

The noncentral fallacy – the worst argument in the world? (2012) - scribu
http://lesswrong.com/lw/e95/the_noncentral_fallacy_the_worst_argument_in_the/

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myusernameranou
Good article but there's something I want to point out:

> But in this case calling Martin Luther King a criminal is the noncentral.
> The archetypal criminal is a mugger or bank robber. He is driven only by
> greed, preys on the innocent, and weakens the fabric of society. Since we
> don't like these things, calling someone a "criminal" naturally lowers our
> opinion of them.

You can make valid arguments that Martin Luther King was bad because he was a
criminal without connecting it to emotional reactions we get from criminals.

You can dislike criminals because you think they're nasty people, but you can
also dislike them on the principle of them breaking the law, regardless of how
nasty or clean they otherwise are. If you say that 'Criminals are bad
necessarily because they break laws', and 'Martin Luther King was bad because
he was a criminal', then you can connect them to get 'Martin Luther King was
bad necessarily because he broke laws'. That can be seen as true without ever
bringing in emotional reactions to criminals.

I can safely dismiss that as an imperfect example though, and still a
reasonable example. The general thesis of the article makes sense.

You can apply the same reasoning to some of the other examples. In the
Evolutionary Psychology part, a lot of the time EP is dismissed as being non-
credible, not because it doesn't support one's argument or because people
think it's inherently sexist. The author's example misrepresents what a lot of
people mean when they disregard EP in an argument: they don't disagree with it
because the logical conclusion is sexist, they disagree with it because it's
being used in an unscientific and unreliable way. Again though, it could be
used the way the author described, so for the sake of example I guess it makes
sense.

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scribu
In general, yeah, it's good to apply the principle of charity to any argument.
However, it's very hard to do when the argument is expressed using such
emotionally loaded words as in the examples given.

