We're built to play games. Until we hit the formal operational stage (at puberty), we basically have a bunch of individual, contextual constraint solvers operating mostly independently in our minds, one for each "game" we understand how to play—these can be real games, or things like status interactions or hunting. Basically, each one is a separately-trained decision-theoretical agent.
The formal operational psychological stage signals a shift where these agents become unified under a single, more general constraint-solving mechanism. We begin to see the meta-rules that apply across all games: things like mathematical laws, logical principles, etc. This generalized solver is expensive to build, and expensive to run (minds are almost never inside it if they can help it, rather staying inside the constraint-solving modes relevant to particular games), but rewards use, as anyone here can attest.
When we are operating using this general solver, and we process an assertion that would suggest that we must restructure the general solver itself, we react in two ways:
Initially, we dread the idea. This is a shade of the same feeling you'd get if your significant other said, very much...
You know those puzzles you get on the back of cereal packets, where there's a big spaghetti-mess of lines, and you have to help the monkey by finding which line leads to the banana?
Up to a certain level of complexity I can usually look at one of those once, and immediately identify the appropriate line. Bad logic feels like being presented with one of those puzzles, only there is somehow no route to the banana. I can tell, on sight, that there's no route to the banana. There's some sort of holistic wrongness about the puzzle, and it really distresses me that the monkey can't get to the banana!
I tend to find bad reasoning painful when I feel it's likely to be accepted by many, and I can't do anything about it. When it's not likely to be accepted, I just find it funny. I don't remember where I read it, but I like the advice of treating crazy (and otherwise bad or annoying) people as unique objects of art in a mental collection.
People might feel better about this entry if it were in the discussion section rather than in the main section. Also note that one needs to be careful about focusing on such arguments. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence. Moreover, the argument you mention about faster than light travel has non-trivial forms. A classic puzzle given to beginning physics students is very close to this, where one has a laser beam that is focused on a very far away object. If you move the laser pointer a little bit the dot will move much faster than the speed of light. The problem is to explain why this doesn't violate special relativity.
When I was younger I used to go fishing as well as hunting for game birds with my dad. Several relatives and others along the way, found this very disturbing. I remember the gist of one conversation well, from when I was about 12: they ask me, rather petulantly, how I can be so horrible as to shoot birds. Immediate sick feeling in stomach: this conversation will not go well for you.
I point out that they are not vegetarians, whose critique I do take seriously. Do they think that their steaks grow on special shrink-wrapped trees?
But the ducks are so beautiful!
So only pretty things deserve to live?
But they were living such a peaceful life in the wild, and then you shot them! Cows never have good lives to start with, so it isn't as bad.
!!!!!Whaaa!!??!
But you're killing them!
And you're letting someone else kill for you.
Cue moral dumbfounding, followed by "But still!" type interjections.
(Aside: I am now switched to a basically vegetarian diet, with meat allowed occasionally if it is ethically farmed.)
More broadly, I often find conversations with muggles on anything vaguely controversial, to be very frustrating. Once they choose a position on some issue, they seem to...
My response varies.
If somebody just flat-out makes a false inference (I see this most often in journalism) my thought is "Ha, ha! I could do your job better than you!" It's outrage, but it's kind of a pleasant outrage. Yes, it's uncharitable of me to say so, but I'm sure I'm not alone.
What makes me literally uncomfortable is when I see pages and pages that pretend to be an argument but don't seem to be moving towards any point. Teilhard de Chardin, for example. Or a really crappy school essay where the student didn't bother to make and defend an argument, but just sort of rambles. That's disorienting and unpleasant to read -- maybe like having a fever or dizziness.
The first kind of "bad logic" is something I could step in and fix; it attracts my eager editor's impulse. The second kind of "bad logic" gives me a kind of sick, "oh, shit, this is unsalvageable" feeling.
To me, a bad argument for something I disagree with feels like frustrating rudeness or obstruction, even if I have no reason to believe the misargumentation is intentional. I suppose, in a way, it is: the perpetrator has an intention to persuade someone of their (wrong) view, and they are at least negligent in their poor reasoning if not actively dishonest. Physically, it's like the symptoms of mild anxiety with a hint of anger.
A bad argument for something I do agree with feels similar, like unhelpful interference, but with a dash of embarrassment thrown in. I suppose it's likely I don't notice as many bad arguments for things I believe as for things I don't.
Hrm... I tend to get more a feeling of irritation/"GAH! SHADUPSHADUPDHADUP" (depending on mood/how bad it is)
The problem is, I'm not sure I can properly separate the "bad logic" reaction from the "how dare you argue against a position I support and thus implicitly challenge my status?" thing. (Actually detecting explicitly the bad logic is one thing, but the "feel" of it might just be that other feeling. ie, I might simply be noticing or remembering as more egregious the instances of bad logic that were against my position. Although I do find bad logic that supports my positions to be annoying too.)
"What's the worst argument you can think of?"
Since you asked... Some people told me I shouldn't be vegetarian because I kill plants.
And my reaction to such arguments is the surprise of learning that the human mind really is that broken. I used to be under the impression that as intelligence rises, the ability to spot certain fallacies should be reached before the ability to ride the long bus.
I don't feel any pain, but sometimes I feel like I'm SUPPOSED to get an ice cream headache from the overwhelming stupidity.
So, how did you feel when you read that bit of sf hand-waving?
It makes me go like this: ಠ_ಠ
Aside from that, when the person making the bad argument is someone I can empathize with, it often makes me feel embarrassed on their behalf; like, if it's someone I identify with enough that I can generally imagine myself in their position, I often imagine myself making the bad argument, and, being that I-as-myself can see why the argument is bad, I immediately feel embarrassed, including the associated physical sensations.
That's the same reason why I don't like movies about awkward people.
I really enjoy poor arguments that are along the lines of your example. I think it's funny (I mean literally funny, like a joke) to come up with an argument that is almost right except for some single glaring flaw, and present it seriously; can you spot the flaw? I come up with such things on purpose frequently in casual conversation with friends, if I can think fast enough. I don't think we would get along very well!
I also enjoy debugging software a lot more than most people, which I think is conceptually similar; you have a big mental model that yourself or someone else has constructed, but it doesn't work as implemented, because there's a trick somewhere. Where's the trick?
I haven't read all the comments yet, but I do feel like I can have a good idea that an argument doesn't follow without knowing the exact point at which it becomes fallacious. Kinesthetically , it feels like the first instant of trying to open a locked car door. Your arm is working, the latch is working, but something isn't "catching" and you can feel the weight of the door isn't falling the right way.
I am not sure if this counts as an argument per se, but several works of fiction have had instances where a time machine moves a small amount into the future, (say 1 second), and always travels to 1 second ahead of the protagonist, and thus is invisible. Wouldn't this just give the protagonist a 1 second head start against the villain?
At a time of t=5, both would be visible and present, but the protagonist would have 5 seconds of action time, but the "clever" villain would only have had 4 seconds.
For bad arguments in that class, the feeling I get is the same sense of emptiness that I get when I think about a closed, opaque box that I know is empty. There's just nothing useful there, the sentence is a shell with no logic inside. (I get a similar sense of a disorganized but full box when I contemplate a possibly-correct but currently not understood train of logic, and a related sense of a complex but working potentially-visible machine when contemplating a train of logic that I understand but am considering as a whole rather than as its constituent p...
For bad arguments in that class, the feeling I get is the same sense of emptiness that I get when I think about a closed, opaque box that I know is empty. There's just nothing useful there, the sentence is a shell with no logic inside.
That's a very lucky response. I visualise something like a broken, mashed-up machine made of human belief and longing, flailing and bleeding as it tries to keep running. It's really very horrible. That's what determined stupidity looks like.
(wow, that's icky. It's also true. I slightly wish I hadn't realised that's what I've been picturing. Mostly in a dim sodium-yellow light rather than full colour, thankfully.)
So, how did you feel when you read that bit of sf hand-waving?
Interestingly, my reaction wasn't negative. Instead, my curiosity was stimulated, and I immediately set myself the task of figuring out what was wrong with it. (Turned out to be easy, of course.)
On a larger scale, I've found the exercise of going through a certain 427 pages of wrongness, and coming to precise understandings of the mistakes, to be strangely satisfying (and informative). Perhaps it could be compared to the feeling of satisfaction a repairman might get from fixing a broken machi...
I don't know about science fiction, but when I'm working on a RationalWiki article about stupid or crazy things, I really do feel like I'm getting dumber doing the research - finding the original sources of stupidity, going through the bad thinking and trying to understand it enough to describe it and mentally shouting "WHAT. WHAT." all the way through. The pseudoscience equivalent of being boxed in the head repeatedly. There's a reason why skeptics who write about pseudoscience have a tendency to get snarky. Of course, I keep going back to it.
I'm not generally one to get over-excited about peoples' bad reasons for being creationists, but the leap from "Evolution due to natural selection doesn't provide obvious explanations for every single thing that every living thing ever does or has" to "The King James Version of the Bible as generally remembered and interpreted by Protestants is exactly right" is always staggering when I can tease it out of people explicitly.
As far as non-kinesthetic responses to awful arguments go, I guess I would call it a general feeling of discomfort...
The closest equivalent to that kind of synesthesia I can think of in my own head is the disorientation I sometimes experience when trying hard to communicate with someone whose expressed beliefs are absurdly disjoint from mine.
That is, not when they disagree, but when I haven't (yet) understood them well enough to disagree, where what they say doesn't seem to connect to reality enough to even be false.
That can be a delightful feeling when it's a single absurd thought in the context of an otherwise coherent relationship, admittedly, much like how roller ...
The stomach pain from mental distress is quite a common phenomenon, due to the enteric nervous system (also referred to as "the brain in the gut"). We have an amazing number of neurons in our digestive system-- roughly the size of a cat's brain. Strong emotional responses (like fear, anger, or disgust) are transmitted from the brain in the head to the brain in the gut, often resulting in pain or other discomfort.
When I hear a bad argument, it feels like listening to music and hearing a wrong note.
In one case it is the logical causality that is broken, in the other the interval between notes.
Actually it is worse because a pianist usually goes back on track.
I feel disoriented for a brief period until I realize that what I'd just heard does not have to make sense.
By the way, I think you would have evoked more authentic reactions if you hadn't begun your post by revealing the badness of the arguments. At least in my own case, knowing an argument is bad before hearing it lets me brace myself and put on my flaw-hunting vest. (The vest is made of flawnel, of course.)
Maybe others differ from me in always being alert to flaws.
Profound sadness, would be my answer.
On some primitive gut level you’d expect to be oddly satisfied by your own superiority, and amusedly angry at bad logic. But here’s what made me change my thinking pattern.
In college, I came across this (self-reportedly) highly-acclaimed web site of creationist science. On the front page, complete with pictures, were abstracts of young kids from a creationist science fair. There was this one girl, 6-8 year old, whose project was essentially this: She poured clean water into jars, prayed to God for six days not to creat...
Uh, Objective Ministries appears to have Poed you. You can relax a bit.
Their review of Portal is great.
For ages the guy behind Objective Ministries contributed to Conservapedia as "Dr Richard Paley". Thus: not even actual fundamentalists can tell what's real fundamentalism and what's a parody.
A relative once told me they believed in god because;
"If god exists and I believe I go to heaven, If god exists and I don't believe I suffer for eternity in hell, if god does not exist then It does not matter if I believe. The logical and sensible thing to do therefore is to believe in god."
This is truly someones logic. When confronted with what happens to a person who has not been told to believe the reply was "I'm sure god will take that into account". When asked what happens to people of different faiths and beliefs "all thats i...
Well, of course, but is your relative trying to please atheists or to please God? What if he can only please God by disbelieving in Him?
After all, if an all-powerful God wanted to be believed in, he could easily make his existence self-evident. We could ask the heavens "Are you there, God?" and a booming voice from the skies could reply "Yes, I AM".
But if there exists a God that wants to be disbelieved in, the reply to "Are you there, God?" is silence -- and that's indeed confirmed by testing. This God's existence seems therefore, going by the rational evidence, more probable than the existence of a God that wants to be believed in.
Your relative is pissing off God by believing in him, despite all of God's best efforts to promote atheism in the universe.
Probably something parallel to the reason that, if there is a god who does want to be believed in, he apparently created people who feel inclined to write things like "The God Delusion".
(One possibility: Satan planted the Bible, the Qur'an, etc. in rebellion against God's desire to not be believed in. Ever since then, God's been doing desperate damage control by watching over torture, rape, and genocide, and not doing anything, but to little avail — people go right on believing in him, because Satan's memes are just too infectious and powerful.)
Wait, really? If there was no evidence of God (in the form of Bibles or fingerprints), that would be evidence that there's a God out there hiding?
Yes. If the nature of humans is such that if physics operates in a natural way then they do a certain thing with high probability and said thing is not done then it raises the probability that physics is not operating as thought.
The absence of expected evidence is evidence of interference.
I think the most extreme reaction I've had to stupidity was while reading Kent Hovind's "dissertation" and similar creationist work. That level of failure made me dig my fingernails into my arm like I was trying to cut myself.
This may be a similar phenomenon: really bad grammar, especially spoken, gives me a mild version of that sensation you get when you bring your teeth together wrong.
Oh! When I read the Allais Paradox, I had an actual physical reaction to most people selecting 1A>1B and 2B>2A. For about thirty seconds my eyes bulged, I shook my head, I made incoherent "buh. buh." noises. It was certainly highly refined stupidity. So yeah, I became aware that I was confused.
It's even more interesting to see how people react when faced with arguments that are either very bad or very good, but they can't tell which. I have described the doomsday argument to many random people. The typical reaction is a kind of nervous laugh, followed by quick dismissal. Not a single one became genuinely curious and tried to work it out. It's awful.
I don't think the doomsday argument is a bad argument mathematically. It's just completely useless, like predicting whether the sun will rise tomorrow using laplace's rule of succession. We have vast amounts of information that has some bearing one way or another on the likelyhood of the end of the world happening at any particular time. It's absurd to throw all that away. As such, dismissal seems completely reasonable to me. I really don't think there is anything to be learned by calculating the expected number of total people ever to exist using nothing but a uniform prior.
For me it feels like when I've heard a bad pun. I literally get a significant desire to facepalm.
If you need more examples to test your reaction, I suggest browsing here, but be warned, this can be a TVTropes style time waster.
I don't get this when I hear bad reasoning, but I do hear it when I hear about people making what seem to me really bad decisions. My girlfriend told me about a fellow who regularly patronized phone psychics (spending $100's) and used their advice in his life. I find this kind of story terrible upsetting; an assault on my empathy.
I'm late to the party, but the given example reminded me... if I may combine a few conversations from my childhood and convert to a syllogism:
A) Humans can do anything they set their mind to. (Proof: god was afraid of what humans could accomplish and scrambled their language in genesis.) (me, excited: What about time machines? Hmmmm... ok:) A') Humans can probably do anything they set their mind to. B) Thought is faster than light. (Proof: I can think about being on Mars instantaneously, even though it takes light 30+ minutes to get there). C) Therefore, f...
Noticing myself making bottom lines is kind of kinesthetic; it feels as though my thoughts are diving too rapidly to the privileged conclusion.
Aside: The Bottom Line has waaay too little karma IMO. But this is generally true of Eliezer's older posts.
I feel a little disoriented, like the ground is shifting under my feet. Then I feel like I do the mental equivalent of making a box: I put the argument inside the box and try to evaluate it with detachment. Often, if the topic is 'soft', there is indeed a sudden drop in empathy that causes me to act enraged and indignant but which actually feels on the inside like being ostracized and persecuted. I feel like if people around me aren't logical that this is an attack on logic itself, and, somehow, therefore, an attack of my inner person. I don't feel confide...
I can't find a direct link to a strip, just an indirect mention, but there was a running joke in a few weeks' worth of Peanuts comics where Lucy would give Linus an absurd explanation for a natural phenomenon, and Charlie Brown's stomach would start to hurt. So you're generalizing from at least a considerable subset, not just one example.
For me, it's a feeling like I'm about to be hit in the stomach. If you've ever observed your internal reactions while doing full-contact sparring, you've probably noticed the patterns of tension that arise from hits and ...
Is it possible that what you're actually feeling is an abrupt drop in empathy? "I would never reason this way; this person is less like me than I had assumed."
A good resource for distilled bad arguments is Hundreds of Proofs of the Existence of God.
This seems rather odd-- what sort of physical connection might that be?
Hmm. It almost sounds like you have a physical reaction to confusion - a biological 'noticing you are confused'. That is, well, cool.
This is one argument I find particularly irksome...
All laws are constructed by some intelligence
Natural laws are laws
Therefore, natural laws are constructed by some intelligence.
The annoying part is that it is deductively valid if the definition of law is actually the same in both premises. The person making this argument thinks their argument is watertight because of its structure, and will likely not listen to any suggestion that natural laws are not a component of the laws described in the first premise. I can't understand how anyone can fail to s...
Tell that person that feathers are light, what is light cannot be dark, therefore feathers cannot be dark.
"All men are created equal"
"God's love is unconditional"
I feel the pain in my head. I think its because I genuinely want to understand why they truly believe what they are saying while not seeing the clear contradictions, but try as I might I just cannot. I have found that I feel the same way when a contradiction betweeen a belief and action within myself occurs. For example I believe nothing really matters, but every decision and action I take obviously contradicts this belief.
The pain has a name. Confusion. With awareness that such id...
I don't know, rhetorical flare? He was trying to rally people around a cause not precisely define a PhD thesis. You have to be densely literal-minded to not realize Jefferson was talking about political and moral equality-- not any other kind of equality.
I think the right way to interpret most 'declarations' is as illocutionary acts. Jefferson is basically saying "If you try to deny us political equality, these enumerated rights and the freedom to start our own nation we're going to shoot you with these here muskets."
I think "god's love is unconditional" is wrong in exactly the same way, but LessWrong doesn't have as many theists as it does Americans.
LessWrong doesn't have as many theists as it does Americans.
I found that hysterical for some reason.
I don't know if I agree with his assessment, but I immediately thought back to David Stove's "worst argument in the world" aka "The Gem".
Car insurance ads that advertise how much people save by switching to _ Company. If people weren't going to save money, there's no way they would be switching to the company. They probably also wouldn't go through the hassle of switching if the savings were unclear or trivial. Therefore, knowing that the people who looked into it and then switched are completely, totally useless and misleading for the typical viewer who has not looked into it; and if they had looked into it, then they'd already have information rendering that statistic useless.
Though I suppose this vexes me only because it's so obviously stupid once you hear it dozens of times.
Certain statements definitely make me cringe, or at least flinch. For me, I suspect it's about the person's stubbornness of thought, and the importance of the matter. I've only had reactions like yours when I'm talking to someone and realize that rational conversation with the person on something important to both of us seems impossible.
This sounds like a it's worth a few studies, if they aren't already out there! Find out if the effect really exists, and how it varies across demographics. If it's a real effect (and this really should be more motivated by ...
I am disgusted and confused when an individual gives an argument and refuses to give basis or evidence that proves that their statement is true or false. A statement can either be true or false, never both, so how is it that some people come with a philosophy that dictates that it is possible for a statement to somehow be 'border line' or just in between right or wrong. No matter the appearance a statement can only be one of the two coexisting forces, positive or negative, black or white, right or wrong, bad or good, no grey, no kind ofs, no sort ofs, no i...
Just to throw my own data point on the pile:
I don't experience any specific physical sensation, such as my stomach hurting or whatever, when confronted with terrible logic. However, I do experience a sort of mental pain, which feels like the bad arguments are stabbing me directly into my mind. Nothing else triggers this experience, as far as I can tell.
I never really thought about it before, but my reaction is always more or less the same: my eyes roll, I and then I laugh/sigh humorlessly a single time. Sometimes, if it's especially bad (like the example in the OP) I shake my head a couple times as well.
I agree with Crono's comment that it's like hearing a really bad pun.
Bad arguments also make me feel slightly mad, even if the argument maker is obviously sincere.
I feel disoriented for a brief period until I realize that what I'd just heard does not have to make sense.
By the way, I think you would have evoked more authentic reactions if you hadn't begun your post by revealing the badness of the arguments. At least in my own case, knowing an argument is bad before hearing it lets me brace myself and put on my flaw-hunting vest. (The vest is made of flawnel, of course.)
Maybe others differ from me in always being alert to flaws.
It looks as though I was generalizing from one example. If you have a fast reaction to bad arguments and it isn't kinesthetic, what is it?
My experience is similar to what you describe.
It sounds like nausea; like you get when you're intoxicated and the room starts swimming--your faculties try to make sense of what's happening, and fail.
I have to violate the "politics is the mindkiller" heuristic to present the worst argument I've heard recently. Actually, it's two separate arguments from the same person.
First of all he met the proposition "if you can have censorship without fascism, censorship is not fascism (essentially an expression of the law of the excluded middle)" with the reply "then nothing is fascism"
He then further stated
"Socialism is a key part of fascism, therefore socialism is a fascist idea".
That is actually a verbatim transcription of what he said (I took the screenshot). The fact that the man is an engineer exacerbated my despair.
"I think therefore I am"
Would it be more accurate to say I think therefore I think I am. What if I think I am not am I not. If I think I am a goldfish or a black hole is this what I am. If you were to show me a thought it would be by an action, so perhaps it should be I act therfore I am.
The question of what constitutes an "I" is the question that needs first to be answered in order to be able to demonstrate "I am".
(probably gone a little to far with this one, just interested in the nature of the self and what others think about this kind of idea. Maybe point me to a different more relevent post)
What's the worst argument you can think of?
One of my favorites is from a Theodore Sturgeon science fiction story in which it's claimed that faster than light communication must be possible because even though stars are light years apart, a person can look from one to another in a moment.
I don't know about you, but bad logic makes my stomach hurt, especially on first exposure.
This seems rather odd-- what sort of physical connection might that be?
Also, I'm not sure how common the experience is, though a philosophy professor did confirm it for himself and (by observation) his classes. He mentioned one of the Socratic dialogues (sorry, I can't remember which one) which is a compendium of bad arguments and which seemed to have that effect on his classes.
So, how did you feel when you read that bit of sf hand-waving? If your stomach hurt, what sort of stomach pain was it? Like nausea? Like being hit? Something else? If you had some other sensory reaction, can you describe it?
For me, the sensation is some sort of internal twinge which isn't like nausea.
Anyway, both for examination and for the fun of it, please supply more bad arguments.
I think there are sensory correlates for what is perceived to be good logic (unfortunately, they don't tell you whether an argument is really sound)-- kinesthesia which has to do with solidity, certainty, and at least in my case, a feeling that all the corners are pinned down.
Addendum: It looks as though I was generalizing from one example. If you have a fast reaction to bad arguments and it isn't kinesthetic, what is it?