
The fallacy of mood affiliation (2011) - apsec112
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/03/the-fallacy-of-mood-affiliation.html
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vannevar
Simply providing a counter-argument to an argument, whether it's 'pessimistic'
or not, does not constitute a fallacy of any kind. The author's chief
complaint seems to be that people have the temerity to counter his arguments.
You can't call an argument a fallacy based solely on your perception of the
motivation of its proponents; a true fallacy can be proved simply by examining
the argument itself.

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xyzzy4
This reminds me of how Peter Thiel said extreme pessimism and extreme optimism
are both problems because they both lead to inaction. Why do anything if you
believe the world is getting really good or really bad?

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chroma
The Thiel quote you're referencing is from an interview with the author of
this blog post, Tyler Cowen. Thiel was answering an audience member's question
about the desirability of life extension[1]:

> We accept that we’re all going to die, and so we don’t do anything, and we
> think we’re not going to die anytime soon, so we don’t really need to worry
> about it. We have this sort of schizophrenic combination of acceptance and
> denial, like extreme pessimism and extreme optimism. It converges to doing
> nothing, and I’d like us to just fight it a little bit more for its own
> sake.

1\. [https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/peter-thiel-
on-t...](https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/peter-thiel-on-the-
future-of-innovation-77628a43c0dd#1f66)

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jonsterling
Politics isn't something to be studied "objectively", where views are right or
wrong on their own merits (or worse, some pseudo-"empirical" measure). There
is no "null theory" for politics; all political engagement starts from some
political theory or method of analysis.

So this so-called "mood affiliation" isn't a fallacy at all, it's the
identification of a speaker's political theory. Pretending that you don't have
such a theory (or that yours is "objective" or "neutral") won't make it so!

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hyperpape
My political theory includes as a major idea that people dying when they don't
have to is typically bad.

Based on this, I judge certain environmental problems to be significant.
Someone else, motivated by the belief that environmental problems are
overblown, denies that they are. Mind you, this person doesn't deny that we
should try to save lives. They just deny the facts about what's happening. [1]

There are (contentious!) philosophical theories on which neither one of us is
being objective, but, C'MON, whatever philosophical points you might make, you
have to acknowledge a very real sense in which one of us is just reasoning
badly.

[1] And to forestall any knee-jerk reactions, yes, it is sometimes the case
that people assume a potential environmental problem is a disaster because of
the opposite sort of mood affiliation. Which is more common isn't even the
point.

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chroma
If you're against involuntary death, shouldn't your top priority be curing
aging? The vast majority of deaths on this planet are due to age-related
illnesses. Not accidents, not violence, and certainly not environmental
catastrophes.

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hyperpape
Possibly! We'd both have to spell out a lot of details to have that argument.
I'm not the one to have it either, because I don't know how plausible it is
that we can really solve aging anytime soon.

But I'd say it's not super-relevant to the argument at hand, since the person
who we're discussing doesn't say "these environmental problems are less
important than aging" but just denies the specific harms are happening on the
scale they are.

Edit: crap, left out a not. "It's _not_ super-relevant."

