outcomes are you saving the vial or the girl, or neither. Which do you choose?" I thought this was an interesting take, since it reads as a very different situation depending on your view of the embryos! A "pro-life" person would clearly interpret this as a modified trolley problem. You have 1000 embryos who could become people but cannot feel pain or terror or [etc] right now (or at least not in the same way as the 4-year-old). Or you have a 4-year-old who can, and will suffer greatly. This is quite trolley-esque and while this one seems to have somewhat of a likely-correct answer, it's certainly not without some complication. Someone who thinks the embryos aren't yet people or persons will see this as a much less interesting thought exercise - of course you save the 4-year-old, the vial is just some cells that clearly don't even have consciousness yet. And there's even a whole swathe of positions in between who will assign some amount of humanity to the embryos and attempt to resolve the quandary between the embryos vs the 4-year-old. But, as interesting as this is, it completely misses the point of the original question-poser. Regardless of which option you pick as correct, it doesn't really inform us much as to whether abortion is ethical. Going back to my main point of bemoaning the dreadful state of the average internet argument.

kragen 4y ago

There are cases where it's rational to reject logic entirely, for example, when you lack the necessary background knowledge in a field to apply it reliably. Classical logic fails very badly when one of its premises fails to be completely true, as numerous famous paradoxes illustrate, and we all know some people who have been convinced of false things through logical argument. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn... And, although Bayesian reasoning can deal with degrees of uncertainty other than "impossible" and "beyond the shadow of a doubt", it can still collapse under an onslaught of evidence chosen to favor one position: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chin... But the problem with taking the debate out of the logical realm and into the emotional realm is that, while you may win the debate, you will only win it if you are better at emotional manipulation than the other side is. In particular you will always lose if the other side is, for example, a Hollywood studio. And this is true whether you are right or wrong. Gandhi's greatest claimed advantage for satyagraha over coercion by armed struggle was not that it was more likely to win; it was that it was incapable of effectively promoting evil goals. Predictably, there's a Slate Star Codex post ascribing the same virtue to rational argument: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-c...

jfoutz 4y ago
Hey Sophistry! There's a big difference between convincing the person you're arguing with and convincing an audience. I may persuade you, or you may persuade me and I think in that situation we both get closer to the truth. But if we have an audience, our arguments are restricted to what might convince each other AND what might convince the audience. If the audience is the real decider, I can't really know how logical the audience is, so I'm going to play every dirty trick I can to win. it's subtle, and textured. If I gotta convince you - say for funding, I've got a broader array of arguments to use. if I've gotta convince you and the audience, I've got a fairly narrow range of options. If I gotta convince the audience, well, that's all analogies about how my dog died and it sucked, so if we'd done this my dog would still be around and it's better for everybody. historically you'd have to worry about the audience of 20 or so people that cared. and we'd probably both know them and how to sway their opinions. Kennedy Nixon is held up as a big example of persuading millions. You gotta scope in two dimensions. Your interlocutor and the audience. They have different weights. It's hard. Our ancestral heritage doesn't really give us much support for persuading a bazillion people. But that's sort of the table stakes today. Maybe not persuaded, but the audience must remain indifferent.

Bancakes 4y ago

Or you could mind your own life and not gaslight people from your patronizing point of view?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

MichaelCollins 4y ago

> The difficulty is that there is an entire class of people who don't even care about being logically correct or in finding truth. They desire or "feel" something and will barge their way through to get it, A malicious philosopher tells you that to move from point A to B, you must first pass through an infinite number of midpoints, and therefore motion is impossible. Do you: Invent/learn calculus to prove him wrong rigorously? Or do you walk away? For some few people, figuring out the matter rationally may bear a lot of fruit. But most people will be better served by walking away. For those people, wasting their time with rational arguments would be irrational. They have better things to do with their day. Irrational arguments can cut through solipsistic bullshit very fast and efficiently, and that makes them a valuable and productive tool for most people much of the time.

elefanten 4y ago
But not every appeal to logic comes from malicious philosophers. Most do not. So, in practice, you get a lot of lazy dismissals in service of selfish desires.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  > But not every appeal to logic comes from malicious philosophers. Most do not. Whether it comes from a malicious philosopher or somebody who means well but is confused, it is generally prudent to consider whether the discussion is actually worth your time. I haven't met many philosophers actually pitching Zeno's paradoxes at people, but some I've encountered recently for real: reasons why Jesus is the means to salvation, why the Earth is flat, and why we're probably living in a simulation. I brush these aside without giving them serious responses, because I selfishly want to spend my time in other ways.
  - conqueso 4y ago
    That's not selfish - we only have so much time. The expectation that one should engage with everybody all the time will lead to misery. It's totally okay to say " no thanks, have a nice day" Edit: I realize your pointing out the prudence of an upfront decision of whether or not to engage means we probably agree here, I just consider the word selfish to be a bit harsh

MrPatan 4y ago

It may be hard to figure out if somebody is nitpicking on irrelevant stuff as "pointing out fallacies" because they are sure about their conclusion and just want to barge their way through to it. When you're dealing with someone like that, there's very little incentive to continue arguing, they will latch onto whatever it is that makes them feel they were right without actually consider the issue at hand. It may actually be used as a test of their desire to engage with the problem. Throw them an irrelevant thing they can be right about (maybe even a typo or wrong grammar), and see the actual issue fade away from their mind.

bananamerica 4y ago

Pointing out fallacies in conversation, both online or IRL, is, and always will be, pointless. That is not because people don't care about being logical. Dropping fallacies is just lazy and makes you sound like a dick. It's lazy because you're trying to solve the problem without doing the work. It's a shortcut. The knowledge of fallacies is useful to identify common flaws in arguments and is particularly useful for you to construct a better, more persuasive counter-argument. No one should expect the "opposing side" to do that for them. You can't just shout "strawman!" and drop the mike. That's not how a conversation works.

SantalBlush 4y ago
>Dropping fallacies is just lazy and makes you sound like a dick. Yes, this happened in the tragic case of Fallacy Man [0], who demonstrated that simply announcing a fallacy is not a sufficient argument. [0] https://existentialcomics.com/comic/9 https://existentialcomics.com/comic/9
throw0101a 4y ago
> No one should expect the "opposing side" to do that for them. You can't just shout "strawman!" and drop the mike. That's not how a conversation works. It can be a useful heuristic to determine how much effort you want to expend on a topic with someone else. If someone is simply putting forward tu quoque / ad hominem statements, then pointing this out and asking if there are any other reasons can perhaps lead to focusing on more 'productive' areas of disagreement.
- bananamerica 4y ago
  It's useful if you keep it to yourself and use it to redirect your own reasoning. If you say out loud that it's actually a fallacy, not only you won't convince anyone you'll immediately look like a dick. Guaranteed.
BeFlatXIII 4y ago
Pointing out fallacies doesn't work because doing so itself uses the fallacy of "I have proven you wrong, therefore I am right" when the most likely truth is both are horrendously off-base.

atoav 4y ago

If we are talking about internet discussions we should not forget that the act of finding truth does not only concern the person you are discussing with, but the silent bystanders and those who stumble upon the scene way after. I cannot imagine many situations where shouting ad hominem! would give you better chances at convincing the audience you were right, than for example explaining why you think the other person is misrepresenting your argument unfairly. If you play this the right way you might be even able to get the person opposite towards some realization. Humour is a good way, but another good way is pretending not to know things, have them explain things to you — all while naively asking the painful questions. This can be as simple as asking Why? till they come to the point where they suddenly have to talk about the base of their believes: A: I hate foreigners B: Why? A: Because they are stealing our jobs! B: Why are they doing that? A: Because they cannot get jobs in their home country. B: Why do you think that is? A: I think $Nationality is just lazier than us. At this point you can go on, or you could ask why he is afraid of them stealing his job when they are lazy. But the point is: this provides more insight to the emotion based thinking of the other side than any discussion where you were going against the guy from the start could have done. Of course it is not always the right move to start a discussion with someone just because they are saying something that is wrong. Just start a discussion if you are willing to follow through.

gadders 4y ago
I think that is perhaps the weakest strawman I have ever seen.
- dasz 4y ago
  Three paragraphs and you dismiss it with a sentence. Since you're criticising I think you could have done better. The asking questions approach is a great way to dig out the weeds especially when someone's thinking appears to be a mess. Especially if you think they are somehow malicious or have a less than positive intent.
  - gadders 4y ago
    I was referring to the seven lines of dialogue.

tpoacher 4y ago

I would argue it's less about "a class of people", and more about "the context/aim of the conversation". If it's a "discussion", i.e. a conversation with the aim of improving the understanding of all parties involved, "winning" is the worst outcome, and fallacious arguments are likely to be done by accident and gladly corrected. If it's a debate, then by definition you're trying to win, and all bets are off. PS. It may be true however that a particular "class of people" enjoys plugging themselves in one type of conversation more than the other.

winReInstall 4y ago

Wow, its like watching somebody getting born. Now if we accept, that such variety of "castes" of unreasonable people exists and they do not want to "grow up", then society has to be adjusted for that, i guess. Making capability groups of neuro diverse people. Such persons would need a representative politically, to speak in there interests. Such a person would need limitations, to limit the damage they could cause. Reasonable people would have to be protected from this non-blue-blood class, to keep them productive and isolated. Systems need to created, to rile and cool the emotions of the non-logicals to make them steerable. There should be a science to differentiate the various types of illogical people, based upon the data collected by the big four. And steering unreasonable people should be a science too. We should call it something cool. Something witty. Leviathancybernetics. Get it. Hobbes, the leviathan, and the art to surgically implant synthetic structures and to turn society into a prothesis god. Now, lets talk about the negative side effects of knowing so much about society and humans. It turns you into a grandfather clock. All you hear is gears and mechanics, grinding your teeth, while all you observe your own instincts firing from the sub concious.

winReInstall 4y ago
Lets see how long we can keep this going, before the NDA gods hammer down. Life longs for the exponential. Intelligent life defeats the predation of life by other life (bacteria, virals, predators, etc.) and allows for a exponential curve bumping into the resource ceiling , the line that is the environment. Again and again. Starts the moment you become apex predator actually. Now darwinian evolution is blind, it just sees the merry go round spiral and adapts sub-groups of the population to it. Stable -> Exceeding Env Limitations -> Unstable -> Society Reassembling. Each of the four groups should in a cycling society be around 25 %. Each yearns for its natural situational habbitat and tries to push towards were it has advantages. Each has deep instincts, to not "waste" resources and step outside the god whorshipped which is a bloody wheel of butchering. A stable society is basically only possible for brief amounts of time, where the wheel is propped up and technology used to harness a surplus to keep the cyclic society from returning to the "default" of old. The amount of resources to do this, is enormous and some of the groups involved see this only as a "prolonged" recovery phase pre next conflict/collapse. Handing them the technology necessary to keep the peace, equals handing them apocalyptic weapons for conflict, should the peace break. So its a trap, unless one learns to implement societal self-control, one will forever hand more dangerous toys to us loop-deformed creatures. Which would make a great explenation for a universal filter, if there ever was one.

AmericanChopper 4y ago

> The difficulty is that there is an entire class of people who don't even care about being logically correct I don’t think this is the right perspective. Being logically correct doesn’t exist, the best you can do is be logically consistent with your chosen axioms. I would suggest the deeper problem is that people tend to not think too much about the foundational axioms of their world view, and think you can simply debate a topic with somebody who has a world view founded on a completely different set of axioms. No productive debate can take place in that context, because the controversy stems from the merit of your axioms, not how they apply to a given situation.

afarrell 4y ago

> the name of the game is to get the emotions on your side. In order to do this, you need to recognize your own emotional needs. You might say something like: “to move forward here, I need to trust that we are both willing to see reality clearly and use solid reasoning to make wise decisions even if those decisions are uncomfortable to think about. When I hear you say X, that I notice that it risks {name of fallacy} and I would not feel responsible unless I help us avoid stumbling into that. Could you please help me by clarifying what you mean here?” This imposes some discomfort on you by clearly revealing needs for responsibility and trustworthiness… but it also gives the other person a clear choice: A. Re-think what they’ve said and either follow your lead in avoiding the fallacy or asking you for help understanding. B. Explicitly deny your need to use logic to make responsible choices. And you can decide how much to trust the other person when the responsibility they have for making that choice wisely is made clear to them.

xtiansimon 4y ago

> “… make them look foolish … then … reveal to others how childish their position is or pressure them into abandoning their … position.” Yikes. I think the point of humor is to change the stakes, so people you’re working to persuade may think better. Humiliation in the face of peers is an emotional attack and highly immoral.

Ma8ee 4y ago
If someone spreads dangerous falsehoods (say, an anti-vaxxer) and refuses all rational arguments, public ridicule might actually be our most efficient weapon, and certainly morally defensible.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  And in that case you're appealing to the crowd and trying to persuade your opponent is not very likely and not the point.

amelius 4y ago

Isn't it possible to get these people to come to their senses by showing them historical failures of people in a similar situation?

toss1 4y ago

Yup, when a person has abandoned reason, no reason can disturb their position. This is why we see so many anti-science movements.

kmeisthax 4y ago

The people who don't care about the truth and the people who will point out fallacies all day are the same people. Shouting "Ad hominem!" and pointing your wand at the opponent is just another way to "own people with facts and logic" (read: counterfeit the form of a winning argument without the substance of it). That's why pointing out fallacies to win an argument is called the fallacy fallacy.

plainnoodles 4y ago

I'll throw out another "class" of person - someone who believes something, and at least grasps the concept of philosophical reasoning enough that they'll attempt to build one of the basic forms of argument - usually an argument by analogy - and having done so, they'll trumpet their conclusion. Then, commenters will pile in, either being part of the class of people you mention (who will skip reading the argument and just check to make sure the conclusion is what they want) or being part of the same class who will review the argument, stamp a "lgtm!" on it, and upvote/concur. We're right! And look, it's got proof attached, too! But then even the most amateur student of philosophy, perhaps about 60% of the way through their freshman (mandatory) Philosophy 101 course, would be able to examine the argument and identify mistakes so appallingly obvious that they might be provided as practice problems in their homework. The analogy isn't appropriate; or it begs the question; or it assumes some predicate where their proof may hold if the predicate is true, but the predicate itself must be proven for the conclusion to be substantive. I see this a lot on reddit. Especially recently due to the abortion debates re-heating. Arguers - regardless of side - are so poorly equipped by our education system, and so poorly incentivized by the highly polarized/tribalistic nature of modern political discourse, that even when people try they're still not making any progress in reasoning about their positions.

plainnoodles 4y ago
Adding on: and sometimes, even when they manage to make an interesting point, they've gotten so lost in their appraisal of their argument that the philosophical question ends up not even being the one they actually care about. To that last point, I've lately seen a lot of arguments for abortion being ethical/unethical that end up just being modified Trolley problems. One I saw that stuck with me was: "Suppose there is a fire in a building. You have a test tube of 1000 human embryos in one hand, and a 4 year old girl in the other. The only possible outcomes are you saving the vial or the girl, or neither. Which do you choose?" I thought this was an interesting take, since it reads as a very different situation depending on your view of the embryos! A "pro-life" person would clearly interpret this as a modified trolley problem. You have 1000 embryos who could become people but cannot feel pain or terror or [etc] right now (or at least not in the same way as the 4-year-old). Or you have a 4-year-old who can, and will suffer greatly. This is quite trolley-esque and while this one seems to have somewhat of a likely-correct answer, it's certainly not without some complication. Someone who thinks the embryos aren't yet people or persons will see this as a much less interesting thought exercise - of course you save the 4-year-old, the vial is just some cells that clearly don't even have consciousness yet. And there's even a whole swathe of positions in between who will assign some amount of humanity to the embryos and attempt to resolve the quandary between the embryos vs the 4-year-old. But, as interesting as this is, it completely misses the point of the original question-poser. Regardless of which option you pick as correct, it doesn't really inform us much as to whether abortion is ethical. Going back to my main point of bemoaning the dreadful state of the average internet argument.