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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

I would like to hold my hands up and apply for penitence here, I am definitely guilty of that. A lot of it has to do with the fact that this is one of the few places on the internet where the majority of people are capable and qualified to have these "work to rule" (lovely analogy) type of logical debates. In this environment I have a tendency to debate in this way simply because I find it very intellectually challenging and rewarding. It also may well come from the fact that I and others often comment here as a break from coding, and as such we are in a very rigid, strict logical mindset when we post.

(I would hope however that I never use it as a get-out-clause in an argument I am losing. That is simply intellectually dishonest.)

Also it is perhaps because I am still reading Godel Escher Bach, which is shot through with this kind of thinking, and still enjoying it immensely. Large tracts of it are in fact made up of the very type of debates you describe. This sounds like awful reading, but bear in mind they are written in the style of Lewis Carrol.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_E...

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