Comment by breckinloggins | Hacker News Reader

Comment by breckinloggins | Hacker News Reader

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Wow. The number of people who are responding to any of my little strawman arguments on their merits is surprising, and frankly disappointing on Hacker News. If you have replied to any of these "arguments" and asked me how I could possibly believe them, then you:

- Have not understood the meta-topic of the post

- Are unable to resist attacking silly arguments even when it is stated in my post that they are caricatures

- Failed to read the comments on the original article, in which many others also noted the examples' lack of balance

- Have provided an entertaining case in point of the argument made by http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/

Particularly in regards to my extremely silly and vacuous evolution example, I can not honestly believe so many of you not only thought that I believed what I was writing, but then went on to expend energy attacking me on it.

When I read the original article, I was amused at the disclaimer he put up front saying "I don't necessarily believe these things, they're just for the sake of example." I thought I could leave something so obvious out in a place like HN. Apparently I was wrong.

I'm not sure why you thought it was constructive to turn HN into a sounding board for your personal complaints about 'left-leaning argumentoids'. Setting aside the utility of providing more 'examples' of inflammatory political statements on HN, why maintain such thoroughgoing political bias? If the intent is to discuss forms of argument then the bias is only distracting. If the intent is to catalogue stereotypes or caricatures of 'left-leaning argumentoids' (with the drift that the left is stupid) then your post is directly on target.

Oh boy. Even when someone makes it clear they are trying to fill in the bias of the original article with an opposite bias, people still think you're doing it as a personal argument.

Sounds like he's trying to make the original article more neutral-sounding to me. He is merely saying that some people may immediately dismiss the author's article as trying to show that right-wing arguments are flawed. Hence, he proposed a few additional examples which are not so right-wing.

Just to expound upon this a bit, I think it's important the GP gave counter-examples. The implication of the article being all right-wing straw men is that anybody who holds a view point that could be supported by the argument is actually living in a fallacy-filled fantasy land. Truthfully, these should have been fairly non-political examples to drive the point home, but c'est la vie.

Given the immense amount of replies trying to tell the GP that evolution is fact, the very fact that these examples are politically charged help obscure the author's point.

Implications are important, and as we see time and again, people read whatever they want to read in these articles. I wonder how many people will read this and think I'm an ultra-conservative.

It's funny, the overall article is not about "how do we disarm conservative arguments" it's about a certain type of argument and how it is used. The examples were "liberal" but that is irrelevant, the point is identical.

That was exactly his point. It was illuminating to hear some Worst Arguments in the World that I have sometimes used without realizing. I don't see why everyone is getting so riled up.

Except for the first one (and even that's debatable - if memory serves me correctly, "George Washington was a traitor" is generally used by the left-wing to demonstrate why categories like "traitor" aren't useful, rather than as a serious argument against Washington) they're not actually examples of the Worst Argument in the World though.

For instance, the fact that guns kill people is still just as effective as an argument for gun control even though not all guns kill people. Or take his point about how only parts of evolution have been proved - that's actually a particularly obnoxious kind of fallacious reasoning that creationists use a lot. There's always going to be gaps in our knowlege of the exact details of evolution because not all transitional forms survive and because there aren't enough researchers out there to investigate every single gene and biological pathway. But not (yet) knowing the exact details is not evidence that evolution is impossible - indeed, pretty much all of the supposedly "irreducably complex" features that creationists claim couldn't have been created by evolution have been proved to have evolved.

But isn't that exactly the argument? Evolution itself isn't a fact. Parts of it are a fact, and the other parts can be reasonably deduced from the facts. It's a bit presumptuous to say that it's a fact, as you could probably say that about Newton's laws too, which were proved to be inaccurate in the end.

Wow, way to miss the point! He was merely saying that the examples given seem a bit slanted, and I would be more effective to use some other examples to illustrate the point of the article!

Wow, this is quite possibly the most disingenuous thing I've ever read, or it is the most brilliant troll ever:

Poe factor: 1.

The poster said "look I'm afraid too many people will miss the point about the form of argument because the article has a lot of examples against a common set of opinions representative of political collective of people. As such, here are some other arguments that follow the exact same pattern, but representative of a common set of opinions representative of the opposing political collective".

It is so very very awesome that you are too emotionally driven to see that things you agree with could possibly follow poor form - It really highlights the underlying problem the author is working with: emotional response is illogical and, to put it bluntly, stupid. Blasting someone because he shows examples that are bad arguments you agree with even though you will gladly discuss the same fallacy applied to the points you disagree with is the human political problem in a microcosm.

You know what? I agree with the general position represented by a lot of the gp's argumentoids, but completely disagree with the form they take. When my fellow left-leaning people make these points, I cringe, and even argue against them because the form is so piss poor.

I think we can all agree that as far as understanding the unimaginable complexity of life, the universe, and everything goes, the human race is pretty much Screwed with a capital F.

"emotional response is illogical"

To compound the problem, emotional responses are faster, with rational arguments developed after the fact. The neocortex likes to think it's hot shit, but the lizard and mammal brains still control us to a surprising extent. Well, surprising to the neocortical parts of us at least.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, for example, developed a series of short scenarios designed to 1) trigger the disgust response of taboos and 2) pre-answer the typical logical objections. Even when reminded that their "reasons" for disapproving of a scenario didn't actually fit the story as presented, the subjects still felt that the described behaviors were wrong even if they couldn't articulate the exact reason why.

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