

Logic Lunch Counter - DanielBMarkham
http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/12/logic-lunch-cou.php

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tome
I really like this article Daniel. It's a very interesting talking point
regarding the kinds of discussion that happen on the internet.

Here is a related article about the "Ad Hominem Fallacy Fallacy"

<http://plover.net/~bonds/adhominem.html>

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DanielBMarkham
Thanks. That's a good link too.

I found myself drifting towards attacking the Ad Hominem, probably because
it's done wrong so much. But the general point is that _all_ logic critiques
are in themselves flawed in some way. For instance, how else would two people
discuss something rationally without one person saying something like "If I
understand you correctly, you're saying X. But X doesn't make any sense at all
to me" To which the other person can yell "Straw Man! Straw Man argument!"
like a little schoolkid or they can try to move on towards some kind of
reasonable discussion.

Intent and nuance count a lot, I think. And these are the very things that are
toughest to do well on the 'net. (sigh)

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mquander
It's not tough to do well if your aim is really to "discuss something
rationally." Most of the time, people are not trying to discuss anything in
particular, or understand anything better; they're just trying to socialize,
and whatever they're arguing about is just a medium in which to play games of
flag-waving and oneupmanship. (I know that sounds dismissive, but I'm not
trying to crap on it; I do it too. It's just the way it is.)

It's silly to look at the result and say, well, you would communicate better
if you did X, because that's not the goal.

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sketerpot
All I'm taking from this is that people often misapply shallow knowledge of
logical fallacies.

Look, not all reasoning is equally good, and the fact that no essay is a
mathematical proof doesn't mean that we shouldn't point out problems in
reasoning. If someone sees mysterious lights in the sky and thinks that it was
aliens, that's not _entirely_ invalid -- but because of a false dichotomy and
confirmation bias, the assumed probability of the lights being aliens got
exaggerated.

tl;dr version: fallacious reasoning should be guarded against not because it
automatically destroys any argument containing it, but because it skews our
estimates of probability.

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DanielBMarkham
_because it skews our estimates of probability_ is based on a group
understanding of the situation applied through many filters and not by some
appeal to universal tenets of logic. Each of these fallacies carry subjective
and conditional baggage not understood by many commenters.

If you got that, then you don't need the article. I'm just not sure from your
reply if you got it.

