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 out of the blue and in very much the sort of tone associated with such things, "we need to talk." Your brain is negatively reinforcing, all at once, all the pathways that led you here, way back as far as it remembers the causal chain proceeding. Your mind reels, thinking "oh crap, I should have studied [1 day ago], I shouldn't have gone out partying [1 week ago], I should have asked friends to form a study group [at the beginning of the semester], I never should have come to this school in the first place... why did I choose this damn major?"

Second, we alienate ourselves from the source of the assertion. We don't want to restructure; not only is it expensive, but our general solver was created as a product of the purified intersection of all experiments that led to success in all played games. That is to say, it is, without exception, the set of the most well-trusted algorithms and highly-useful abstractions in your brain. It's basically read-only. So, like an animal lashing out when something tries to touch its wounds, our minds lash out to stop the assertion from pressing too hard against something that would be both expensive and fruitless to re-evaluate. We turn down the level of identification/trust we have with whoever or whatever made the assertion, until they no longer need to be taken seriously. Serious breaches can cause us to think of the speaker as having a completely alien mental process—this is what some people say of the experience of speaking with sociopathic serial killers, for example.

Of course, the mind can only implement the second "barrier" step when the assertion is associated with something that can vary on trust, like a person or a TV program. If it comes directly as evidence from the environment, only the first reaction remains, and intensifies increasingly as you internalize the idea that you may just have to sit down and throw out your mind.

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.

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 stake their whole identity on it. They want to attack the problem from every angle at once, without bothering to come to any conclusions on any particular aspect. They think that if ideas are vaguely associated with each other, then you have to buy both ideas or neither; hence there is always a trend toward "that sounds like something Hitler (or whoever) would approve of." They always try to up the emotional ante by pretending(?) to be offended if at all possible. No clear conception of what is and isn't relevant. Their only goal is to win the argument at all costs.

It does make me feel slightly physically ill, sometimes for hours afterward. Anyway, sorry, this was rantier than I meant it to be.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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 parts.)

For things like 'all men are created equal', which aren't logic based but are potentially-true observations that aren't true in this world, it's a feeling of something being out of place, similar to hearing a dissonant note in a song or suddenly noticing a bug in my food, depending on severity and context. (Realizing that my boss thinks women are always less competent than men would get a stronger reaction from me than finding out that a random stranger believes the same.)

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.

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 machine.

On the other hand, when (the very same) bad arguments are presented in this manner, I get so enraged I can barely stand to look. (Dark techniques really grate on me when they're used in an attempt to persuade people of something I know to be incorrect; and if you're wrong, you darn well better not be sanctimonious about your wrong answer.)

I also suspect that if I had encountered the above sci-fi argument in context, where the incorrect deduction would either have been used to support a further, important, wrong conclusion, or would just have indicated carelessness on the part of the author or character, I would have been annoyed.

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.

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 create life, and at the end of six days she presented the jar as evidence against evolution. Her abstract was written with such moving sincerity, that it turned my stomach how anyone could do that to her.

EDIT: My memory of a house cat failed me (quite predictably). Thanks, David_Gerard. The blurb I actually read was most probably:

Patricia Lewis (grade 8) did an experiment to see if life can evolve from non-life. Patricia placed all the non-living ingredients of life - carbon (a charcoal briquet), purified water, and assorted minerals (a multi-vitamin) - into a sealed glass jar. The jar was left undisturbed, being exposed only to sunlight, for three weeks. (Patricia also prayed to God not to do anything miraculous during the course of the experiment, so as not to disqualify the findings.) No life evolved. This shows that life cannot come from non-life through natural processes.

"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.

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.

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 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.

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.

http://notalwaysright.com/

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. Like, "Someone's brain really just output that series of words, and I'm very upset to live in a universe where that's the case." Sort of like the discomfort of watching someone you can't help who's in a bad situation.

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 coasters can be fun, even though the same physical experiences on a train would be traumatizingly terrifying. (I also enjoy absurdist art in the same spirit.)

As I say, I often experience that as a kind of physical disorientation, similar to vertigo. I classify this as a self-induced hallucination, rather than any kind of perception... that is, I think I could train myself out of it and not lose any data in the process.

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.

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 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, faster than light travel is probably possible.

I've developed a theory that there are two kinds of people: those who model reality in their heads, and those who don't even bother to try. I'm not sure how to describe the sensation, it's not exactly physical, but hearing logic that poor hurts.

"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 ideas impact the world and yourself it combines with sadness, pity, anger, frustration or a combination of all of them. Maybe this is the pain you feel in the stomach. Zen uses koans to take confusion to a heighten level in order to show an individual that all thought is equally confused depending on your perspective. The truth is there is nothing solid or certain just a feeling (that is created/invented) that there is. Belief, thought, action, feeling have little to do with reality. People have a limitless ability to rationalize just about anything and make the most absurd ideas true for themselves. The corners you feel are all pinned down are coners you or people collectively have created for yourself. Different corners, different conclusions, different logic. How you react to ideas, whether fast or not, is based upon the corners your logic uses (and so is in a sense kinethetic) and how they are set up over a lifetime is as individual as fingerprints.

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 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 think it feels a bit like hearing an especially awful pun or horrible joke.

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 threats of hits. That's what someone relying on a really bad chain of logic feels like to me.

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.

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 important is that they believe in god". When asked what happens to people if they have no concience and commit unspeakable acts "as long as they believe in god they will be alright".

The fear of eternal suffering can create some strange logic.