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MichaelVassar comments on Forager Anthropology - Less Wrong
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This sounds like a better argument than I have seen from you earlier, indicating to me that you do have the ability to make such arguments when you are inclined, at least some of the time.
With respect to its content, yes, I think this is a reasonable conclusion regarding how one should respond to Pinker's conclusions. However, as I noted, my observation is that Pinker argues well. When you have a good argument in front of you its primarily the argument and not the evidential value of the opinion which you have to confront.
I think that I'm placing more emphasis on whether his arguments are sound, and you're more concerned with their validity.
Yep. When evaluating a dispute between someone and Pinker I started by saying that I could take it for granted that his arguments are sound, but that it seemed to me that their arguments might be worth-while and scholarly. (I could also have said fact-filled and valuable, especially if not taken literally, as a source of added validity).
In practice, arguments that aren't sound are practically never fully valid, but they are frequently a valuable complement to sound arguments as part of how validity of belief is achieved.
Did you mean valid here? Its the soundness of Pinker's arguments that I am claiming to have undermined, so I'm kind of confused.
I think that my internal argument-evaluation-algorithm focuses most of its effort on premises and treats the subsequent reasoning as a mostly mechanical and straightforward process. Getting enough and good enough data together instinctively seems like the greater obstacle to me, possibly because I do fairly well with formal logic.
Yep. My mistake.
Ah. The problem with treating reasoning as mechanical is that almost no-one actually does reasoning reliably enough for that to work. If they did, the quality of public debate would be completely different.
Absolutely agreed. I know I don't reason as reliably as I seem to generally expect. This is my bug, not the world's.