The Harry Potter fallacy | Hacker News Reader

The Harry Potter fallacy

the-tls.co.uk

169 pointsrzk188 comments

I agree that pointing out fallacies can get excessive, but is mainly based on the intention for so doing.

The difficulty is that there is an entire class of people who don't even care about being logically correct or in finding truth. They desire or "feel" something and will barge their way through to get it, even if it is antithetical to their stated goals and eventually results in their misery. Reasoning with such people is somewhat futile, even pointing out their fallacies in good faith will do nothing. They may even reject logic entirely, as is becoming more common in our society.

In that case, pointing out that someone is committing a fallacy can be something of a canary test of their desire to reason. You could offer to help them with their argument, point out ways around the fallacy, engage with them in good faith, but if they are obsessively attached to their fallacy and their flawed position, then there isn't much you can do. There is no mathematical or logical solution to that problem, that is a "people problem".

When dealing with such a person or class of people, using humour to make them look foolish can be more effective, since then the main goal should be to reveal to others how childish their position is or pressure them into abandoning their purely emotional position; or resorting to even better emotional fallacies. The name of the game is to get emotions on your side.

> The difficulty is that there is an entire class of people who don't even care about being logically correct or in finding truth. They desire or "feel" something and will barge their way through to get it,

A malicious philosopher tells you that to move from point A to B, you must first pass through an infinite number of midpoints, and therefore motion is impossible. Do you: Invent/learn calculus to prove him wrong rigorously? Or do you walk away?

For some few people, figuring out the matter rationally may bear a lot of fruit. But most people will be better served by walking away. For those people, wasting their time with rational arguments would be irrational. They have better things to do with their day. Irrational arguments can cut through solipsistic bullshit very fast and efficiently, and that makes them a valuable and productive tool for most people much of the time.

> A malicious philosopher tells you that to move from point A to B, you must first pass through an infinite number of midpoints, and therefore motion is impossible.

Easily countered by stating that the distance between adjacent points within this infinite set must be zero, so the total distance is zero and you can travel any distance instantaneously.

Now the philosopher has to invent calculus to prove you wrong.

How do you prove both of these claims wrong, using calculus?

The first is Zeno's Paradox, or a variation thereof. The solution is that passing through infinitely many midpoints is fine, since the sum of an infinite number of positive numbers can still be finite. The example that solves the original Zeno's Paradox (you run half the distance, then one quarter, then one eight, etc, and never get there) is the fact that 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + ... sums up to 1, since it's a Geometric Series.

The second comment touches on how just because the limit of something approaches 0, you can't treat it as 0. If you divide a line into infinitely many segments, the length of those segments approaches 0, but if you treat them as if they were really 0 you get wrong results when summing them back up. Usually that gets relevant with integrals, but in this example it happens with a simple 1-dimensional sum.

> The second comment touches on how just because the limit of something approaches 0, you can't treat it as 0.

I think this one is a little more subtle. You can definitely treat the limit of something as an exact value.

If you split a segment of unit length into n segments, then each segment has length 1/n. As n goes to infinity, 1/n goes to zero. But at the limit, 1/n = 0, exactly. Not approximately, really exactly, and there is nothing wrong with defining lim[n->inf] 1/n = 0 and using that in a calculation. It's no different than saying lim[n->inf] sum[k=1..n] 2^-k = 1 as you did in the first paragraph.

The problem is slightly different. The person conceives of a sequence of `n` copies of `1/n`. For any finite value of n, these add up to 1 of course; it's just the result of calculating `n × 1/n`. But at the limit, they pull a trick: they say lim[n->inf] 1/n = 0 (which is correct) therefore any sum of these values is 0 too. But we never had lim[n->inf] 1/n, we had lim[n->inf] (n × 1/n) instead!

If you put it in mathematical terms, the argument is:

   lim[n->inf] (n × 1/n) = 
   (lim[n->inf] n) × (lim[n->inf] 1/n) = 0

Which has two problems: first, you can't split up a limit like that, so the first step is already invalid. Second, even if it were valid, lim[n->inf] n = infinity, which is not a number, so you can't multiply with it, and the conclusion that the result is 0 is wrong. You might think `x × 0 = 0` for any x, but that's only true if x is actually a number; if x is not a number the answer is undefined.

This is a similar kind of fallacy that underlies the proof that pi=4, here: http://www.kevinhouston.net/blog/2011/03/pi-is-4-video/, where the author (intentionally) confuses the perimeter of the limit (pi) with the limit of the perimeter (4).

If you divide a line into infinitely many segments, the length of those segments approaches 0

Hence the real world being quantized. You can't even hypothetically divide a string into infinite points because there is a smallest distance, below which it really does round to zero, i.e., a singularity.

We have no solid evidence of space-time itself being quantized.

alternatively, you realize the runner/observer is not infinitely small and that effectively puts a finite, lower bounds on the steps, because most of that approach to zero is too small to matter, practically.

learning that infinite things could be finitely bounded was mind-blowing back in the day however.

You don't. Calculus gives exact measurements of the situation in terms of math. But math is fiction, one of many descriptions of reality that we have invented. Other descriptions, many of them non-scientific, work equally well.

I just threw a rock at your head. It hit your head. Therefore, motion is possible without math.

Appeal to the stone fallacy!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_the_stone

Appeal to the stone may be the most effective refutation to "very smart" A+ students with B- intellects (a.k.a. my K–12 peers)

Then again, I generally have a dim view of using deductive reasoning as the first method of thinking. Lots of petulant "my absurd conclusion is correct because you agreed to my premises and that my argument contained no obvious logical fallacies" in that camp.

> But math is fiction […]

Anyone interested in this can search for "Is math invented or discovered?".

I wouldn't say that math is fiction. I'd say that it's a tool that can be tested, but there isn't one tool that's correct. There can be many such as Euclidean vs Bolyai-Lobachevskian geometry. Both are non-fiction, one maybe more useful than the other.

All the tools are fiction. They are creations of man. The rock doesnt care. Its existence is not altered one iota by the tools that man use to describe its motion. Things that have no impact outside the minds of men are fiction.

If you are correct, then man must also be fiction.

I keep using my consciousness to figure out if my consciousness is real, but I think it might be biased.

We can predict what will happen to the rock. That predict will or won't be fiction. If the rock is nahcolite we know what'll happen if we mix it with acid. The prediction will be fact or fiction.

well then 'fiction' is fiction so i guess everything is real

Calculus explains how the sum of infinitely many infinitely small numbers can be any finite or infinite number, depending on how they are constructed.

This is a great response. Another good response is to ask the philosopher to prove the existence of infinity.

The problem with the argument wasn't the argument itself, but rather that the other side of the conversation doesn't want to hear it. Therefore, pointing out the strengths and/or weaknesses of arguments won't matter.

The basic issue is better stated as such: we have globally accepted non-truths, dogmas if you will, and found it acceptable to punish people for pointing these out, even where no harm to individuals is meant by them.

Which ones? Obviously they multiplied over time, and we all know. They relate to racism, sexism, non-binary sexes (whether the biological ones or the non-biological ones), global warming, ...

For both your and your parent's counter responses, I have to agree with MichaelCollins: Most people are still better served with the irrational response.

In fact, until the other party can justify my using my time to engage with him, the irrational response is a good one.

These 2 comments are such keepers. Thanks both of you.

> Irrational arguments can cut through solipsistic bullshit very fast and efficiently

The problem with irrational arguments is that you can also cut your way straight into bullshit of any kind. And there's a lot more ways to be wrong than there are to be right.

The problem with irrational arguments is that they're often a poor description of reality. And a poor description of reality can literally kill you and the people around you. (Covid denial, any number of addictions, climate catastrophe denial, and so on.)

Unfortunately that is also the problem with rational arguments if they are deliberately or ignorantly reductive, i.e. without holistic perspective.

But not every appeal to logic comes from malicious philosophers. Most do not.

So, in practice, you get a lot of lazy dismissals in service of selfish desires.

> But not every appeal to logic comes from malicious philosophers. Most do not.

Whether it comes from a malicious philosopher or somebody who means well but is confused, it is generally prudent to consider whether the discussion is actually worth your time.

I haven't met many philosophers actually pitching Zeno's paradoxes at people, but some I've encountered recently for real: reasons why Jesus is the means to salvation, why the Earth is flat, and why we're probably living in a simulation. I brush these aside without giving them serious responses, because I selfishly want to spend my time in other ways.

That's not selfish - we only have so much time. The expectation that one should engage with everybody all the time will lead to misery. It's totally okay to say " no thanks, have a nice day" Edit: I realize your pointing out the prudence of an upfront decision of whether or not to engage means we probably agree here, I just consider the word selfish to be a bit harsh

Sometimes it is a quick occlusion algorithm; if we spent time evaluating every proposal we encountered, we would never get much done. Being able to quickly remove some arguments that our brain can quickly exclude (even when sometimes incorrectly) is a dramatic optimization. The key is training our brain to do it (mostly) correctly, like some kind of truth Bloom filter.

In my experience they kinda do.

You draw 2 points on the floor, mark them as A and B, then walk from A to B in front of him.

That was just an evil demon deceiving him with a false illusion of the real world. It didn't actually happen.

Unfortunately, for certain people in certain situations even this won't do it.

"My fist is a point A and your face is at point B. If you're correct, my right hook will never connect with your nose. Would you like to empirically test your hypothesis?" :)

You're talking about a known "malicious philosopher". Is that shorthand for someone arguing in bad faith? I think most of the time, you don't know if you're talking with a "malicious" philosopher or not. Let's say in the course of a discussion with someone you don't know to be malicious, you feel they are setting up a strawman. Maybe they don't fully understand what you are saying, or maybe they are malicious and arguing in bad faith (or both). How do you determine this? Certainly not by saying "strawman!" at them (to tie this back to the article).

Why is this important to me? I like to see if I'm communicating my ideas in a way most people can understand, so if it is just a misunderstanding, I know maybe I need to be more clear in what I say. I feel like if my arguments aren't clear, my other communication may not be clear, and that's important to me, professionally and personally. However, if they're just arguing in bad faith, well, then yeah I don't care and will walk away.

> Let's say in the course of a discussion with someone you don't know to be malicious, you feel they are setting up a strawman. Maybe they don't fully understand what you are saying, or maybe they are malicious and arguing in bad faith (or both). How do you determine this? Certainly not by saying "strawman!" at them (to tie this back to the article).

You determine it by probing why the conversation is occurring in the first place. Whether a brusque "Why are we discussing this?" or a politer "My time is a bit short. Can you give me an idea of the goals for this discussion?" Or even "What would it mean for you to have this conversation?"

There's nothing wrong with pointing out that you're not getting much benefit from the discussion.

I'll throw out another "class" of person - someone who believes something, and at least grasps the concept of philosophical reasoning enough that they'll attempt to build one of the basic forms of argument - usually an argument by analogy - and having done so, they'll trumpet their conclusion. Then, commenters will pile in, either being part of the class of people you mention (who will skip reading the argument and just check to make sure the conclusion is what they want) or being part of the same class who will review the argument, stamp a "lgtm!" on it, and upvote/concur. We're right! And look, it's got proof attached, too!

But then even the most amateur student of philosophy, perhaps about 60% of the way through their freshman (mandatory) Philosophy 101 course, would be able to examine the argument and identify mistakes so appallingly obvious that they might be provided as practice problems in their homework. The analogy isn't appropriate; or it begs the question; or it assumes some predicate where their proof may hold if the predicate is true, but the predicate itself must be proven for the conclusion to be substantive.

I see this a lot on reddit. Especially recently due to the abortion debates re-heating. Arguers - regardless of side - are so poorly equipped by our education system, and so poorly incentivized by the highly polarized/tribalistic nature of modern political discourse, that even when people try they're still not making any progress in reasoning about their positions.

Adding on: and sometimes, even when they manage to make an interesting point, they've gotten so lost in their appraisal of their argument that the philosophical question ends up not even being the one they actually care about.

To that last point, I've lately seen a lot of arguments for abortion being ethical/unethical that end up just being modified Trolley problems. One I saw that stuck with me was: "Suppose there is a fire in a building. You have a test tube of 1000 human embryos in one hand, and a 4 year old girl in the other. The only possible outcomes are you saving the vial or the girl, or neither. Which do you choose?"

I thought this was an interesting take, since it reads as a very different situation depending on your view of the embryos!

A "pro-life" person would clearly interpret this as a modified trolley problem. You have 1000 embryos who could become people but cannot feel pain or terror or [etc] right now (or at least not in the same way as the 4-year-old). Or you have a 4-year-old who can, and will suffer greatly. This is quite trolley-esque and while this one seems to have somewhat of a likely-correct answer, it's certainly not without some complication.

Someone who thinks the embryos aren't yet people or persons will see this as a much less interesting thought exercise - of course you save the 4-year-old, the vial is just some cells that clearly don't even have consciousness yet.

And there's even a whole swathe of positions in between who will assign some amount of humanity to the embryos and attempt to resolve the quandary between the embryos vs the 4-year-old.

But, as interesting as this is, it completely misses the point of the original question-poser. Regardless of which option you pick as correct, it doesn't really inform us much as to whether abortion is ethical. Going back to my main point of bemoaning the dreadful state of the average internet argument.

Assuming those 1000 embryos belonged to e.g. 100 cancer patients who were subsequently rendered infertile by chemo, the choice really comes down to, kill one child, or effectively sterilize 100 cancer patients by removing their option to have biological children.

You could rephrase the problem as this: you have a sterility gun that will fire 100 times. You can direct it into a crowd where it will permanently sterilize 100 random people. Or point it at one 4 year old, who will be killed by the accumulated 100 shots. Which is more harmful?

Politics on reddit? Isn't that shills arguing with shills moderated by shills ranked by a biased algorithm that other shills try to game with vote bots.

It may be hard to figure out if somebody is nitpicking on irrelevant stuff as "pointing out fallacies" because they are sure about their conclusion and just want to barge their way through to it.

When you're dealing with someone like that, there's very little incentive to continue arguing, they will latch onto whatever it is that makes them feel they were right without actually consider the issue at hand.

It may actually be used as a test of their desire to engage with the problem. Throw them an irrelevant thing they can be right about (maybe even a typo or wrong grammar), and see the actual issue fade away from their mind.

Pointing out fallacies in conversation, both online or IRL, is, and always will be, pointless. That is not because people don't care about being logical. Dropping fallacies is just lazy and makes you sound like a dick. It's lazy because you're trying to solve the problem without doing the work. It's a shortcut. The knowledge of fallacies is useful to identify common flaws in arguments and is particularly useful for you to construct a better, more persuasive counter-argument. No one should expect the "opposing side" to do that for them. You can't just shout "strawman!" and drop the mike. That's not how a conversation works.

>Dropping fallacies is just lazy and makes you sound like a dick.

Yes, this happened in the tragic case of Fallacy Man [0], who demonstrated that simply announcing a fallacy is not a sufficient argument.

[0] https://existentialcomics.com/comic/9

Pointing out fallacies doesn't work because doing so itself uses the fallacy of "I have proven you wrong, therefore I am right" when the most likely truth is both are horrendously off-base.

> No one should expect the "opposing side" to do that for them. You can't just shout "strawman!" and drop the mike. That's not how a conversation works.

It can be a useful heuristic to determine how much effort you want to expend on a topic with someone else. If someone is simply putting forward tu quoque / ad hominem statements, then pointing this out and asking if there are any other reasons can perhaps lead to focusing on more 'productive' areas of disagreement.

It's useful if you keep it to yourself and use it to redirect your own reasoning. If you say out loud that it's actually a fallacy, not only you won't convince anyone you'll immediately look like a dick. Guaranteed.

> “… make them look foolish … then … reveal to others how childish their position is or pressure them into abandoning their … position.”

Yikes. I think the point of humor is to change the stakes, so people you’re working to persuade may think better.

Humiliation in the face of peers is an emotional attack and highly immoral.

If someone spreads dangerous falsehoods (say, an anti-vaxxer) and refuses all rational arguments, public ridicule might actually be our most efficient weapon, and certainly morally defensible.

And in that case you're appealing to the crowd and trying to persuade your opponent is not very likely and not the point.

I would argue it's less about "a class of people", and more about "the context/aim of the conversation".

If it's a "discussion", i.e. a conversation with the aim of improving the understanding of all parties involved, "winning" is the worst outcome, and fallacious arguments are likely to be done by accident and gladly corrected.

If it's a debate, then by definition you're trying to win, and all bets are off.

PS. It may be true however that a particular "class of people" enjoys plugging themselves in one type of conversation more than the other.

> the name of the game is to get the emotions on your side.

In order to do this, you need to recognize your own emotional needs. You might say something like: “to move forward here, I need to trust that we are both willing to see reality clearly and use solid reasoning to make wise decisions even if those decisions are uncomfortable to think about. When I hear you say X, that I notice that it risks {name of fallacy} and I would not feel responsible unless I help us avoid stumbling into that. Could you please help me by clarifying what you mean here?”

This imposes some discomfort on you by clearly revealing needs for responsibility and trustworthiness… but it also gives the other person a clear choice:

A. Re-think what they’ve said and either follow your lead in avoiding the fallacy or asking you for help understanding.

B. Explicitly deny your need to use logic to make responsible choices.

And you can decide how much to trust the other person when the responsibility they have for making that choice wisely is made clear to them.

There are cases where it's rational to reject logic entirely, for example, when you lack the necessary background knowledge in a field to apply it reliably. Classical logic fails very badly when one of its premises fails to be completely true, as numerous famous paradoxes illustrate, and we all know some people who have been convinced of false things through logical argument.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...

And, although Bayesian reasoning can deal with degrees of uncertainty other than "impossible" and "beyond the shadow of a doubt", it can still collapse under an onslaught of evidence chosen to favor one position:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chin...

But the problem with taking the debate out of the logical realm and into the emotional realm is that, while you may win the debate, you will only win it if you are better at emotional manipulation than the other side is. In particular you will always lose if the other side is, for example, a Hollywood studio. And this is true whether you are right or wrong.

Gandhi's greatest claimed advantage for satyagraha over coercion by armed struggle was not that it was more likely to win; it was that it was incapable of effectively promoting evil goals.

Predictably, there's a Slate Star Codex post ascribing the same virtue to rational argument:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-c...

Hey Sophistry! There's a big difference between convincing the person you're arguing with and convincing an audience. I may persuade you, or you may persuade me and I think in that situation we both get closer to the truth. But if we have an audience, our arguments are restricted to what might convince each other AND what might convince the audience.

If the audience is the real decider, I can't really know how logical the audience is, so I'm going to play every dirty trick I can to win.

it's subtle, and textured. If I gotta convince you - say for funding, I've got a broader array of arguments to use. if I've gotta convince you and the audience, I've got a fairly narrow range of options. If I gotta convince the audience, well, that's all analogies about how my dog died and it sucked, so if we'd done this my dog would still be around and it's better for everybody.

historically you'd have to worry about the audience of 20 or so people that cared. and we'd probably both know them and how to sway their opinions. Kennedy Nixon is held up as a big example of persuading millions. You gotta scope in two dimensions. Your interlocutor and the audience. They have different weights. It's hard. Our ancestral heritage doesn't really give us much support for persuading a bazillion people. But that's sort of the table stakes today. Maybe not persuaded, but the audience must remain indifferent.

Isn't it possible to get these people to come to their senses by showing them historical failures of people in a similar situation?

The people who don't care about the truth and the people who will point out fallacies all day are the same people. Shouting "Ad hominem!" and pointing your wand at the opponent is just another way to "own people with facts and logic" (read: counterfeit the form of a winning argument without the substance of it). That's why pointing out fallacies to win an argument is called the fallacy fallacy.

Yup, when a person has abandoned reason, no reason can disturb their position.

This is why we see so many anti-science movements.

If we are talking about internet discussions we should not forget that the act of finding truth does not only concern the person you are discussing with, but the silent bystanders and those who stumble upon the scene way after.

I cannot imagine many situations where shouting ad hominem! would give you better chances at convincing the audience you were right, than for example explaining why you think the other person is misrepresenting your argument unfairly. If you play this the right way you might be even able to get the person opposite towards some realization.

Humour is a good way, but another good way is pretending not to know things, have them explain things to you — all while naively asking the painful questions. This can be as simple as asking Why? till they come to the point where they suddenly have to talk about the base of their believes:

  A: I hate foreigners
  B: Why?
  A: Because they are stealing our jobs!
  B: Why are they doing that?
  A: Because they cannot get jobs in their home country.
  B: Why do you think that is?
  A: I think $Nationality is just lazier than us.

At this point you can go on, or you could ask why he is afraid of them stealing his job when they are lazy. But the point is: this provides more insight to the emotion based thinking of the other side than any discussion where you were going against the guy from the start could have done.

Of course it is not always the right move to start a discussion with someone just because they are saying something that is wrong. Just start a discussion if you are willing to follow through.

This is Schrodinger's Immigrant[1], often spotted in the UK Murdoch papers, sometimes even in the same edition.

[1] https://www.econlib.org/schrodingers-immigrant/

Lazy yet stealing jobs. Yup that makes sense.

The better argument is that the more immigration there is the more difficult it becomes to provide various social programs. Difficult doesn't imply impossible however. One countering argument is that the more people there are the more taxation there is to support social programs. The truth therefore is that immigration has both good and bad aspects so there's a balancing point: Fully open or fully closed borders are likely a bad idea in general.

"Social programs" here being things like education and health. "Minor" things like that...

> The better argument is that the more immigration there is the more difficult it becomes to provide various social programs

The counter argument is that in an aging Country like mine, less immigration is killing social programs (caregivers are mostly immigrants here) and entire economic sectors (like catering and hospitality) because there aren't enough workers willing to do the job, but the trumpets both left and right shout that the other party is not doing enough to create new jobs and people lament that they can't find one.

We can call it the Schrödinger job that's both nowhere to be found by employers and yet highly prized among the population.

I believe Schrödinger would be very surprised to see that his experiment can be applied to social phenomenon and not only to quantum mechanics.

>> because there aren't enough workers willing to do the job

because there aren't enough workers willing to do the job at a price employers want to pay

Fixed it for you. There is never a labour shortage, only a shortage at a particular wage rate.

> because there aren't enough workers willing to do the job at a price employers want to pay

> Fixed it for you

I like people who assume without knowing like anybody else, but that's not the point.

These are jobs that usually pay above average salaries, people simply don't want to work on the evening (restaurants serve dinners, you know...) or in the weekend (restaurants work the most when people do not work or are on holiday etc. etc.)

So they both want the money and the time.

Long story short: they don't want to do the job, which is legit, but can't at the same time complain that there are no jobs IMO.

> There is never a labour shortage, only a shortage at a particular wage rate

There are limits though, over a certain threshold it becomes nonsensical, at some point it's better to kill the job sector entirely and call it a day.

If a waiter wants the same salary of a CEO, probably she/he's shooting too high...

Or they imagine that restaurants should be for billionaires only, that would shrink the number of available jobs to the bare minimum and skyrocket the skills needed to actually do the job.

Schrodinger at work here too.

p.s.: in my Country collective negotiation is the norm, one cannot easily pay radically different salaries for the same job. On the flip side once hired it's not as easy as in other Countries to be fired, it is actually pretty difficult to fire someone.

>> These are jobs that usually pay above average salaries, people simply don't want to work on the evening (restaurants serve dinners, you know...)

People will do all sorts of unsavoury jobs if the pay is high enough. Plenty of people work night shifts in various jobs.

>> There are limits though, over a certain threshold it becomes nonsensical, at some point it's better to kill the job sector entirely and call it a day.

This we can agree on.

------ Update due to the posting too fast rules ----

If I offered to pay you $10,000/night as a waiter in a restaurant, I guess you would take the job. I would.

If I offered you $1/night, you probably wouldn't.

Hopefully, somewhere between those two points is a number that will get people to work and be profitable for the restaurant owner. I'm not sure why people think supply and demand applies to other goods but not labour.

Upper Limit. Hiring you at $3,000 a month will increase my income by $3,000.

No reason to hire you. Below $3,000 and I can make money.

But ~1/3 employees are lazy and I can't fire them. So I have build in some safety margin for the bad employee's.

So I can pay you $2,000 a month and on average I'll break even. No thanks.

So I can pay you $1,500 a month, I'll make $500.

> People will do all sorts of unsavoury jobs if the pay is high enough. Plenty of people work night shifts in various jobs.

One would think...

Problem is that people that are willing to do that are not that many as you imagine.

Maybe where you come from people would kill themselves for money, but not here.

You know who would do almost anything to get a job and become better integrated with society while also feeling better about themselves?

Immigrants.

> If I offered to pay you $10,000/night as a waiter in a restaurant, I guess you would take the job. I would.

Surprise, I would not.

My best friends have restaurants and pubs, if I ever wanted to do that job I would already do that.

But it's not my job, it's not what I am good at and if someone gave me $10,000 night to do that job I would feel like a fraud. Also I would imagine that if you pay me that much, one that is actually good at the job is being paid at least 2x that amount, because I really suck at that!

People have consciences, believe it or not not everyone is a money-slut.

I'm much better off doing my job, which is what I really like to do.

But back on topic: if you offer a waiter 2,000 euros / month + tips (it's a very good salary in Italy) and they stop coming at work after a few days "because I wanted to go to the beach with my friends" there's something different going on, which is not "not enough money".

Besides: there are many psychological studies that point out that people would accept lower salaries for more meaningful jobs or better work/life balance and that they work more willingly if it's a favor to someone (even if it's people they do not know) and/or for free than for a paid position, where they feel like they are only doing it for the money but don't really wanna do that. So they prefer to say no to the money and don't do the thing at all.

Correlations have been found.

For example, I would push someone on a wheelchair for free, but if they offered me money to do it, I would politely refuse with an excuse, because it's not something I wanna do for money (not that I do not like money in general, it's that I do not want to do it as a job, paying someone it's exactly that: hiring the person for the job)

> Surprise, I would not.

Yes, I find it surprising. Seems to not compute.

>But back on topic: if you offer a waiter 2,000 euros / month + tips

This is poverty wages. That waiter would never be able to afford a home and family of his own. The waiter would find time to go to the beach around his work schedule if he was properly compensated.

> Yes, I find it surprising. Seems to not compute.

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

I have to guess that you're slave to the money, I'm not.

I really don't care about them , as long my life is not in danger.

> This is poverty wages

LOL

American, right?

Average salaries in Europe are not much higher than that

Italy: €1.740

Spain: €1.800

Portugal: €1.1160

UK: €2.200

And these numbers are after taxes (which are quite high for US standards here, but also they really are not if you wanna define yourself a decent developed Country). So the employer is spending almost 2x, which is not bad per se if you ask me, but that's still something to consider.

> . The waiter would find time to go to the beach around his work schedule if he was properly compensated.

Restaurants are closed usually at least one day/week and 2-3 weeks off-season (it depends on the geography for some it's August for others it's fall/winter).

It's just that most of them close during the week and people want to go to the beach with friends and/or family on weekends.

But then again, you don't complain that there is no job if you don't want to do any job you're cut for and are not qualified for well paid, highly skilled jobs.

Please, if you wanna discuss things, can you at least learn the bare minimum to actually have a conversation that is not entirely based on your prejudices and stereotypes?

And €1.740 is enough to afford an average home in Italy? Raise a family? Seems not enough to me.

Half of the population is doing it with less than that, so I guess the answer is yes.

Also: salaries are per capita, two people with kids on average earn 2x that.

Most of Italy is not big costly cities, but small towns where prices are much more affordable.

You can rent a 100 square meters house in Taranto centre (quite large city in Apulia) for about 500-600 euros/month.

You can eat out in a restaurant and have a full meal for 20 euros.

Of course they are not getting rich.

Of course there are people who literally cannot live on their income and we should do more about it, like raising wages, for example, when possible.

Reminder: after taxes, which means free healthcare and free schools.

Taxes are paid by the employer as part of the salary.

Perhaps you could open a restaurant and pay people as much as they want to live a comfortable life. If you could do that and stay in business I would be most impressed.

Won't be able to stay in business without workers. If workers cannot live comfortably on their wages, they'll choose another job that provides those wages.

Funny. That's not how life works for most people.

Most people earn what they can, and live off it as best they can. If that means single bedroom apartment with 10 family members eating beans and rice, then that is what it is.

People on HN tend to be out of touch with how lower income people actually live.

In my own life over the course of twenty years I went from: living in a tent with 3 others for a year, to a one bedroom apartment with a roommate in the living room, to an apartment with just my wife, to buying a house and starting a family, to then buying a house with a pool and sending my kids to decent schools.

The point is that rice and beans is temporary. As a worker, I continued to work towards better employment that provided the life I required. The vast majority of folks I knew along the way did the same. All 4 of the folks in that original tent with me are comfortably middle class nowadays.

If there are more job openings than there are workers to fill them, then it doesn't matter what wages anyone is willing to pay, surely some of those jobs are going to go un-filled?

> Lazy yet stealing jobs. Yup that makes sense.

There are lots of people for whom logic, and logical consistency, are non-priorities. If they are anti-immigrant* and emotional, assume that they're trying to articulate their emotions - not get an 'A' on their Public Policy 401 term paper, nor favorably impress people with quite different priorities and educational backgrounds from their own.

*Of course, their anti-immigrant "beliefs" may learned from demagoguery they've been exposed to, which was a good-enough emotional match for their economic & social pain & insecurity.

Yes, the lazy mid-wit dismissal used by the upper-middle classes, safe in the knowledge that they would never be replaced. Perhaps in 100,000 additional people a year, there could be groups that do either?

What if the person you are asking is an immigrant themselves? Would that answer make them reverse-Schrodinger's immigrant? Just trying to improve my Harry Potter game here...

I'm more of an "open borders libertarian" so by all means let everyone come in, but this here is a silly argument. If an immigrant comes, they're either going to get a job, or not get a job. From the point of view of someone who's opposed to more immigration, neither outcome is good. I fail to see a contradiction.

At the moment where instead of "Because they cannot get jobs in their home country." the counterpart says "Because they are willing to work for very low pay for which locals would be unable to make ends meet." you have some thinking to do, not him.

> This can be as simple as asking Why? till they come to the point where they suddenly have to talk about the base of their believes:

While I generally support this type of argument, it's not necessarily helpful. Someone can observe something real but misattribute the cause, and you can end up dismissing their observation because their explanation of it doesn't make sense.

For your example, just because immigrants aren't lazy doesn't mean they aren't "stealing jobs".

B: Because of Economics 101. Look it up sometime before talking rot.

Genuinely curious if this is a joke or not. In a thread about arguments, I honestly cannot tell.

I think that is perhaps the weakest strawman I have ever seen.

Three paragraphs and you dismiss it with a sentence. Since you're criticising I think you could have done better.

The asking questions approach is a great way to dig out the weeds especially when someone's thinking appears to be a mess. Especially if you think they are somehow malicious or have a less than positive intent.

I was referring to the seven lines of dialogue.

  B: Why do you think that is?

Or you could mind your own life and not gaslight people from your patronizing point of view?

> The difficulty is that there is an entire class of people who don't even care about being logically correct

I don’t think this is the right perspective. Being logically correct doesn’t exist, the best you can do is be logically consistent with your chosen axioms. I would suggest the deeper problem is that people tend to not think too much about the foundational axioms of their world view, and think you can simply debate a topic with somebody who has a world view founded on a completely different set of axioms.

No productive debate can take place in that context, because the controversy stems from the merit of your axioms, not how they apply to a given situation.

Wow, its like watching somebody getting born.

Now if we accept, that such variety of "castes" of unreasonable people exists and they do not want to "grow up", then society has to be adjusted for that, i guess. Making capability groups of neuro diverse people.

Such persons would need a representative politically, to speak in there interests. Such a person would need limitations, to limit the damage they could cause.

Reasonable people would have to be protected from this non-blue-blood class, to keep them productive and isolated. Systems need to created, to rile and cool the emotions of the non-logicals to make them steerable.

There should be a science to differentiate the various types of illogical people, based upon the data collected by the big four. And steering unreasonable people should be a science too.

We should call it something cool. Something witty. Leviathancybernetics. Get it. Hobbes, the leviathan, and the art to surgically implant synthetic structures and to turn society into a prothesis god.

Now, lets talk about the negative side effects of knowing so much about society and humans. It turns you into a grandfather clock. All you hear is gears and mechanics, grinding your teeth, while all you observe your own instincts firing from the sub concious.

Lets see how long we can keep this going, before the NDA gods hammer down.

Life longs for the exponential. Intelligent life defeats the predation of life by other life (bacteria, virals, predators, etc.) and allows for a exponential curve bumping into the resource ceiling , the line that is the environment. Again and again. Starts the moment you become apex predator actually.

Now darwinian evolution is blind, it just sees the merry go round spiral and adapts sub-groups of the population to it. Stable -> Exceeding Env Limitations -> Unstable -> Society Reassembling. Each of the four groups should in a cycling society be around 25 %. Each yearns for its natural situational habbitat and tries to push towards were it has advantages. Each has deep instincts, to not "waste" resources and step outside the god whorshipped which is a bloody wheel of butchering.

A stable society is basically only possible for brief amounts of time, where the wheel is propped up and technology used to harness a surplus to keep the cyclic society from returning to the "default" of old.

The amount of resources to do this, is enormous and some of the groups involved see this only as a "prolonged" recovery phase pre next conflict/collapse. Handing them the technology necessary to keep the peace, equals handing them apocalyptic weapons for conflict, should the peace break.

So its a trap, unless one learns to implement societal self-control, one will forever hand more dangerous toys to us loop-deformed creatures. Which would make a great explenation for a universal filter, if there ever was one.

> armed with a new toolbox of Latin names for fallacies, eager students all too often delight in spotting fallacies in the wild, shouting out their Latin names (ad hominem!; secundum quid!) as if they were magic spells. This is what Scott Aikin and John Casey, in their delightful book Straw Man Arguments, call the Harry Potter fallacy: the “troublesome practice of invoking fallacy names in place of substantive discussion”.

I've long wondered about doing online debates (which usually end up in shit throwing) where an independent moderator or bot detects and mentions fallacies.

But I think in practice it would mean no arguments would hold weight anymore.

Anyway, the main problem I think is not logical fallacies, but people not debating in good faith, and / or having a fixed opinion already. I did read about a trick, starting a debate by asking "What will it take to convince you?"; depending on the answer, you won't even have to bother.

I mean there's no debating with the anti-science movement(s) because they put facts into question, for example. I mean being skeptic is not a bad thing, but what will it take to get past the skepticism?

Or to put yourself in their shoes, what will it take to convince you that, for example, the earth is flat? (I mean it's OBVIOUSLY more like a dinosaur, but let's not go into that).

Isn’t a debate by definition two sides trying to convince a 3rd party which side is correct. The sides involved in the debate will never back down.

A discussion on the other hand is when both sides just try to reach the “best” conclusion. Unfortunately all too many things are debates and not discussions…

A bot that detects logical fallacies would be amazing for journaling. Would be really interesting to stream of consciousness into a text document and have the computer put red underlines under questionable premises or conclusions.

indeed the reference is weak

Yeah it's much better to call this the "fallacy fallacy"

An important lesson in second-order ethics. If your opponent is willing to operate outside of the rules of the game (as you see them) aka acts in bad faith, they can achieve their ends by taking advantage of your adherence to the rules. Recognizing when someone is doing this and refusing to play along is a difficult, but sometimes essential, skill. (Though one we all learned to some extent on the playground)

Ben Shapiro is a classic case of someone who has made a career out of bad faith 'debating'.

Short form and heavily edited to fit short attention media platforms are biased towards this style of interaction because breaking down bad faith debating is a much longer and detailed process than the initial statement.

I learned fairly recently there is a name for this: The Gish Gallop; “a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm their opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments.”

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

I hear his name a lot but never actually saw anything he did. What type of stuff does he do?

A neutral answer: he's a popular young conservative Jewish-American political pundit who gained fame for debates at college campuses. He gained notoriety for his snappy rhetorical "takedowns" of (mostly left-leaning) university students during open-forum guest lectures he frequently hosts on college campuses.

My personal take: his "takedowns" are pretty fun entertainment, but doesn't really have anything to do with which political position is correct or not. A lot of contemporary political ideas have a "nuanced, difficult to explain, strong" version, and a "flawed, weak, easy to explain" version. For most people, when asked to explain their political views, have trouble formulating the strongest version of their argument. Many people believe what they believe purely on emotional or tribal grounds rather than based on the facts of the matter. Ben's personal style is to find the weak version of an argument, and to (correctly) point out the obvious flaws in it. Of course, just because X argument for Y is fallacious, doesn't make Y false.

He "debates" college students using every logical fallacy possible.

Another name for a logical fallacy is "something that your brain prefers over strict logical constructions" or "a shortcut that the human brain is wired for".

Basically this generations Rush Limbaugh. Very popular Youngish conservative commentator that hosts a successfully podcast/radioshow.

He debates college kids, basically. He's in the same league as Jordan Peterson, another pseudo-intellectual.

These are our thought leaders in 2022.

If a (former) tenured and now emeritus professor doesn't count as an intellectual, I'm not sure who would. I have found he seems to have started falling for his own hype recently though. He was fascinating up until a few years ago, and even on the things I disagreed with him on he was worth listening to, but is turning into a parody of himself.

My impression of him has always been that he's one of those people who would never use one word when one hundred words were available. If he has any good ideas (and I'm skeptical based on what little I've seen and also his dissolution), it's so buried under academic-sounding rambling that working them out is more trouble than it's worth.

Virtually all debate is "bad faith." You've ever seen the Presidential debates? Shapiro doesn't do anything differently than any liberal pundit. The only difference is that he's really good at it, and liberals disagree with him.

Edit: Nothing confirms ideological blindness more than downvoting a comment without any rebuttals.

Refusing to play along will be seen as a loss, which is precisely the intention.

Depends on the refusal.

Most bad faith argumentation is a pretty straightforward combination of misdirection, cherry picking, outright lying, "proof" by repeated assertion, and a huge dose of personal insults and ridicule.

There's no need to stick to facts or logic if your opponent has made it clear it's not a good faith exchange.

The challenge is knowing how to calibrate responses for maximum effect on the audience - who are usually the real target - balanced between keeping credibility and staying relatable instead of dislikable.

The problem with pointing out logical fallacies is that it erodes both of those.

So you can end up being 100% right while appearing 100% wrong.

If you're trying to win over an audience based on fact, you've already lost.

Emotion wins every single time.

This is where you see a lot of really smart people trip up. They think that being right matters. It doesn't.

> The challenge is knowing how to calibrate responses for maximum effect on the audience - who are usually the real target - balanced between keeping credibility and staying relatable instead of dislikable.

100%

Sure, but most such losses are easily sustained, costing almost nothing.

Certainly, some are not. When running for office, it's dangerous. When talking to family, it's dangerous. But I sustain losses with a simple "fair enough" and walk away quite often having lost nothing. To people with slightly more good faith, a quick "I'm not quite convinced, but I can't nail down my disagreement" is sufficient to gracefully take the L.

AFAIK I'm quite well-respected in my peer group so it isn't causing me any harm.

The way around this is by 'no, but'ing.

You're not playing that game, you're going to play this other, better one instead. It requires some eloquence, charisma, and social intelligence to pull off such a redirection, though.

In defining the played game, the other person is expressing social power. Either playing along or refusing still allows them that power, whereas changing the game is addressing that expression of superiority directly.

Can you elaborate?

Except if you start with "OK, let's play along and see where that leads us".

This leads to disaster.

"OK, now that we've seen that what you are saying is bullshit, let's talk real" (you turn away form that person and start to talk even if they do as well)

Oh man, I hate politics.

Sounds to me like intolerant groups that abuse tolerance to push their agendas, or authoritative regimes that invoke free speech to push propaganda that undermines freedom. Would you say those belong in the same category.

Seems you're building on top of another HN thread from today:

"Ask HN: Higher order derivatives in everyday life?"

https//news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32257887

Unfortunately real life is more complex than Calculus I. The analogy is simultaneously valid and useless.

GP used 'higher-order' to mean higher in some ontology of abstraction, similar to 'meta', à la 'higher-order function'. In this case, in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-ethics

Speaking of today's submissions, Wikipedia might need some discussion of its own about what to do with these articles all about pretty much the same thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadiscourse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-discussion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-communication

(meta: username checks out)

Reminds me of Daniel Schmachtenberger's excellent article, The Endgames of Bad Faith Communication: https://consilienceproject.org/endgames-of-bad-communication....

Under his framework, this would be a specific example of bad faith communication, and he agrees that the breakdown in our ability to communicate in good faith is a threat to true democracy.

There are a few classics of middle-brow discourse:

- Fallacy Name Summoning: described in article

- Edge-Case Generalization: "Humans have two legs". "You haven't accounted for this man born with one leg".

- Single Paper Refutations: Search Google Scholar to find a single paper that does X. Means nothing. Lots of research is non-repeatable. Lots of it is faked.

- Single Paper Confirmations: The same as above but weasel-worded into "there is some evidence that" with rest of discussion operating under the frame of last-paper-submitted wins.

- Gish Gallops of the former: Single Paper Xs, n times. If you scan the space of papers with appropriate keywords, effectively sampling only the ones that will power your argument

Overall, each of these are mostly performed by (mu-eps, mu+sigma) people. You need some intelligence to get here. But it's really tiresome reasoning. For my part, I try to engage at best capacity, but sometimes I get really frustrated. It's a variant of the Blub Paradox. All the people below me on the Epistemology ladder are morons incapable of understanding things. All the people above me have failed to account for some nuance.

In any case, I now have certain heuristics. To be honest, it's quite nice to have these because, while these mid-brow participants are frustrating, they also lead to me taking a break from this website.

> In Straw Man Arguments Aikin and Casey introduce a wealth of concepts for getting to grips with the dark art of the straw man. Indeed, they propose a further notion: a fascinating inversion called the “iron man”, where one responds to a maximally strengthened form of one’s opponent’s argument and explains how even this move – which is sometimes seen as dialectical best practice – can sometimes be fallacious.

I wish they expanded on why the "iron man" (which I usually see called the steelman) can be fallacious. The only thing I can imagine is an "armored strawman" where you claim you're steelmanning but your changes to the argument actually make it weaker? Guess I'll have to buy the book...

The most common form I've seen is often not malicious: "thing you actually said is a weak form of this argument, the strongest form is in fact mostly agreeing with me"

The problem is that the strength or weakness of an argument is not objective. Usually steelmanning is fallacious when you don't first seek agreement with the counterparty that the new version of the argument is stronger. This comes up a lot when your counterparty is operating from different premises than you are.

E.g. attacking a utilitarian version of your conterparty's argument when the counterparty is not a utilitarian is fallacious, even if the utilitarian version of the argument seems stronger to you. They will see the argument as obviously flawed from the start, because they do not believe the utilitarian premise.

Since people are sharing frustrations around the topic of fallacies, my biggest beef with fallacies is that around every month or so someone comes up with an entirely new name for an already existing fallacy, which then trends on twitter and you now have to add to your list of synonyms.

E.g. I'd never heard of the term "Hollow man fallacy" to describe Bulverism before, but I'm like 90% sure it's already the more popular term now.

I'd not heard of the term Bulverism, so thank you. Nice account of its being coined, by C.S. Lewis, too, for anyone else unfamiiar with the term:

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

I guess the fact that it was C.S. Lewis that coined this is not at all surprising! I imagine arguing about something so obviously wrong with someone so smart would be amazingly frustrating.

I think I'm quite forgiving of those. I think a lot of more modern named fallacies are easily reachable by a teenager who happens to have read epistemology. i.e. someone who has been informed of the "straw man" could reasonably "worsen" the fallacy. They might then name it an "invisible man" or a "hollow man" or whatever simply so that their peer group can discuss the term.

I for one disagree with the article. Naming fallacies is shortcuts, useful in keeping the discussion focused on topic. If we had to explain why attacking the proponent instead of the argument is not disproving the argument every time someone uses ad-hominem any discussion would have to be so much longer.

In my experience, it is mostly the people who fall for logical fallacies that complain when the opponent is calling them out.

Naming the fallacy shouldn't be the end of your response though, because you both still disagree. Clearly your interlocutor is trying to point something out, perhaps an observation for which he has only a fallacious explanation, and merely pointing out the fallacy does not dismiss their position or suffice as a response. That's the article's point that calling out fallacies is not substantive discussion.

Related to the previous post and to this one (and agreeing with parts of both), I think it's worth mentioning an important aspect a little more explicitly: the conclusion of an argument that contains a fallacy is not necessarily false.

The conclusion isn't proven true, but the fallacious reasoning doesn't render it false either. Naming the fallacy can help refute, but it's likely that one needs to go further with their explanation of a differing conclusion (or a more sound reasoning of why the other's conclusion is, in fact, false).

You just described the fallacy fallacy :)

Also known as a fallacy fallacy. Related: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/9

No. They distinguish the Harry Potter fallacy from the fallacy fallacy.

Students, once they learn the fallacies, just love to spot them and charge others with committing them, and so expect that dropping some Latin name for an opponent’s argumentative move will be a kind of magic that fixes the critical discussion (often in their favor). Call it the Harry Potter problem, thinking that learning a little Latin phrase will paralyze an opponent with its expression. So entirely new kinds of wild and woolly behavior are encouraged with this vocabulary. Without fallacy theory teaching the fallacies, there would be no burden of specious allegations of fallacy. Further, new fallacies are made possible--take for example, the fallacy fallacy, inferring that an opponent’s position is false because it is supported by fallacious arguments.

Or, to be ironic with this post's name, argumentum ad logicam

Or, as most people would understand it, that you can be right for the wrong reasons

If a fallacy is wrong, wouldn't a fallacy fallacy be right

Not at all. You are commiting the fallacy fallacy fallacy: incorrect reasoning about fallacies above first order.

Something is probably whooshing over my head here.

The fallacy fallacy is when you argue a conclusion must be false because of a fallacy in how it was reached.

If a blind person told you that they believed that the sky is blue because someone told them it is, would you respond that that's argumentum ad verecundiam and therefore the sky is not blue?

> If one’s aim is not so much discovering the truth as winning an argument at all costs, fallacy theory can provide a training in the dark arts of closing down a discussion prematurely

Good HappyOpossum: “I totally need to make sure I avoid doing that”

Real HappyOpossum: “That’s totally how I can win arguments on HN, gotta make sure I study fallacy theory”

There’s no way to win arguments on social media

Public argument isn't really for trying to convince the opponent of your position, it's for convincing the onlookers of your position. In that sense maybe you can win an argument on social media?

I tend not to participate anyway, preferring a less confrontational approach.

I find it's a helpful way to challenge oneself. Get into an argument and very quickly you'll find things you hadn't considered, and a wonderfully easy way to bring one's own tribalism to the surface, where it can be killed more easily.

Getting challenged on one's positions and reconsidering them is ideal if it were so, and perhaps on HN it is about half the time.

On other social media there is no challenge to one's positions. You are racist, so it doesn't matter what you said. You are sexist, so it doesn't matter what you said. You are a shill, so it doesn't matter what you said.

It's like Wargames.

The only way to win is not to play.

Actually, that said, perhaps some readers who are not in the argument might learn something. Or if you're in it then you do as well.

> The only way to win is not to play

You can also just troll. Generally, you can’t lose from such a position.

Arguably though, that would still count as “not playing”.

> Arguably though, that would still count as “not playing”

...or playing, but not playing at the same game.

Cue the saying about wrestling with a pig.

> The idea behind the so-called Socratic method is that by offering arguments and counter-arguments, we can collectively converge on something like the truth.

That is not what the Socratic method is... it is a teaching method. One person teaching another through leading answers to encourage their asking more questions that will teach them something though it will feel to the person like they arrived at the solution themselves (which they did, with help).

> through leading answers to encourage their asking more questions

The answerer is the one usually presumed to have a flaw in their argument, hence them being asked questions that slowly illuminate all their reasoning until it is either shown to be sound, or more likely, a flaw to emerge quite obviously.

It appears you're saying it's the other way round.

Indeed, that is not the Socratic Method. Even though it's just an introductory aside, seeing such an inaccuracy straight in the second sentence about something which (I thought) is common knowledge put me off from reading the rest of the article.

It's a more accurate description of the Socratic Method than is asking leading questions until the student comes to the correct conclusion.

In the Socratic Dialogues, Socrates repeats constantly that he does not know the answer, but that he and his interlocutor are together discovering the truth. That isn't trickery nor sophistry, so to speak. It's really the approach.

Agreed, but now I’m wondering what exactly the author had in mind instead. Dialectic?

If I had to guess it would be dialectics. Though the texture dialectics has is substantially different from that of online discussion. Dialectic dialogue tends to have open-minded participants whereas on the internet, well, things tend to be the opposite.

“The Harry Potter Fallacy “ could also be a descriptor meaning “People will remember or care about your idea if you invoke this particular piece of old pop culture.”

I hope they learn about the “I Beg You To Please Read Another Book Corrollary”

"Please read another book" is more overused than Harry Potter references these days. Super popular media is referenced because people will probably get the reference.

If I start busting out War and Peace plot points I'm going to look like an uppity dickhead and nobody will get what I'm on about.

"Read another book" is just another way to shut down a conversation, usually when someone's ran out of real arguments but still wants to feel superior. You either get the reference and we're good to continue talking or you don't, you tell me, I'll state it in a different way.

I read 2-6 books a month, I'd reference some of them but the people following the thread probably have not read the book and then how do I get upvotes out of that?

No one is saying we should instead all be walking around referencing literary texts in every day conversations (speaking of straw mans, trying to use an extreme counterexample to dismiss criticism...). It's possible to communicate without relating everything back to pop culture.

> It's possible to communicate without relating everything back to pop culture.

That's a fair point

There are more books than the HP series and War and Peace. I do not have advice about how to optimize your reading for upvotes on HN though aside from maybe books about topics that are regularly discussed here?

Just an example, I think I'd have reached the character limit if I listed every book in existence

Upvotes was a bit of a joke. It didn't land well, it is what it is. I was being too silly.

https://archive.ph/6aOXf

Just in case someone would want to read only because of Harry Potter: there's literally not a single relationship with Harry Potter in what is discussed here.

The relationship was calling out fallacies like spells to attack your opponent.

I should have just read this comment instead of the article!

> The “discursive hygiene” picture of fallacy theory sees fallacies as mistakes that a good arguer will avoid. Indeed, armed with a new toolbox of Latin names for fallacies, eager students all too often delight in spotting fallacies in the wild, shouting out their Latin names (ad hominem!; secundum quid!) as if they were magic spells. This is what Scott Aikin and John Casey, in their delightful book Straw Man Arguments, call the Harry Potter fallacy: the “troublesome practice of invoking fallacy names in place of substantive discussion”. However, they note another, less wholesome reason why some may be interested in fallacy theory. If one’s aim is not so much discovering the truth as winning an argument at all costs, fallacy theory can provide a training in the dark arts of closing down a discussion prematurely, leaving the impression that it has been won.

TL;DR: the Harry Potter fallacy is thinking that shouting out a named fallacy (e.g. "That's an ad hominem!") makes you instantly win a debate, as though you were casting a magic spell.

At the risk of proving the author's point, they reference another fallacy: equating winning an argument with being right.

Watching the format of many cable news programs in the 2000s+, they seemed to have fallen deep into this fallacy (perhaps intentionally?)

I've noticed that the format of these news programs (Fox, CNN, MSNBC, et. al.) is to line up a set of guests for a debate. It doesn't seem to be for hashing out ideas in front of an audience, but instead it seems to be debate training for the audience. The "correct" view (the one most in-line with the host's views) almost always leads, followed by a rapid fire of dissenting opinions and rebuttals. They're introducing the audience to a new idea, showing the common objections you'll encounter when you share it, and showing you how to defeat those arguments. This seems to be in an effort to prime you for going out into your social circles and sharing their ideas. I don't know if it is intentional or not, but it sure is a good way to increase the reach/influence of their news program by sending their viewers out into the world to spread the good news.

Anecdotally, at the beginning of COVID (right after I made the call to self-isolate) I stopped consuming all news and focused on work. I noticed that subsets of my social circles (many of whom were completely isolated from one another - no interaction) were all using almost _identical_ talking points. They'd spontaneously throw them out into a conversation with no prompt. Week over week, the talking points would change but these subsets of my social circles would stay consistent - the same people saying the same things. Once they brought up a talking point, you could nearly chart the conversation as a decision tree and I could fairly well predict what someone was going to say ahead of time based on previous conversations! Turns out - what these subsets had in common was the news network they preferred. They had watched someone ramble off a talking point on the news, memorized how the debate evolved, and were trying out the debates themselves in the real world.

I think the world was on fire and it was really important to them that they _figure it out_. What should be done, what should they do, what is safe and what is not. Intentionally or not, the debate format of these news networks was being used by the folks in my social circles to get to "truth" by winning arguments. The only problem? Winning an argument doesn't mean you are right! It just means you're better at arguing.

> If one’s aim is not so much discovering the truth as winning an argument at all costs, fallacy theory can provide a training in the dark arts of closing down a discussion prematurely, leaving the impression that it has been won.

If you aim is to discover "the truth", maybe you shoud stay out of debates altogether and not lecture others on what to say. If you train a bunch of kids to go into brain shutdown mode when they hear some latin keywords, why exactly shouldn't I exploit that? I will exploit that, because others will exploit it for sure. You can whine about it all you want, but if my strategy works I will win the debates and contol opinions, while you will fuss over correcness in complete irrelevance.

The book looks good, but they are charging $82.80 for the ebook(on Amazon[0] and on publisher Bloomsbury)-- I have to ask, are they serious? Is the book really worth that much? Most non-fiction books sell around 15-20$ (or cheaper), why the high price?

Either the publisher wants to gouge students who will be forced to buy it, or they want to force the book to flop by artificially setting a very high price

0. https://www.amazon.com/Straw-Man-Arguments-Fallacy-Theory-eb...

So I oppened this in the Amazon Brazil. The Kindle book is R$569,00. That is more than a brand new Kindle Paperwhite, and more than twice the Brazilian minimum wage.

I won't provide the link, but it took me 5 seconds to find this for free :P

I meant to say: it is more than half the Brazilian minimum wage.

For many years, academic publishers have followed the model of high prices and small print runs. I think they just assume that only university libraries will actually buy a copy.

There is already a name for that, it's called fallacy fallacy. Calling it "the harry potter fallacy" is unnecessary and click baity.

In the text, they distinguish the Harry Potter fallacy from the fallacy fallacy and a few others.

Whether or not individuals are excessive, I'd rather live in a world in which people are more aware of when they've made a logical fallacy and work to argue for their point better, rather than the situation now in which people who are basically paid to think and write for a living routinely make rhetorical and logical errors in their reasoning.

I was expecting this article to cover how in political debate the argument is sometimes framed in terms of Harry Potter characters.

Ugh. Without Javascript, this is a blank page. Yet there's no apparent need for JS on the entire site.

At first I thought this was an article about the fallacy of associating many things one (mainly politically) doesn’t like to pop-culture characters/franchises, like Harry Potter or Star Wars (maybe the article also mention that at some point, I wouldn’t know because it’s partly behind a paywall).

That Harry Potter/Star Wars fallacy was (and still is, even though it has partially subsided) especially prevalent when discussing the current war in Ukraine.

I hit the partial paywall too, it seems like it kicks in at random. Here's full article if anyone else hits it: https://archive.ph/6aOXf

To the HN mods: Shouldn't there be a policy that articles behind Paywalls are automatically removed from the main page?

Any cookie notification that has an accept button should also have a reject button.

> One can label one’s opponent a “racist”, a “bigot” or a “fascist”, and suggest that an audience is safest by ignoring the arguments altogether, for fear of being duped into bigotry itself.

I think that this is often making a mistake about what is going on. There is an idealized form of argument that arrives at a conclusion from first principles and which we can then debate, dispute and resolve.

But since this article does actually bring in twitter, let's talk about the what is actually going on. There are a series of arguments that are proposed that whilst having atleast a veneer of respectability, aren't held for reasons of principle. There was a term related to this that turned up during the Trump years - Trump would take an outrageous unjustifiable position, and then Intellectual Zambonis would come in and try to smooth it out to be a heroic stand for the principles of the right. I'm not saying Trump is the only example of this, but in the real world, you do actually have to engage with the idea that the only reason someone is taking a position in an argument is not because they believe it, but because it's the most persuasive way of getting what they want. Whether that's originalism at the Supreme Court, or States rights. You do have to ask the question "If I prove this argument to be wrong, will it actually change the outcome that the opponent is advocating, or will they just move to another argument".

> Whether that's originalism at the Supreme Court, or States rights. You do have to ask the question "If I prove this argument to be wrong, will it actually change the outcome that the opponent is advocating, or will they just move to another argument".

You make it seem like originalism is not a deeply held and staunchly argued principle, as if judges capriciously move into it and out of it depending on the wind or current political thinking. Is that the impression you got from Scalia[1]? If you did I'd say that's weird, he seemed pretty steadfast on it for a good long time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonin_Scalia

I'm making the opposite point: That there is a genuine and intellectual argument for originalism. But it has nothing to do with the Supreme Court's current decision making process which is "Do we have 5 suitably Conservative Supreme Court Justices? Yes or No?". Which is why in the Dobbs decision Thomas rightly points out that the next thing to do is revisit Contraceptives, Same sex marriage, and Gay sex. And why Roberts makes another concurrence literally saying he also wants to ban abortion, but just doesn't see the need to overturn Roe to do that.

The problem is that the arguments they make support their position, but they don't support their own arguments when it doesn't result in supporting their position.

> And why Roberts makes another concurrence literally saying he also wants to ban abortion, but just doesn't see the need to overturn Roe to do that.

I've read the actual concurrence[1] and I have no idea how you can describe it that way, other than to have read someone else's summary of it, a summary that is at best poor, at worst mendacious.

> Which is why in the Dobbs decision Thomas rightly points out that the next thing to do is revisit Contraceptives, Same sex marriage, and Gay sex.

Thomas mentions contraceptives once, on page 122, and does not "point out that the next thing to do is revisit Contraceptives". Should I bother to see what he actually wrote about same sex marriage and gay sex? I think it would be better if you provided the source of your claims here and cross reference them against the text of the ruling.

I'd also like you to go over this:

> the Supreme Court's current decision making process which is "Do we have 5 suitably Conservative Supreme Court Justices? Yes or No?"

They don't bring the cases. They choose the cases from those they are brought but they have also regularly chosen cases that invoke Roe or Casey, before and after the conservative majority. Did you mean something else?

[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf

Sorry, I simplified this because I thought people would appreciate having the reference to the actual principles behind the cases rather than literally just naming random names that happen to be the plaintiffs in the precedent setting case. To be specific, we're talking about substantive due process as referenced on page 43 of the decision. As an aside - it's making the quite whimsical statement that abortion isn't deeply rooted in the nations history - literally comical. But moving on, Thomas goes on to clarify on page 118 that he believes that that entire phrase is an oxymoron, implying that no ruling based on it should be upheld.

As you point out he literally name drops contraceptives when abandoning entire swathes of court precedent.

> Should I bother to see what he actually wrote about same sex marriage and gay sex?

No you absolutely shouldn't bother it's definitely not there. I'll hold my hands up, I just got to the word contraceptives and just made the rest up. Let's read what it really says:

> Cases like Griswold v. Connecticut, Cite as: 597 U. S. ____ (2022) 381 U. S. 479 (1965) (right of married persons to obtain contraceptives)*; Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U. S. 558 (2003) (right to engage in private, consensual sexual acts); and Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U. S. 644 (2015) (right to same-sex marriage), are not at issue.

Oh that's right that thing you say you couldn't find and I must have made up, is in fact in the same sentence that you pointed me to. Which brings me back to my original point - which was to quote the actual details of the cases, not the names of the plaintiffs.

>They don't bring the cases. They choose the cases from those they are brought but they have also regularly chosen cases that invoke Roe or Casey, before and after the conservative majority.

Just to be clear, the replacement for RBJ was in place about 18 months ago and since then a number of clearly Roe-breaching laws were passed and then progressively handed up through the courts to get this decision. It has been as direct and immediate as it could possibly have been.

That would've read better if you'd tried to respond to what I actually wrote instead of letting your tribal instincts get the better of you.

> Oh that's right that thing you say you couldn't find and I must have made up, is in fact in the same sentence that you pointed me to.

I didn't say I couldn't find it, you've pointed to a different sentence (I referenced page 122, the quote you've given is from page 118, that would be a loooong sentence), so why are you writing that? Yes, you seem to be making things up or reading things second hand that distort the actual text that I've given you a link to.

So, take a breath, read what I wrote again and respond to that, and try it with the attitude of charity[1] and (the buzzword of the moment) good faith, because I'm not really that interested in whether American women can get abortions or not as I'm not American nor a woman. Mindless tribalism isn't going to lead to a good conversation.

I am interested in the law (mainly English common law and its derivatices), and people making claims that will stand up to scrutiny. Yours, thus far, do not.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

I've literally quoted back to you a sentence from the document you cited with a list of all the things I claim including a direct reference to contraceptives that you could've literally ctrl+f'd for. If I were being less charitable I would've pointed out that the legal underpinnings of those claims also mean that Justice Clarence Thomas opposes inter-racial marriage, something not within the text but clearly consistent with his concurrence.

I'll take you back to my original point in this thread - the arguments made by people like the Supreme Court Justices are contradictory and entirely driven by a decision to create pretexts for decisions they were going to make anyway. We know this. A manifestation of this, is people like you, coming out and saying that I've not read the judgement, and when I can directly point you to the section that contains what I claimed, you respond that I'm not being charitable to you.

I'm not here to be charitable to you - I'm here making a claim that you make disingenuous arguments that make no sense to engage with, because they have nothing to do with the conclusions you drew in the first place.

> I'm here making a claim that you make disingenuous arguments

disingenuous arguments, eh?

> Oh that's right that thing you say you couldn't find and I must have made up, is in fact in the same sentence that you pointed me to.

As I've pointed out already, it's a different sentence. Which means one of:

- you didn't read what I wrote properly (twice now)

- you're lying

- you don't understand your own mistake

> I'm not here to be charitable to you

You should be charitable to yourself and everyone here by leaving such arguments on Twitter where that kind of low quality nonsense is the norm, at least in part because people don't read what the other person has written properly.

What’s interesting on the “Trump” right is that they won’t admit to being racist, bigot and so on, but that’s it’s all done underhanded. They know they can’t outright call out anything, so it’s all done under the veneer of different arguments that still promote racism, bigotry and fascism. Sometimes it’s being a Christian (say against abortion) or to give off a fascist signal (the jan 6 insurrection) It’s a great intellectual dishonesty.

Now many politicians are like that, as they love to cling to power, they make up stuff to keep their constituents happy, but in the case of the Trump right it seems to have evolved in such a manner they can remain judicially scot-free while still going by their plans.

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