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Comment by brobdingnagians | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

> But math is fiction […]

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

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.

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.

> 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).

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.

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

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.

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

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?" :)

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

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

> 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.

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.

> “… 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.

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?

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.

> 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.

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.

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?

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.

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...

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.

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.

> 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".

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.

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