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Comment by SideburnsOfDoom | Hacker News Reader

> Wouldn't be wise to focus on unresolved problems like hunger, poverty, education and incurable diseases?

Several times on HN I have posed replies that consist of the snappy comment: "your logical fallacy is: " followed by a link. It doesn't usually go over well.

Yes, it would be wise to do those things. I mean, to do them as well: It's not one of the other. The "don't go to Mars, fix poverty" argument is something like Whataboutery or "Fallacy of relative privation"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

http://www.logicallyfallacious.com/index.php/logical-fallaci...

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I am not saying "don't go to Mars" or not comparing two unrelated actions. What I just wanted to imply is reaching to Mars won't resolve our existence problem. There are several problems that we need to resolve. Human race won't be saved when we reach to Mars. Colonization will be highly dependent to Earth and Earth's problems. What I am saying is the solution of problem of human extinction isn't reaching to Mars.

I wonder... do we have the knowhow to build `logical_fallacy_bot` and deploy it to the general Internet yet?

I love this idea. Alongside factual_error_bot it would completely transform political discourse.

Imagine if presidential debates had real-time scoring of what was being said. Politifact is great, but 24h delay makes it substantially less impactful.

People already use bots to harass their opponents on twitter, etc. It's not a good thing. This sounds good for a short while, but think through how misguided or malicious people would use it.

Do you know of any data sets of examples of logical fallacies?

Your logical fallacy is: Just because we can doesn't mean we should.

That's what my experience indicates, anyway ;)

The fallacy links are just inappropriate in this case.

"It's not one or the other"

To a large degree it is, as in "you cant have your cake and eat it".

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