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Yvain comments on Rationality quotes: October 2010 - Less Wrong
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— Marcus Aurelius
Is there a general name for that shape of argument? It or something close to it seems to be a recurring pattern.
"People who can manage their lives will, despite MMOs.". (People who lose time playing MMOs are bad at managing life, so they would've lost the time anyway.)
"There's only two possible outcomes for their relationship. They split, or they stay together forever. If it's split, then the sooner it happens the better for everyone. If it's stay, then my meddling won't matter.".
"No one you would want to meet would find you boring.".
(Edit: removed opening "also".)
False dilemna. Also false dicholomy or possibly black and white thinking.
I've never heard a name for that, and it ought to have one. How about "the predestination fallacy"? They all seem to start with the assumption that something will go the same way no matter what, then conclude that therefore, pushing it in a bad direction is okay.
It's not always a fallacy. Examples:
You're trying to achieve some objective, and the difference between achieving it and not achieving it swamps all other differences between credible outcomes. It may then be rational to assume that your desired objective is achievable. (You have nasty symptoms, which can be caused by two diseases. One will kill you in a week whatever you do. One is treatable. If it's at all difficult to distinguish the two, you might as well assume you've got the treatable one.)
You're trying to achieve some objective, and you know it's achievable because others have achieved it, or because the situation you're in has been crafted to make it so. It's rational to assume it's achievable. (There's an example in J E Littlewood's "Mathematician's Miscellany": he was climbing a mountain, he got to a certain point and couldn't see any way to make progress, and he reasoned thus: I know this is possible, and I know I've come the right way so far, so there must be a hidden hold somewhere around there ... and, indeed, there was.)
It looks like it's called Morton's fork.
Disjunctive reasoning. I liked the example in this post.
Calling it fake or selective disjunctive reasoning might describe it, I guess.
Can you think of any possibilities the good emperor didn't mention?
Also:
The phrase "the people who mind don't matter and the people who matter don't mind". Similarly, the phrase/meme "haters gonna hate" (edit: although that usually has further information implied).
Possibly the saying that if you're worried you might be crazy, it proves that you're not. (Although the problem with that could have more to do with taking your conclusion and adding it back to the evidence pile, ala One Argument Against an Army.)
"And people do stupid things no matter what -- beer or grass or whatever are all incidental to that central fact.". That's fits under "predestination fallacy", but possibly not the concept I was originally thinking of, which was something like "argument by subtly-flawed categorization".
"If I lied the first time, I'm not going to tell you the truth just because you ask twice.".
I'll edit this post with any further examples. Last edited 2010/11/07.
I've just been advised that he probably didn't say that.
For the first two "then"s, the conclusions seem plausible but far from the only possible ones if the possibility of (knowable) gods were taken seriously. It sounds like saying that if you live under an unjust government, you should act like it doesn't exist until you get arrested, rather than either accepting it or trying to fight it.
As Marcus Aurelius was a philosopher king, I get the feeling this quote is in the context of the gods being unknowable. The unjust government, on the other hand, is here and knowable.
Were there people who advocated worshipping unknowable gods?
Arguably. The main one I could find was this:
Though I remember at least once being told that God's "mystery", that is, the inability to figure him out, understand him, or be absolutely certain he's there, was part of a reason to worship him.
Since St. Augustine was a Christian, I don't think he fits. By "knowable" I meant something like "we can identify an action that they're more likely to regard as worship than as blasphemy, thereby making the question of whether to worship them relevant". I'm uncomfortable with my use of the action/inaction distinction there, but I'm going to leave it.
Alternate interpretation of the Marcus Aurelius quote: It illustrates how far thoughts fit ideals. Regardless of whether he took gods seriously, they were distant enough that he could make grand moral claims without worrying about living up to them.