Comment by nmrm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nmrm | Hacker News Reader

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I think our fundamental disagreement boils down to a question of tractability. It's not that better arguments don't exist. Rather, it's a matter of whether the argument is even worth our time.

> It may be important to note, but it's not argumentation.

Isn't it? The end effect is disregarding a certain set of arguments entirely. If completely ignoring the relevance of an argument isn't a powerful argumentative tool, I'm not sure what is.

> You don't need to attack the person making the argument or the medium delivering the argument in order to question its premises.

But isn't that exactly what's happening in the infomercial case? And surely we shouldn't waste our (bounded, finite) time addressing, point-by-point, infomercial arguments?

I have something more practical and less specific in mind as well. You'll find all manner of conspiracy theorists. The more serious ones can bash you over the head with truth claim after truth claim. At some point, in order to avoid endless rabbit holes, it becomes necessary to disregard certain arguments simply because of their source. I typically do this with a 9/11 truther friend (also chem trains and luminati (sp?) and so on), and only consider his factoids non-fictional when I hear them from other sources as well.

There's also an important distinction between attacking the source per se, and attacking the source's credibility/veracity in the argument at hand. We might be talking past each other due to that distinction as well.

edit: ambiguous grammar

>Isn't it? The end effect is disregarding a certain set of arguments entirely. If completely ignoring the relevance of an argument isn't a powerful argumentative tool, I'm not sure what is.

Why would you do that? For me it's important to note because premises are assertions, and conflicts of interest raise the likelihood that the premises have been deliberately constructed as to be false or misleading. The idea that I would throw out someone's argument because I've decided that it must be wrong in advance seems ludicrous.

Arguments should rise or fall on their own merits.

>But isn't that exactly what's happening in the infomercial case? And surely we shouldn't waste our (bounded, finite) time addressing, point-by-point, infomercial arguments?

Why exactly wouldn't we, and why would we assume that the claims that are made in infomercials are uniformly false? The reason I don't waste my time vetting the arguments in infomercials is because I'm not currently interested in a juicer, not because of a belief that people who make infomercials are liars, no matter how consistent their arguments or verifiable their premises.

>I typically do this with a 9/11 truther friend (also chem trains and luminati (sp?) and so on), and only consider his factoids non-fictional when I hear them from other sources as well.

I don't. The reason I ignore truthers is because their logic is consistently bad, and their premises are usually demonstrably false. Those reasons came after listening to their arguments, not before. There are plenty of questionable elements in the official narrative, too, but they're not in the same order of magnitude as the leaps of logic made by truthers.

> Why would you do that?

Because I have a finite amount of time in the world. Because we need to decide which policy to enact (or not) today and not in 20 years. Because producing and evaluating arguments takes time, and -- most importantly -- because bad actors exist.

> The idea that I would throw out someone's argument because I've decided that it must be wrong in advance seems ludicrous.

Witness e.g. Microsoft trolling standards committees into non-existence back in the day. I'm sure they had an endless supply of valid and brilliantly illustrated technical points to consider, but at some point you have to say "you're a bad actor, and I'm going to start disregarding your arguments because you're making the decision process intractable and, like it or not, something needs to be done eventually".

--

Regarding infomercials:

> The reason I don't waste my time vetting the arguments in infomercials is because I'm not currently interested in a juicer, not because of a belief that people who make infomercials are liars, no matter how consistent their arguments or verifiable their premises.

Right. You have an a priori opinion that you don't need a juicer (or whatever), and you stick with that instead of wasting time considering the commercial's many valid arguments about how buying a juicer will totally enhance your life.

edit: it's not that the infomercial guys are liars per se. It's just that you've decided that evaluating their arguments for why their product will make you happier probably isn't worth your time. And in most cases, I claim that most people make that decision precisely because the source is a paid advertisement. That's an ad hom dismissal of the argument that juicers save marriages (or whatever, can you tell I don't watch infomercials? :-) ).

> Those reasons came after listening to their arguments, not before.

It's the particular person, not any of his theories per se. If one of these theories was mentioned by another person (even someone I didn't know), I would probably investigate if I found the time. But this particular person proved his signal-to-noise ratio is too high long ago, so I stopped listening. That's ad hom, but it's also a cost-effective. I don't want to spend my finite time on this planet objectively analyzing the evidence for every conspiracy theory my friend happens to latch on to. And I think that's rational, even though it's ad hom. And the reason is that evaluating the veracity of arguments is time consuming, and I have finite time.

>Because we need to decide which policy to enact (or not) today and not in 20 years.

It doesn't take 20 years to evaluate an argument. If, on a case by case basis, there's an argument to be made that any of the proposed answers would be better than delaying a decision, then that's an argument too, with premises and reasoning that need to be evaluated.

>Right. You have an a priori opinion that you don't need a juicer (or whatever), and you stick with that instead of wasting time considering the commercial's many valid arguments about how buying a juicer will totally enhance your life.

Maybe I've phrased it wrongly, then. If I'm watching an infomercial, I'm evaluating its arguments. I don't seek out infomercials, because I'm not interested in a juicer. It usually doesn't take very long for infomercials about juicers to make a dubious health claim when I do catch them, though, so in the past I've rejected purchasing one on the merits.

edit: added "usually", in that I've watched infomercials that never made a dubious claim, and I've used products that have been featured in infomercials and been entirely satisfied.

> It doesn't take 20 years to evaluate an argument.

Yes it can, and even in barely contrived scenarios if your proof calculus isn't nice enough.

More importantly, in very practical cases even not assuming adversarial (e.g. Microsoft on standards committees), it most definitely can take 20 years to find a valid argument. Exponential growth is serious stuff. Triple exponential growth is just stupid fast.

If you can't wait 20 years, then you have to move forward with arguments for not-valid-but-sometimes-true cases. And in this case, the agent with the most compute power can generate contradictions for opposing props more quickly and can also generate true instances matching his policy preferences more quickly. Thus, bounded argumentation often inherently favors the more resource-rich adversary.

And the same thing works in more informal settings as well.

One way to cope with this is to disregard arguments from known bad actors. We can discuss rather that's the correct course of action, but the need is a provable fact of the most useful formal systems and an observable fact of informal argumentation (I'm still not sure which you want to discuss, since your assumptions make me think you view all arguments as formal systems, but most arguments -- including this one -- clearly aren't in any meaningful sense of the word formalized).

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