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thomblake comments on Intelligence enhancement as existential risk mitigation - Less Wrong
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Hey, I publicly identify myself as an irrationalist, and I have no problem calling a spade a spade.
That said, folks could easily think "Logical fallacy!" is about as helpful as "That comment had 25 characters!"
If you think people won't notice that there's a fallacy, then you should also think that they won't know what it is, and kindly point it out.
how are you defining irrationalist? we are all, of course, imperfect rationalists.
I'll have to write a blog post about that. For now, suffice it to say that I use it analogously to how a Nietzschean might use "amoralist".
Amoral is to moral/immoral as arational is to rational/irrational?
That would be a much better distinction, wouldn't it?
Well, maybe - but then what are they doing here?
I think you're missing my point - we should be in 1 of 2 situations:
Even people who know what the fallacy is won't necessarily notice it.
And people who didn't recognize the fallacy can still use logic to determine what it is - or rather, they should be able to.
thomblake's first case refers to people actually noticing the instance of fallacy, not just being abstractly familiar with the kind. Are you twisting words on purpose, or are you actually failing to notice what was intended?
Annoyance was pointing out the third case, which I had suggested was unlikely - that one might not notice that the reasoning is fallacious, but can work it out once it's brought to one's attention. Presumably, such people are the intended audience of "Logical Fallacy!" and I could see how that might be helpful to them. I still think it would be much more helpful to point out the specific instance, with little more effort.
I do see your point. However, if people can't work through a brief, simple written argument and analyze it for its logical content by themselves, they're really not ready to contribute.
Passing over a fallacy without recognizing it is something that a reasonable person might do inadvertently, or even because they want to accept the argument and so will tend not to notice. But someone who is incapable of working through and finding the flaw?
It's not as though I replied to a page-long comment "There's a word misspelled". There would be hundreds or thousands of words involved, and even a recognizable typo might take a long time to locate. A word that someone genuinely misspelled would probably prove evasive for a long time.
The logical content of such a comment would be much simpler - and few comments here are that complex.