Comment by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC | Hacker News Reader

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zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC

As you don't seem to know what a strawman argument is, let me explain:

A strawman argument is when you misrepresent the position of your opponent in order to have something that is easier to argue against so as to avoid addressing your opponent's arguments. Arguing against a strawman is fallacious because of the misrepresentation: Your arguments only invalidate the strawman position, not the position of your opponent, but you present it as if those were the same.

What you are seeing above is called an analogy: You present an argument that is similar in structure to what your opponent is using, but which explicitly uses different details, in order to make a problem with the argument's structure stand out more clearly.

The important difference is whether there is misrepresentation - just reframing an argument does not make a strawman, as long as you don't attribute the reframed version to your opponent.

edit: To whoever voted this down: Mind to explain why you think explaining to people how to avoid fallaciously accusing others of fallacious reasoning or dishonest arguments is not a good idea?

It is a stawman argument, precisely because it's not a good analogy; instead it's basically an example of Godwin's Law.

The reason why your 'analogy' isn't really such is that setting up a facebook account with just your name, which is all you'd have to do, is nowhere close in severity to willingly following a dictator. It's not analogous.

I see an opportunity to explain godwin's law!

But first: As I said, the point of an analogy is to make the problem with the structure of an argument stand out more clearly, not to otherwise equate scenarios. The structure of the argument we are dealing with here is "you are in the minority, therefore you should not complain and your concerns are not relevant", the fallaciousness of which becomes a lot more obvious when you replace facebook with a dictator, but the structure being defective does not depend on replacing facebook with a dictator. It's also not an argument about whether or not having to create a facebook account is bad, mind you, it's simply showing that that argument doesn't hold water.

As for godwin's law: It is a common fallacy to believe that any comparison of anything with an authoritarian leader is a fallacy and that the name of that fallacy is "godwin's law". Godwin's law though actually is just a meta-observation that discussions tend to not go very far after a certain historical figure or his ideology has been mentioned, and such comparisons can be perfectly valid arguments, though one is well-advised to be careful with those because the topic tends to have a lot of historical baggage that can make constructing a valid argument difficult.

And on the general theme of "this analogy is fallacious because those things are so different": The LHC is similar to a cathode ray tube in that elementary particles get accelerated in a vacuum using electromagnetic fields. This is not an invalid comparison just because the LHC is so much bigger than the average CRT and is so totally different in almost all details. It's only a fallacy when you conclude that therefore a CRT consumes megawatts of power.

Setting up a facebook account with your name, then logging in to various wifi spots around the country is exactly what concerns our OP.

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