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ata comments on "Life Experience" as a Conversation-Halter - Less Wrong
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It becomes a conversation-halter when they don't tell you what their relevant life experience is (or why it's evidence for their position). In that case they're just saying "I'm older and wiser, someday you'll understand". It may turn out to be true in some cases, but it is not reasoning.
I've had this experience a few times when arguing with my dad. Not very recently, mainly when I was a teenager. I knew little if anything about real rationality at that point, but even then it seemed very wrong to me. I was thinking (when it was too late for me to say it, o'course), "Can't you just respond to my arguments as though it were someone your age saying it?" and "If that's what you think, then why didn't you just say that at the beginning? It sounds like you're only saying it now because you can't think of an actual response." and so forth.
Good idea.
Even if you think your conversation partner might be arguing in bad faith, saying so is likely to make them more defensive and less open to changing their mind, so it should probably be saved as a last resort.
True, that's more the sort of thing I'd just think to myself.
Continuing the devil's advocate line, I do not think it's reasonable to expect someone to give you their log of relevant experience. Experience does something like train a neural network (literally in this case) and the training data is often thrown away.
I think the crucial question is finding the distinguishing property of the two kinds of life experience.
That may be true, but that doesn't make it valid reasoning. You should only use it with an explicit acknowledgement that your intention is to end the conversation (perhaps in a manner similar to that proposed by Dagon), without pretending that it is somehow an argument in its own right.
And even then, it should be used very sparingly. I'd be suspicious of any belief I hold if I can't remember why I hold it (if "the training data [was] thrown away").