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lessdazed comments on Rational Romantic Relationships, Part 1: Relationship Styles and Attraction Basics - Less Wrong
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The notion that there is information to be gained by categorizing things after they are fully described is useless from a utilitarian perspective.
For example, if we know exactly what the process of waterboarding is, and how unpleasant it is, the answer to the question "Is waterboarding really torture," tells us nothing about the morality of doing it. At least that question might have some relevance when posed to presidential candidates, since "torture" is a legal category and saying "Yes, it is torture," might imply an obligation to prosecute waterboarders.
Here, the question of "Is PUA really rape?" is entirely useless, even if the questioner is referring a clearly delineated subset of it, because we are already told to assume states of the world and consequences are true in the hypotheticals (about Alice, Carol, etc.).
Insisting that a guy's acting confident and suppressing nervousness is rape is, at best, an application of the rhetorical trick of referring to disfavored things by the worst label logically associable to them (the counterpart is referring to favored things by the best label logically associable to them). It is a violation of the virtue of narrowness.
For abortion opponents, woman X aborted "A fetus," (of unspecified age). For proponents, woman X aborted "A two month old fetus." For abortion opponents, woman Y aborted "A nine month old fetus." For proponents, woman Y aborted "A fetus," (of unspecified age).
"Women who are 41 are "41". Women who are 49 are "in their forties".
Relevant LW posts: How An Algorithm Feels From Inside, Diseased Thinking. Kudos for noticing that the dangling categorization mistake sometimes also serves as a rhetorical trick. Do other biases also double as rhetorical tricks?
I'm going to skim the transcript from the Republican Presidential candidates' debate a few days ago for five minutes and see what biases I find that aren't prominent logical fallacies. I might find none, but I'm writing this now so that a later statement on what I found or didn't find will be more meaningful.
Wish me luck, I'm going in!
ETA: What a disaster. Most problems look simply like classic fallacies, but not all. I'll elaborate later.
I didn't want to say anything before you looked, but this is a classic exercise for a basic logic class. Yes, logical fallacies abound.
That's really cool. By all means write a discussion post if you find something interesting!
Thanks for this short phrasing for something I often want to say.
I agree with your connotation etc. - but I think the question "Is waterboarding really torture?" does have moral implications beyond presidential candidates: whether or not it is torture can determine whether or not waterboarding goes against a preexisting law or even informal promise ("No ma, I promise I won't torture anybody in Iraq"), and breach of agreement is morally relevant.
More generally, categorizing things even after they are fully described can still be a gain of information if the category label is mentioned in some outside agreement.
For another example, if Professor Witkins the Mineralogist told you "I'll give you $10 for each blegg you bring back from the mine, but nothing for rube.", and you're considering whether to put a purplish weird-shaped rock in your bag, even if you have full information on it you might still wonder if a Mineralogist would classify it as a blegg or a rube (Even if you know Witkins wants the bleggs for their vanadium, you still expect him to pay you for vanadiumless bleggs).
Pretending that someone has actually argued for this position when nobody has done so is a Straw Man argument and probably also a case of poisoning the well.
Edited to add some more specific content: Contrast what you are doing here with the principle of charity, or the principle quoted here:
If the people who are distorting and downvoting criticisms of PUA instead engaged constructively with those criticisms to improve them or focus them on that subset of PUA beliefs and methods that they are willing to accept as True Scotsmen then this discussion would get much further, much faster.
You said this
and this
What’s the charitable interpretation of that?
I guess I Agree Denotationally But Disagree Connotationally. As in, that is technically true in a hypothetical situation wherein you can fully describe a situation, but a human is unlikely to find themself in such a situation (at least for the time being), and my question was not an attempt to categorize a described thing - rather, it was an attempt to elicit a description for a categorized thing.
It is relevant to a discussion with wedrifid, regarding rape, what wedrifid means by the term.
I do not believe PUA is rape. I do not believe that "acting confident and suppressing nervousness is rape". I do believe that sex coerced without the threat of sexual violence can still "count" as rape.
To say that PUA techniques and theories regarding persuasion necessarily count as rape is, to me, absurd. To say that they could not be used in a coercive manner seems equally absurd (like saying "if you're going to trick people you don't need psychology" (and therefore the study of psychology, divorced from ethical concerns, would not teach people how to trick others)).
So do I. There are all sorts of coercion that are on the order of potency as physical violence or sometimes even worse which do constitute rape. (I actually drafted a reply to anonymous along these lines but the details were starting to seem distracting.)
If you have strong arguments about whether torture is worth doing, than knowing what should be categorized as torture would be useful.
"Torture" is a label you attached to things, and then when you ask if something is torture you're making a disguised query but you can't get out more than what you put in. Strong arguments against anything anyone affixes the label "torture" to don't exist.
If one has a way of carving up reality such that yields (set of activities 1), and another that yields a strongly overlapping (set of activities 2), one doesn't make the sets synonymous by acting as if there is only one mental bin as if there was only one set. An argument against each member of one set will always look like an argument against the members of the other if one makes this error.
This is assuming the cluster structure of thingspace doesn't make the argument against everything in (set of activities 1) valid or invalid, which it usually does if the set's boundaries aren't arbitrary and sharp.
What I was thinking was that if it's true that pain is much more likely to elicit answers that the pain-giver wants to hear than anything else (an argument against torture for the purpose of getting information), then it's worth establishing which sorts of treatment supply sufficient pain to get that sort of reaction.