

Ask HN:  What logical fallacies irritate you the most on Hacker News? - amichail

One I find annoying is when someone gives a counterexample as if that would be enough to shoot down an (implicitly) statistical claim/argument.
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tptacek
I'm not a fan of people trying to shoehorn arguments (especially: arguments
they are losing) into strict logical exercises. It's like a "work to rules"
strike, message board style. The point of a message board argument is to
influence and communicate and, sometimes, to arrive at a shared understanding
of the truth (some topics, subjective ones, don't readily admit to a
convergence on "truth" and yet make perfectly fine fodder for an HN
discussion). They don't all need to be scored from the Nizkor list.

I'm not saying logical fallacies are all benign, but if you ask me what
fallacy annoys me most on HN, it's the fallacy that logical fallicies are
themselves _invariably germane_. They aren't.

~~~
xenophanes
I wonder if there is a conflict here because for some people careless
statements are reliably at too low a precision to be helpful because one has
already considered the topic at higher precision.

When you are an expert at something, to improve further you need to hunt down
every last mistake you can find. You don't just dismiss logical fallacies as
not being germane. Sometimes they don't look germane but actually are for a
subtle reason.

By contrast, for newbies, even if a fallacy is germane in some subtle way it
doesn't matter b/c they aren't learning subtleties.

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siglesias
I'm not sure if this is a logical fallacy per se, but I have observed some
very strong groupthink effects with respect to voting dog piling, both for
positive and negative votes. Strongly postive comments and stories tend to
have accelerating up voting rather than the expected fixed frequency of votes,
implying that number of votes is itself a factor for some in deciding whether
to vote for something. It shouldn't be.

~~~
philwelch
Yeah, it's increasingly easy to find out which side of an argument has the
more popular viewpoint, even if both sides are making good points and
intelligent comments.

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dpcan
None. I don't care what people say or how they say it because we're all
different.

However, since it just came to mind, on StackOverflow.com, I despise when
someone pops in and says "read the documentation" then provides a link. As if
I hadn't already read it a thousand times and ended up at Stack because I was
stuck.

Whoa. Way off topic.

~~~
Travis
This may be a little off topic, but downvoting w/o a comment seems rude. Let
me help you balance that a little.

In response to your SO complaint: I will sometimes reply with a request to
read the documentation (including a link to the relevant section), but only
when it's very clear that the OP has not read the docs. It's especially
prevalent for me, b/c I tend to stick to the PHP/lowest common denominator
languages.

~~~
raganwald
My policy is to down vote or comment, but not both. If it's worth a reply, why
would I down vote it? If it doesn't contribute to the discussion, why would I
reply?

~~~
Travis
Because by replying, you can point out flaws or disagreements in the parent
post. That helps the person who wrote it get a little better.

Additionally, downvoting w/o a comment feel punitive, as opposed to
corrective. It also seems a little lazy -- "I'll click the downvote arrow, but
won't take any time to help them improve."

~~~
raganwald
If I believe there's a good reason to help them improve, then I can do so and
there's no need to also down vote, as my feelings will be on display for
everyone to read.

Also, most posts with flaws do contribute to the discussion, I just disagree
with the reasoning. That's not the right place for a down vote. IMO.

A down vote might be used for a situation where someone else has already
explained why the comment is not helpful, or perhaps something beyond
redemption like "Pwned, LOL" :-)

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hernan7
Windbaggery, a.k.a. the fallacy of thinking that wrapping your ideas in
intellectual-sounding verbiage will make them invulnerable.

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Locke1689
It seems like philosophy students see this far more than other people (based
on my informal survey of my philosopher friends) but confusion of descriptive
and normative statements, also known as David Hume's "is-ought" problem, is
one of the most common fallacies I see anywhere.

This is most easily seen on the more populist articles on Hacker News (which I
simply found by going to /best).

Here's an example: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2037139>

These people are having an argument about whether it _is_ or _is not_ slavery
i.e., a descriptive judgment. However, the question of whether or not it is
slavery has little bearing on whether or not it _should_ be done. The
commenters are confusing a _descriptive_ statement as relevant to a
_normative_ question.

~~~
chc
Although what you say does happen, I don't see how that comment thread an
example of it. Somebody claimed it was slavery, and other people argued that
it was not. To say that particular line of conversation was about whether it
_should_ be done is a better example of the fallacy — you link to a
descriptive debate, and because you think it _should_ be a normative debate,
you say that they were arguing the wrong thing.

~~~
Locke1689
It's true that I'm counting relevance to the topic in the conversation. Given
that these are replies to a thread with a normative statement, the responses
are either a fallacy or completely off-topic. I chose the more charitable
interpretation.

~~~
chc
As far as I can tell, it was neither fallacious nor completely off-topic. It
was a response to the logical argument, "We should not do this because this is
slavery, and we know slavery is wrong." This is a valid argument, so they were
replying that the argument is factually unsound, which is a descriptive sub-
issue within the larger normative question. If we are not allowed to debate
the facts and can only debate the normative conclusions, arguments almost
invariably devolve into emotional shouting matches.

~~~
Locke1689
Actually, I think that whether or not something can be called "slavery" is
irrelevant to whether or not it is wrong. If it shares the same moral
violations that our conventional idea of slavery does then it is wrong, but
not because it is called slavery but because it violates the same moral or
ethical precepts. If it could be called slavery but doesn't violate these
precepts then it is not a moral wrong. This is actually slightly related to
Socrates' question in Plato's _Euthyphro_.

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olalonde
Wishful thinking. For instance, a recurring theme is to predict a given
platform will die (Flash, desktop apps, Apple's App Store, relational
databases, etc.). Although I often find myself agreeing with those
predictions, the arguments presented often take the form of a wish rather than
an evidence based observation.

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kmfrk
Appeal to auth- Wikipedia.

I hate the use of buzz words and namedropping "theories", and this is a close
relative.

Just because there's a friggin' article about something vaguely tangential to
the discussion does not mean that you've refuted someone's argument by linking
to it. Five bucks says you haven't even read the article, but just used it
based on the title.

Sometimes people don't even understand the science behind it, and sometimes
they've misconstrued the actual concept of the theory.

Some people just toss in a link like a large, dead trout on the kitchen table
as their entire comment without explaining their - supposed - train of
thought. But hey, you want people to know that you've learnt a fancy word.

