
The Worst Argument In The World - jmillikin
http://lesswrong.com/lw/e95/the_worst_argument_in_the_world/
======
tokenadult
I read the interesting submitted article and its comments right after it was
submitted here on Hacker News. The worst argument in the world (a general FORM
of argument) is described this way in the submitted article:

"I declare the Worst Argument In The World to be this: 'X is in a category
whose archetypal member has certain features. Therefore, we should judge X as
if it also had those features, even though it doesn't.'"

This recalls many cases on Hacker News when someone has disagreed with someone
else by saying, "Your argument is an example of [name of rhetorical or logical
fallacy]." Perhaps it is carrying out the worst argument in the world to
identify one part of someone's statement as a logical fallacy, if the fallacy
doesn't vitiate the statement, and if sound evidence is still in view to
support the statement. Sometimes facts of the world are as they are even if
they are mentioned by people who argue inaptly, so it would indeed be a bad
argument to ignore the message because of infelicities of expression by the
messenger. If we look at pg's essay "How to Disagree,"

<http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html>

we see advice that a better way to disagree is

"Refuting the Central Point.

"The force of a refutation depends on what you refute. The most powerful form
of disagreement is to refute someone's central point."

So I guess my central point here [smile] is that while it may be interesting
to identify a general form for many particularly bad arguments, it is even
better to be specific in grappling with the evidence for the core factual
assertions of the person with whom you disagree. That takes abundant knowledge
of the world, and a willingness to look up facts. I always appreciate people
on Hacker News who can point to carefully gathered facts, analyzed by people
with appropriate domain-related knowledge, as we discuss issues here.

~~~
tikhonj
I think pointing out a logical fallacy is not a refutation. Rather than saying
"your argument is wrong", it says "your argument is not well-formed". This is
much like the difference between a program that has a bug and a program that
has a parse error.

To take the most glaring example: "my point is true because my point is true".
Obviously, nobody actually says this seriously. But some arguments _are_
isomorphic to this. And any argument like that is not wrong _per se_ \--it is
literally meaningless.

Other fallacies are more subtle and complicated, but the idea remains the
same: using a fallacy does not invalidate your point but merely renders your
argument meaningless. I can say that "the sky is blue because everybody says
so" and I would not be wrong--given the sky is actually blue, of course--but
the argument would still be a fallacy. I think to point this out is valuable
even (perhaps _especially_ ) if you do _not_ disagree with the point in
question.

~~~
tedunangst
As humans, we can do better than a compiler that gives up at the first missing
semicolon. We can keep reading and respond to the rest of the comment with
more than a link to the wikipedia article on ad hominem.

~~~
InclinedPlane
I have to take issue with this. I think it's an important and useful
rhetorical tool that, while sometimes can be used in a petty way to score
points, can elevate the debate. If half of your counter-argument is "compiler
warnings" for your competitor's argument, I think that's valuable.

I, for one, would wildly prefer a world where every debater was a nit-picking
SOB when it comes to logical fallacies and the average debate "compiled
cleanly without warnings". It would be like heaven compared to where we are
today.

~~~
_delirium
If we're talking about the formal fallacies, I agree, but my experience with
people name-dropping compiler errors for informal fallacies is that they're
often not very useful or accurate diagnoses. _Ad hominem_ is one that is often
useful, mostly as a sort of meta-rule about debate etiquette. But things like
"slippery slope" are used to characterize a wide range of arguments of which
only a subset are strictly fallacious. And some informal fallacies are only
fallacies in the specific context of purported logical proofs, but not
necessarily in other kinds of arguments. For example, it's true that an
"appeal to authority" in an argument means it's not a valid logical argument
that proves its conclusions from its premises. But people sometimes raise that
objection in contexts where the authority is being invoked as an epistemic
authority that raises the likelihood of its conclusion being true (because we
have reason to believe that the authority's judgments have non-zero epistemic
value), not as part of a logical proof. For example, while it's true that "the
consensus of physicists is that X" doesn't prove anything about X, if I'm not
a physicist and have a background belief that the consensus of physicists is
generally a good guide on what is likely to be true about physics, it's a good
inference that I should at least provisionally believe X.

------
mseebach
This seems disingenuous to me. Already by calling what's essentially rhetoric
"arguments", he's building a huge strawman.

Take abortion - according to opponents a fetus is a living human being, and
actively and purposefully killing a living human being _is_ murder in the
Charles Manson style. The argument for abortion isn't that it's somehow OK to
kill really young human, it's that fetuses aren't independent human beings,
they're an extension of the mothers body. It's really not a relevant metric
for wether murder is murder if there are grieving friends and family, or if
people live in fear - it seems every other crime show deals with the murder of
a miserable, lonely homeless guy or a prostitute. According to this argument,
that's not murder at all.

The eugenics example is even worse. In the 1930s, people were absolutely
certain eugenics was the best thing since sliced bread, then Hitler showed the
world how bad that could go. To deny "Those who don't learn history are doomed
to repeat it" as a guiding principle seems rather hubristic to me.

"Evolutionary psychology is sexist!" is a different beast: some people have
decided, not through science, but though politics, that material differences
between men and women (or the races for that matter) doesn't exist. Thus
science finding otherwise is unacceptable. Of course it's a bad argument to
reject science because it doesn't fit your political agenda.

~~~
csense
> The argument for abortion isn't that it's somehow OK to kill really young
> human

Not true! At least, if you asked me to make an argument in favor of abortion,
that's the argument that I would make.

No human within the first year or so after conception has any of the
distinguishing features which give intelligent beings a higher moral status:
Tool use, language use, abstract thought, logical reasoning, permanent memory.

Therefore, the moral status of a human immediately after the time of
conception t_0 is akin to that of an animal. It's not okay to torture, abuse,
or injure them for fun; it's not okay for people outside their family to
interfere with them; it's morally and socially acceptable and even admirable
for individuals to form very deep emotional attachments with them and spend
enormous resources helping and protecting them; but it _is_ okay to kill them
humanely if there simply isn't a place for them.

The moral status of the very young human rises from that of a proto-human
animal to that of a full human at time t_I, the time when they become
intelligent.

The problem is that t_I is extremely difficult to measure. It depends on your
definition of intelligence and can be very different for different
individuals. (For severely brain-damaged individuals, it may even be the case
that t_I = infinity.)

To deal with the difficulty of measuring t_I, our culture and laws have
instead picked a deadline t_D, such that t_D is much smaller than t_I in all
cases (regardless of differing definitions or individual cases). We have
declared that we should assume humans younger than t_D have proto-human legal
status roughly equivalent to animal status, and humans older than t_D have
full-human legal status. Killing before the deadline is legal if done in a
humane way with the consent of the mother; killing after the deadline is
treated the same as killing an adult would be (only allowable in very limited
circumstances such as self-defense). Therefore our society can avoid some of
the drains placed on it by humans who, it is known, will be born into far-
from-ideal circumstances, while hopefully staying far away enough from t_I to
avoid sanctioning the killing of anyone who has the moral status of a full
human. (Obviously, t_D is the time of birth plus delta, where delta is less
than one day (I'm not sure exactly what delta is, but I'm pretty sure it's
less than one day). Delta is necessary to account for partial-birth
abortions.)

The problem with many pro-abortion arguments is that they are of the form "It
is our belief that all humans have souls, and therefore full-human moral
status, from the time of conception." It's not a problem that those are their
religious beliefs; the problem is enshrining those beliefs into law in
prohibitions on abortion. Logic and facts, not religious beliefs, must be the
basis of our laws; to do otherwise would open up the very can of worms that we
try to avoid by separating church and state. We can't observe souls, but we
can observe intelligent behavior, and the latter seems not to preclude
existing abortion laws in any way. (Existing abortion laws also don't
interfere with the religious beliefs of abortion opponents; if you believe
abortion is morally wrong, _you_ don't have to have one. The law only steps in
to the extent that anti-abortionists wish to impose their beliefs on others.)

Hypothetically, if the laws were expanded to legalize infanticide as
"extremely late abortion" at any time up to, say, age three, then a moral
argument would hold weight; many two-year-olds _do_ use language and can
exhibit surprisingly intelligent behaviors. Likewise, if the laws were
expanded to _require_ abortions in certain circumstances (for example, to
enforce a one-child-per-family policy like China has), that would also be
wrong and almost surely unconstitutional; for it would interfere with the
religious beliefs of most abortion opponents. (I say "most" since I suppose it
is possible there is some faction whose religious beliefs, if any, don't
forbid abortion, but bases an opposition to abortion on non-religious grounds.
If they even exist, they're surely very small and not very vocal.)

Of course, everyone (myself included) regards such expansions as extremely
morally repugnant; I know of no one who would even consider supporting them.
I'm just offering them against a hypothetical opponent who would say, "If you
would sanction the killing of innocent babies, you clearly have no moral
compass!" This worldview _does_ have limitations on what is allowed; it just
draws the line between "unallowable atrocity under any circumstances" and "the
lesser of two evils" in a slightly different place than pro-lifers.

As much of a tendency as it is among liberals to put all conservatives in the
same boat, both on HN and everywhere else the left gathers, abortion is
possibly the best place to draw the line between libertarians and social
conservatives: The latter favor prohibitions, while the former should oppose
them as unwanted government intrusion (although many do not, I suspect, due to
simple realpolitik -- a sacrifice of a non-core position by a weaker leg of
the stool to support a core position of a stronger leg to maintain the
conservative coalition, presumably a compromise to be "renegotiated" --
possibly unilaterally -- when/if their relative strength ever changes.)

~~~
DannoHung
I think your premises are incorrect. Create a machine that is like a human in
all respects that you cite, tool use, language use, abstract thought, logical
reasoning, permanent memory, and if it is just comprised of that, we will call
it a very amazing robot. You could even add self-preservation routines, and we
will call it an amazing robot that knows its own value.

But unless you add emotions that are recognizable to humans, you will find a
very hard time convincing people that it is a person.

Similarly, I believe that emotional response is the reason why humans agree
that it is not correct to destroy babies, but that some find it fine to
destroy embryos. Those that disagree feel that the potential for emotions
overrides any other concern.

Now, personally, I would hate to be a rationalist. Emotions provide the depth
that make being alive worth experiencing. Divorcing my emotions from every
decision making process would just be disgusting... well, see, I can't even
describe it without emotion.

~~~
csense
> Create a machine that is like a human in all respects that you cite, tool
> use, language use, abstract thought, logical reasoning, permanent memory,
> and if it is just comprised of that, we will call it a very amazing robot.
> You could even add self-preservation routines, and we will call it an
> amazing robot that knows its own value.

I disagree. Much science fiction (for example Asimov) deals with the social
positions of intelligent robots. I would assume, based on the number of people
that find the arguments these works make compelling or at least interesting
enough to buy them, that if such robots _did_ exist, they would quickly gain
at least a small faction of human political supporters. Eventually, through
normal human social and political processes, our society and culture would
hopefully reach some kind of position on what exactly makes something morally
equivalent to humans, in a way that assigns some definite and logically
consistent moral status to these robots.

> Similarly, I believe that emotional response is the reason why humans agree
> that it is not correct to destroy babies, but that some find it fine to
> destroy embryos.

It's probably true that emotional responses are a big part of the reason for
much of the support behind most laws and policies, from the least
controversial (murder is illegal) to the most (abortion, Obamacare, death
penalty, affirmative action, welfare...). But that doesn't mean we can't or
shouldn't come up with abstract intellectual justifications for them.

> Divorcing my emotions from every decision making process would just be
> disgusting...

Emotions are basically heuristics which the human brain has evolved. They
quickly give you guidelines for how you should act in a given situation
without wasting valuable time and intellectual effort creating an elaborate
argument as a justification of the obvious.

Emotions are usually right, but sometimes they lead us astray. And we're at a
complete loss when we have to make a law that goes either one way or the other
on something, but different people in our society have different emotional
responses that lead them to different positions on the issue.

And besides, emotions can lead to things like racism or Nazism if followed
blindly. (Godwin's Law, I know.)

That's where debate and argument come into play.

In a good debate, your empathy should let you experience the emotions on both
sides of the issue, freeing your brain to decide which argument has a good
logical structure and is adequately supported by facts.

Once you've decided, you should try to partially (but not totally! -- your
brain can be wrong too!) suppress your empathy for the losing side and
encourage your empathy for the winning side. You can actually train your
emotions -- basically calibrating your heuristics to agree with your
intellectual decisions, so in the future you can remember your position on the
issue in your gut, without having to remember and fully reconstruct the
argument you made. Yeah, I've found that hacking my own brain is awesome :)

By the way, using emotional heuristics as a shortcut is something I relied on
in my _reductio_ point against using emotions as your sole means of political
decision-making -- your emotions immediately tell you that racism and Nazism
are bad things, because you've been trained to think of them that way. While
you can probably come up with a sound argument that racism and Nazism are bad,
your emotions tell you those are bad things without you having to consciously
construct or remember a justification of why they're bad. So you can
immediately sense that the structure of my argument -- "relying blindly on
emotions without consulting reason is bad because it leads to bad things" --
is sound, without having to go into an entire sub-argument about whether
racism and Nazism are good or bad, and why, and whether the logical structure
of the sub-argument is okay, and mentally fact-checking the facts cited by the
sub-argument against what you know of the history of Hitler and World War II
and slavery and Jim Crow and Martin Luther King...and then _more_ sub-sub-
arguments about fundamental moral questions like whether genocide is morally
okay, or whether slavery is morally okay, or whether it's morally okay to
treat people badly based on a certain set of genetic traits without actually
enslaving them...without those emotional shortcuts to help us out, we'd never
be able to communicate moral ideas efficiently or make moral decisions fast
enough for them to matter in a fast-moving real-life situation.

(FYI, I suspect this feedback mechanism is what Terence Tao was talking about
when he discussed how mathematicians train themselves to quickly decide
whether something is true or false without constructing an airtight proof
[1].)

[1] [http://www.quora.com/Mathematics/What-is-it-like-to-have-
an-...](http://www.quora.com/Mathematics/What-is-it-like-to-have-an-
understanding-of-very-advanced-mathematics)

------
sakai
I hate to say this, but I found this article absolutely terrible.

All of these "Martin Luther King IS ...", "George Washington WAS ...", etc.
statements (form: Noun TO BE Adj.), really remind me of the arguments in favor
of E-Prime and its associated benefits:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime>. The author likely intended this, of
course, but reinforces exactly the same kind of thinking and tone in nearly
every other sentence! (Do a quick scan for the verb to be)

Some might call E-Prime a fairly extreme philosophy / didactic tool, to be
sure ;), but one shouldn't overlook that this article undermined its very own
core point ("don't make a certain class of categorical / binary Aristotelian
statements") through its very language (e.g., the phrase 'Now, because most
arguments are rapid-fire debate-club style, sometimes it's still useful to say
"Affirmative action isn't racist!"').

~~~
child_nihilist
How do you indicate category membership in E-Prime?

What if I want to say "A dog is an animal"?

------
Xcelerate
I wonder if there's some sort of way to definitively defeat someone's argument
in issues other than math and science. I doubt it -- I suspect all arguments
essentially boil down to moral relativism based upon gut feelings
(environmental or genetic factors).

I guess a more optimistic question is whether there's a statistically
significant _process to_ convince* your opponent that your argument is
correct. I would actually be more interested in knowing this.

*By process, I mean a general purpose algorithm that someone could follow that's more effective than alternative algorithms at making your opponent say "you know what, you're right".

EDIT: While I'm at it, I would really like to see more articles/analyses on
the nature of arguing. It seems like argument could be a study in its own
right, though I doubt there exist any strong efforts in the field.

EDIT 2: You know what, if someone got really good at analyzing the way people
argue, they could optimize their own argument strategy to become a very
powerful/dangerous person. I suspect this happens naturally (political
leaders) but I think there's a huge potential if someone were to go about this
consciously and objectively.

~~~
csense
> arguments essentially boil down to moral relativism based upon gut feelings
> (environmental or genetic factors)

There are many pieces of this problem. A few of them at random:

1\. The US education system doesn't do a good job of teaching people to think
rigorously and analytically. Up to 12th grade, math is largely memorizing
specific algorithms, science is memorizing vocabulary words, real programming
courses are usually optional and don't exist at most schools.

2\. Our education system actively beats down original critical thinking and
encourages people to do what they think the teacher wants.

3\. In college, a vast majority professors and students are very liberal. I
have never heard or come up with a satisfactory explanation for the causes of
this; for me personally, many of my innate leftward biases actually declined
through high school and college as my logical reasoning abilities became more
acute through application to harder problems, and I gained more experience of
the world.

But the prevalance of a single political point of view in our institutions of
higher learning may actually cause great damage to our country's political
problem-solving abilities: Many people who are highly intelligent and formally
trained to think critically avoid questioning liberal ideas because everyone
they know and respect thinks the same way, while they are overly dismissive of
conservative ideas because many of their proponents don't have the tools to
effectively argue their positions.

~~~
hef19898
> to point one: In Germany its more or less the same, my best guess as to why
> it is so is that it is easier to do exams on memorized knowledge than
> independant thinking and because you need some basics to beginn with. This
> doesn't mean I wouldn't like to see more critical and analytical thinking

> point 2: largly depends on the subject. in maths, physics chemistry and
> biology (tough field given the whole evolution story) it's more about facts
> and not about opinion (generaly speaking, in the higher levels of it I guess
> it changes, but even then more on execution questions). In "softer" (lacking
> a better word) subjects I completly agree.

------
breckinloggins
The article could use some more neutral and left-leaning "Worst argument in
the world (TWAITW)" examples. I'm fairly neutral politically, and the piece
sounded left-biased to me. Note that I'm not stating my opinion here; the
author even apologizes for it in the article.

Perhaps he is simply at a loss for examples? We could help. Here's a neutral
one (from the comments):

\- "George Washington was a _traitor_!" (should probably be used BEFORE the
Martin Luther King argument; in extremely conservative circles, even
mentioning Dr. King's name rings the "ding! ding! liberal!" bells)

Here are some left-leaning "argumentoids" that you sometimes hear and that
have elements of TWAITW:

\- "But guns _kill_ people!" I realized shortly after reading the article that
this is not only an instance of TWAITW, but shows the logic behind the retort
"Guns don't kill people, people kill people". This might be rephrased as
saying "yes, guns kill people, but not in the way that murderers kill people,
which is to say, with malicious intent. That requires a person, so let's
concentrate on whether removing guns from the economy will prevent those with
malicious intent from obtaining them."

\- "Evolution is a _fact_!" Yes, but maybe not in the "totality of the truth
is plain for all to see" perspective. It is true that PARTS of evolution are
plain fact, but the creationist has a point that some of the more fantastic
parts of evolution are harder to directly observe in the same way as, say,
gravity.

\- "Reproductive freedom is a _choice_!" Perhaps, but you can't just dismiss
the argument at that point. Choice can mean "choosy moms choose Jiff" or it
can mean "the difference between life and death". Saying it is a choice
ignores the fact that not all personal "choices" are accepted by society (i.e.
it is your choice and you can make one, but sometimes there are consequences).

\- "Tax breaks for the rich are _unfair_!" Perhaps, but there are many levels
of unfair. You must argue why tax breaks for the rich are at the same level of
unfair as, say, separate water fountains for whites and blacks and not unfair
as in "it's unfair that I always have to pull the cookie jar from the top
shelf just because I happen to be the tall one."

Note that all of these lean more toward "equivocation" than the author's
technical definition of TWAITW. But then, perhaps that's what TWAITW boils
down to.

Also, I note in all of these that they are all caricature arguments. They are
all cliched. The arguments in the article have a similar nature.

This leads to a disturbing point: it is helpful to have TWAITW as an
analytical tool when having a serious debate, but if you are "debating" with a
person who shouts soundbites like these in your face, do you really think they
are going to understand or care if you try to explain to them that they are
using TWAITW? Seems like more preaching to the choir, unfortunately.

~~~
adastra
This post has so much flame-bait in it I almost wonder if it's a meta-post-- a
practical joke to see how many people go after these various politically-
charged statements rather than comment on the article itself.

I'll assume it's not though. In which case, I really don't see how adding more
politically-charged examples to this discussion, or any other for that matter,
is at all productive.

~~~
jbrechtel
He's suggesting adding them to the article which would have made it less off
putting for the other side of the author's political fence....which wouldn't
be a bad group to target if you want to actually change anyone's mind.

------
leh0n
I've found that most people believe x thing is true because other people also
believe x thing is true. They won't say that's the reason but deep down it
provides emotional support for their belief. So I've found it's best to not
try to "rationally" argue with people and just change the subject.

------
scarmig
I recall a good pg opinion somewhere that reflects a sort of inverse of this
point. We should reject abstract categories for our identities because once we
do define ourselves by them, we start reconstructing our thoughts and beliefs
to actually fit the stereotype for that abstract category. Much better to
focus on the actual specific beliefs without committing to a tribal identity,
both for your sake and so that other people are less likely to commit the
submitted article's fallacy against you.

------
ojbyrne
Slighty more reasonable, but perhaps more insidious is the "slippery slope"
argument. So the first example, about Martin Luther King being a criminal -
could be more subtly argued by saying something like "well obviously he
doesn't count, but where do we draw the line between 'good' criminals and
'bad' criminals, and invoking slippery slopes. Then the argument ends up
basically being the same, but seems on the surface to be less dogmatic.

~~~
scarmig
Certainly some slippery slope arguments are good, though!

For instance, suppose a terrorist starts demanding a large sum of money not to
blow up a plane. Suppose also that the direct risk-corrected value of the
plane, even excluding passenger lives, also exceeds the price the terrorist is
asking for. We still make it policy not to negotiate with the terrorist,
because doing so would create a positive feedback loop that pushes us down a
slippery slope.

When you think about it, it's a fairly insidious argument to say that slippery
slope arguments should be rejected because they fall into a category of
arguments that are subtle and hard to refute because they are so insidious. An
amusing implied prior of the slippery slope fallacy is that once we start
accepting valid slippery slope arguments, what's to stop us from accepting the
really terrible ones that take the same structure?

~~~
mturmon
When you start looking into terrorist incidents, however, you find that
ransoms are indeed often paid (even by governments, even by the US
government). They try to keep this secret; sometimes it works, sometimes not.
One example is Iran/Contra, but there are many others (e.g.,
<http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,48779,00.html> ,
[http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns...](http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/news_cut/archive/2011/09/whose_money_is_freeing_the_ame.shtml)
, <http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/18-10>,
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritime_history_of_the_United_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritime_history_of_the_United_States_\(1776%E2%80%931799\)#1783-1790))

Secretiveness, in this case, is a mechanism to avoid the slippery slope. As a
sister comment to your comment points out, often other effects will step in so
we don't go all the way down the slippery slope, and the "secret ransom" is
one such effect.

~~~
Evbn
I like how your example of a secret ransom completely failed at being a secret
and proved the fallacy of secret ransom.

------
adrianbravo
If someone points out someone else I admire is a criminal, I would approach it
a different way. It has less to do with what I want to call archetypal and
more to do with the historically observable fact that what is legal is not
always what is moral. Murder, torture, slavery, etc. These have all been legal
in some past (or present) context. The possibility that someone who is
acknowledged as a decent person could be a "criminal" is no surprise to me,
and I'd rather argue to that point than dismiss the whole argument.

And even if I support abortion rights, the act is technically killing. A
'life' is terminated. Regardless, I'd point out that murder holds a different
connotation that implies hatred or ill-will (or "malice aforethought") toward
the victim. Same with euthanasia.

Why not take these as opportunities to explore the meanings and limits of a
word? One person's definition of what is the archetypal murderer or thief or
racist may easily differ from yours depending on their own experiences.

------
codehotter
Thanks to this article, I can finally put into words what bothers me about
"Copyright infringement is theft"!

Yes copyright infringement share some of the properties of theft, but they are
sufficiently different that we shouldn't apply our intuitions about theft to
copyright infringement, just like we shouldn't apply our intuitions about
theft to taxation.

~~~
slurgfest
When someone says that piracy or taxation are theft, they are not necessarily
appealing to intuitions about theft. They may literally hold and mean to state
that they share with carjacking whatever makes carjacking theft, WITHOUT
sharing other properties of carjacking... in effect, this is a thesis
statement rather than a knock-down argument.

Of course, it is also possible that it is not even an honest appeal to
intuition, rather just an emotional tarring which will never be substantiated.
This is usually what is irritating about hearing those arguments.

------
skizm
Unrelated (but related to lesswrong.com) If you haven't heard of "Harry Potter
and the Methods of Rationality" I highly recommend it (hpmor.com). It is
written by Less Wrong author Eliezer Yudkowsky. I am about half way through
and it is a great read. It is a fan fiction about the Harry Potter world
except Harry Potter is a boy genius and a trained scientist. Each chapter is a
new lesson in some method of rationality and it is an amazingly easy read and
especially enjoyable if you liked the Harry Potter series to begin with. It is
a work in progress and new chapters get added every once in a while.
Definitely check it out if you like lesswrong.com and/or Harry Potter.

------
001sky
This is a logic shortcut (heuristic), with its origins in decisionmaking under
incomplete information and time constraint. Yes, in the context of
manipulative pre-meditation (and perfect information) it takes on a new
character.

Edit: Clarification/simplify

~~~
child_nihilist
But when such a heuristic is challenged it should be reformed into a proper
argument.

------
Xcelerate
I have to disagree with his first example. He says "X is in a category whose
archetypal member has certain features".

The first example is "Abortion is murder". He then says, "If you define murder
as 'killing another human being', then abortion is technically murder."

The problem is that in this case, his "if" applies to roughly 56% of the US
population, as they define murder that way. In other words, he needs to select
a category that has a unanimous agreement about its features instead of
selecting a category that has a myriad of definitions and then choosing his
own favorite definition and its corresponding archetypes.

~~~
alexchamberlain
How else do you define murder?

~~~
qxcv
Murder (n) - The unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another.

Nobody is debating the definition of murder, the debate is over the definition
of "human". When does an unborn child get the rights of a human? Is it at
conception? At 3 months? At birth?

------
jrajav
When I reached "Taxation is theft!" I was moved to come here and comment on
it. It only took about a second for me to stop myself and laugh. Apparently
others here weren't quite so levelheaded.

~~~
alttab
I'm not sure what your comment is trying to imply, but this is also where I
stopped reading.

"Taxation keeps the first disadvantage, but arguably subverts the second
disadvantage if you believe being able to fund a government has greater social
value than leaving money in the hands of those who earned it."

Using this argument, at least with the US Government, taxation is most
certainly theft.

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

------
gizzlon
Great point!

But stop reading when you come to the examples, they just derail the whole
thing and everyone forgets what the original point was.

" _..the urge is to respond "Martin Luther King? A criminal? No he wasn't! You
take that back!" This is why the Worst Argument In The World is so successful.
As soon as you do that you've fallen into their trap. Your argument is no
longer about whether you should build a statue, it's about whether King was a
criminal. Since he was, you have now lost the argument_ "

------
yafujifide
I experience this argument all the time for being both an atheist and a
libertarian, except replace "archetype" with "stereotype". People assume all
atheists fit into some stereotype they saw on TV, and therefore I must be
exactly like that. Likewise, they assume all libertarians are like the
stereotype they saw on TV, and I must be exactly like that. Since I'm not like
the stereotypes, it's frustrating.

~~~
masterzora
I'd reckon that most people experience this argument all the time with regards
to their religious and political preferences or lack thereof.

Christian. Muslim. Jewish. Buddhist. Hindu. Republican. Democrat. Moderate.
Independent.

Odds are most people who read the above section had some sort of archetypal or
stereotypical vision of most or all of those and all of us can identify some
of the associated types. And most of us can also realise that not all
Christians are fundies (or even vocal), that Jews are greedy with roughly
equal proportion of more general populations, that not all moderates have weak
political views, etc. But we all get to live with these, though admittedly
some are worse than others.

------
alexchamberlain
I must point out that from a logical point of view "Because you don't like
criminals, and Martin Luther King is a criminal, you should stop liking Martin
Luther King." is correct.

Let us assume you like Martin Luther King. Then one of the 2 premises must be
wrong. Is it "you don't like criminals" or is it "Martin Luther King is a
criminal"?

I'm sorry to say that Martin Luther King _was_ a criminal, and let us assume
that means he still is in the strictest sense. Therefore, "you don't like
criminals" cannot be correct.

However, "You don't like people who you consider to be a criminal" could still
be correct, since you would probably accept that you don't consider Martin
Luther King to be a criminal.

Sometimes you just need to teach people a little bit of logic.

------
jessedhillon
This is great, but who does this appeal to? The small minority who actually
takes the time to reflect on their own assumptions, is open to refactoring
their own thinking and possesses the maturity to accept the wrongness of their
own arguments?

Almost all public "debates", on topics of any importance, are merely shouting
matches where two or more sides reiterate rationalizations for their already-
held notions of the world. Rarely is anyone ever convinced to change their
mind, and the philosopher who crafts valid and cogent arguments almost always
has circles run about them by someone who can distill compelling emotional
appeals into clever soundbites.

~~~
gjm11
> The small minority who actually takes the time to reflect on their own
> assumptions, is open to refactoring their own thinking and possesses the
> maturity to accept the wrongness of their own arguments?

Well, yes, that would be exactly the target audience of Less Wrong. Do you
have a problem with that?

(Of course (1) posting this isn't going to make bad arguments disappear from
the world and (2) someone whose goal is influence rather than accuracy or
integrity may well prefer to go on saying things that, when considered as
rational arguments, are very wrong; but so what?)

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

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

------
1123581321
I suggest amending the argument:

"X is in a category whose archetypal member has certain features. Therefore,
we should judge the past behaviors of X as if it also had those features, even
though it doesn't; or assign future behaviors to X even though it cannot
develop those features."

That said, I disagree this is a worse argument than its ideological opposite,
A is not A.

------
barbs
So basically, this is saying "don't generalise". Or am I just generalising?

~~~
roryokane
No, the point is more specific than that. A better summary would be “don’t
generalise the opposing position to a category where it’s an outlier”. Admit
all important ways in which your generalisation unfairly “taints” the subject
with negative connotations. Feel free, on the other hand, to generalise
positions accurately, in a category which the position generally represents.

------
Bjartr
This game seems very appropriate <http://www.argumentchampion.com/>

------
xo
thanks for posting the article. was interesting, though long-winded. for all
the rest of you, shut up. you're making the internet worse. go away.

