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The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world?
Related to: Leaky Generalizations, Replace the Symbol With The Substance, Sneaking In Connotations
David Stove once ran a contest to find the Worst Argument In The World, but he awarded the prize to his own entry, and one that shored up his politics to boot. It hardly seems like an objective process.
If he can unilaterally declare a Worst Argument, then so can I. I declare the Worst Argument In The World to be this: "X is in a category whose archetypal member gives us a certain emotional reaction. Therefore, we should apply that emotional reaction to X, even though it is not a central category member."
Call it the Noncentral Fallacy. It sounds dumb when you put it like that. Who even does that, anyway?
It sounds dumb only because we are talking soberly of categories and features. As soon as the argument gets framed in terms of words, it becomes so powerful that somewhere between many and most of the bad arguments in politics, philosophy and culture take some form of the noncentral fallacy. Before we get to those, let's look at a simpler example.
Suppose someone wants to build a statue honoring Martin Luther King Jr. for his nonviolent resistance to racism. An opponent of the statue objects: "But Martin Luther King was a criminal!"
Any historian can confirm this is correct. A criminal is technically someone who breaks the law, and King knowingly broke a law against peaceful anti-segregation protest - hence his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail.
But in this case calling Martin Luther King a criminal is the noncentral. The archetypal criminal is a mugger or bank robber. He is driven only by greed, preys on the innocent, and weakens the fabric of society. Since we don't like these things, calling someone a "criminal" naturally lowers our opinion of them.
The opponent is saying "Because you don't like criminals, and Martin Luther King is a criminal, you should stop liking Martin Luther King." But King doesn't share the important criminal features of being driven by greed, preying on the innocent, or weakening the fabric of society that made us dislike criminals in the first place. Therefore, even though he is a criminal, there is no reason to dislike King.
This all seems so nice and logical when it's presented in this format. Unfortunately, it's also one hundred percent contrary to instinct: the urge is to respond "Martin Luther King? A criminal? No he wasn't! You take that back!" This is why the noncentral is so successful. As soon as you do that you've fallen into their trap. Your argument is no longer about whether you should build a statue, it's about whether King was a criminal. Since he was, you have now lost the argument.
Ideally, you should just be able to say "Well, King was the good kind of criminal." But that seems pretty tough as a debating maneuver, and it may be even harder in some of the cases where the noncentral Fallacy is commonly used.
Now I want to list some of these cases. Many will be political1, for which I apologize, but it's hard to separate out a bad argument from its specific instantiations. None of these examples are meant to imply that the position they support is wrong (and in fact I myself hold some of them). They only show that certain particular arguments for the position are flawed, such as:
"Abortion is murder!" The archetypal murder is Charles Manson breaking into your house and shooting you. This sort of murder is bad for a number of reasons: you prefer not to die, you have various thoughts and hopes and dreams that would be snuffed out, your family and friends would be heartbroken, and the rest of society has to live in fear until Manson gets caught. If you define murder as "killing another human being", then abortion is technically murder. But it has none of the downsides of murder Charles Manson style. Although you can criticize abortion for many reasons, insofar as "abortion is murder" is an invitation to apply one's feelings in the Manson case directly to the abortion case, it ignores the latter's lack of the features that generated those intuitions in the first place2.
"Genetic engineering to cure diseases is eugenics!" Okay, you've got me there: since eugenics means "trying to improve the gene pool" that's clearly right. But what's wrong with eugenics? "What's wrong with eugenics? Hitler did eugenics! Those unethical scientists in the 1950s who sterilized black women without their consent did eugenics!" "And what was wrong with what Hitler and those unethical scientists did?" "What do you mean, what was wrong with them? Hitler killed millions of people! Those unethical scientists ruined people's lives." "And does using genetic engineering to cure diseases kill millions of people, or ruin anyone's life?" "Well...not really." "Then what's wrong with it?" "It's eugenics!"
"Evolutionary psychology is sexist!" If you define "sexist" as "believing in some kind of difference between the sexes", this is true of at least some evo psych. For example, Bateman's Principle states that in species where females invest more energy in producing offspring, mating behavior will involve males pursuing females; this posits a natural psychological difference between the sexes. "Right, so you admit it's sexist!" "And why exactly is sexism bad?" "Because sexism claims that men are better than women and that women should have fewer rights!" "Does Bateman's principle claim that men are better than women, or that women should have fewer rights?" "Well...not really." "Then what's wrong with it?" "It's sexist!"
A second, subtler use of the noncentral fallacy goes like this: "X is in a category whose archetypal member gives us an emotional reaction. Therefore, we should apply that same emotional reaction to X even if X gives some benefit that outweighs the harm."
"Capital punishment is murder!" Charles Manson-style murder is solely harmful. This kind of murder produces really strong negative feelings. The proponents of capital punishment believe that it might decrease crime, or have some other attending benefits. In other words, they believe it's "the good kind of murder"3, just like the introductory example concluded that Martin Luther King was "the good kind of criminal". But since normal murder is so taboo, it's really hard to take the phrase "the good kind of murder" seriously, and just mentioning the word "murder" can call up exactly the same amount of negative feelings we get from the textbook example.
"Affirmative action is racist!" True if you define racism as "favoring certain people based on their race", but once again, our immediate negative reaction to the archetypal example of racism (the Ku Klux Klan) cannot be generalized to an immediate negative reaction to affirmative action. Before we generalize it, we have to check first that the problems that make us hate the Ku Klux Klan (violence, humiliation, divisiveness, lack of a meritocratic society) are still there. Then, even if we do find that some of the problems persist (like disruption of meritocracy, for example) we have to prove that it doesn't produce benefits that outweigh these harms.
"Taxation is theft!" True if you define theft as "taking someone else's money regardless of their consent", but though the archetypal case of theft (breaking into someone's house and stealing their jewels) has nothing to recommend it, taxation (arguably) does. In the archetypal case, theft is both unjust and socially detrimental. Taxation keeps the first disadvantage, but arguably subverts the second disadvantage if you believe being able to fund a government has greater social value than leaving money in the hands of those who earned it. The question then hinges on the relative importance of these disadvantages. Therefore, you can't dismiss taxation without a second thought just because you have a natural disgust reaction to theft in general. You would also have to prove that the supposed benefits of this form of theft don't outweigh the costs.
Now, because most arguments are rapid-fire debate-club style, sometimes it's still useful to say "Taxation isn't theft!" At least it beats saying "Taxation is theft but nevertheless good", then having the other side say "Apparently my worthy opponent thinks that theft can be good; we here on this side would like to bravely take a stance against theft", and then having the moderator call time before you can explain yourself. If you're in a debate club, do what you have to do. But if you have the luxury of philosophical clarity, you would do better to forswear the Dark Arts and look a little deeper into what's going on.
Are there ever cases in which this argument pattern can be useful? Yes. For example, it may be a groping attempt to suggest a Schelling fence; for example, a principle that one must never commit theft even when it would be beneficial because that would make it harder to distinguish and oppose the really bad kinds of theft. Or it can be an attempt to spark conversation by pointing out a potential contradiction: for example "Have you noticed that taxation really does contain some of the features you dislike about more typical instances of theft? Maybe you never even thought about that before? Why do your moral intuitions differ in these two cases? Aren't you being kind of hypocritical?" But this usage seems pretty limited - once your interlocutor says "Yes, I considered that, but the two situations are different for reasons X, Y, and Z" the conversation needs to move on; there's not much point in continuing to insist "But it's theft!"
But in most cases, I think this is more of an emotional argument, or even an argument from "You would look silly saying that". You really can't say "Oh, he's the good kind of criminal", and so if you have a potentially judgmental audience and not much time to explain yourself, you're pretty trapped. You have been forced to round to the archetypal example of that word and subtract exactly the information that's most relevant.
But in all other cases, the proper response to being asked to subtract relevant information is "No, why should I?" - and that's why this is the worst argument in the world.
Footnotes
1: On advice from the community, I have deliberately included three mostly-liberal examples and three-mostly conservative examples, so save yourself the trouble of counting them up and trying to speculate on this article's biases.
2: This should be distinguished from deontology, the belief that there is some provable moral principle about how you can never murder. I don't think this is too important a point to make, because only a tiny fraction of the people who debate these issues have thought that far ahead, and also because my personal and admittedly controversial opinion is that much of deontology is just an attempt to formalize and justify this fallacy.
3: Some people "solve" this problem by saying that "murder" only refers to "non-lawful killing", which is exactly as creative a solution as redefining "criminal" to mean "person who breaks the law and is not Martin Luther King." Identifying the noncentral fallacy is a more complete solution: for example, it covers the related (mostly sarcastic) objection that "imprisonment is kidnapping".
4: EDIT 8/2013: I've edited this article a bit after getting some feedback and complaints. In particular I tried to remove some LW jargon which turned off some people who were being linked to this article but were unfamiliar with the rest of the site.
5: EDIT 8/2013: The other complaint I kept getting is that this is an uninteresting restatement of some other fallacy (no one can agree which, but poisoning the well comes up particularly often). The question doesn't seem too interesting to me - I never claimed particular originality, a lot of fallacies blend into each other, and the which-fallacy-is-which game isn't too exciting anyway - but for the record I don't think it is. Poisoning the well is a presentation of two different facts, such as "Martin Luther King was a plagiarist...oh, by the way, what do you think of Martin Luther King's civil rights policies?" It may have no relationship to categories, and it's usually something someone else does to you as a conscious rhetorical trick. Noncentral fallacy is presenting a single fact, but using category information to frame it in a misleading way - and it's often something people do to themselves. The above plagiarism example of poisoning the well is not noncentral fallacy. If you think this essay is about bog-standard poisoning the well, then either there is an alternative meaning to poisoning the well I'm not familiar with, or you are missing the point.
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Comments (1742)
You should probably mention at the top that this is cross-posted from your personal blog. I am glad you posted here; it's an excellent post.
I requested the crosspost.
Maybe also link: Sneaking in Connotations.
I've got a brother-in-law who has used this argument often. We live in Australia, and unless you've been paying attention to the politics of refugees, immigrants and asylum in this country, this won't make much sense.
About 10 years ago, the Liberal Party (conservatives, ironically) put in place a policy (sending boat refugees to off-shore handling places to demotivate people to choose this route) and a directive (the navy to make sure boats never reached Australian shores, often by towing them out of Australian waters). Immigration by boat hence dropped dramatically, but the reason for that dropped was put on the introduction of the policy, treating the policy and the directive as the same category of "policy."
This lumping of various policies and directives into one encompassing category has had the unfortunate effect of showing all Australians that "the policy" was successful in demotivating people to hop into boats, when the reality was very, very different (and we don't know how many boats have sunk and how many people have died from this outside of Australian waters because of this; the Australian navy don't report on what happens outside their areas).
I'm not sure I follow where this ties into Yvain's "worst argument in the world".
It ties in where I say "This lumping of various policies and directives into one encompassing category"; it's the inverse effects of the argument at play.
Hmm. My understanding is that the liberal parties are rather often, let us say, closer to the conservative side of the spectrum. The reason this appears strange to especially citizens of the USA is that, for convoluted historical reasons, they use the term "liberal" to refer to the progressive side of the spectrum, whereupon their liberal party needs to be called "libertarian". (And it's not particularly progressive, either.)
(nods) U.S. political discourse does strange things to the word "conservative" as well.
I don't find it surprising it is that "conservative" comes to mean different things. It's always struck me as an odd term: someone who hadn't heard the term before would think a "conservative" party would just be a "status quo bias" party.
If you have two different countries, with different political histories, you would expect labels to mean different things. We currently view libertarians as closer to conservatives than to liberals, yet libertarians regularly seem closely aligned to 19th century writers such as Bastiat, who were described as Liberal. One could imagine an alternative history where the 19th Century Liberal tradition moved towards a typical conservative position (e.g. as a response to a Labour party).
(I can't say whether this is what happened in Australia, because I don't know the necessary history)
Liberals in Australia are basically culturally conservatives and fiscal liberal.
And George Washington was a traitor. ;)
I'm pretty sure the definition of 'traitor' includes "and lost" in there somewhere!
"Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason."
Sir John Harington
I just registered http://worstargumentintheworld.com - it redirects to this post, and should be available shortly. Much easier to mention in conversation when other people use this argument, and don't believe it's a "real thing."
Great piece of work, Yvain - it's now on my list of all-time favorite LW posts.
"Real things" have their own domain. I registered this domain, therefore...
Hahaha, nice.
I was imagining a situation in which someone makes an argument of this type, you say something along the lines of "that's a great example of the 'Worst Argument in the World'," and the person replies "you just made that up..." or "that's just your opinion..."
Providing a pre-existing URL that links to a well-written page created by a third-party is a form of evidence that shifts "Worst Argument in the World" from something that feels like an opinion to the title of a logical fallacy. That can be quite useful in certain circumstances.
Exactly! Logical fallacies are bad, and the Worst Argument in the World is a logical fallacy!
(Actually valid because it's a typical, central logical fallacy, not an edge case. If you'd asked me to list the most common logical fallacies even before I saw this post, I'd hope that I'd remember to put argument-by-categorization-of-atypical-cases into the top 10.)
Is not the "Worst Argument in the World" itself a form of categorization (by form of argument), and how can you be sure any given instance of it is not itself an atypical case, that ought not to be compared against the obviously bad =murder or =hitler cases?
When in the discussion under the well-written page created by a third party the first party openly admits registering the domain in order to use it as argumentum ad verecundiam, the whole thing loses much of its power.
Anyone who visits this page can judge the merits themselves: there's no argument from authority involved. No one is claiming this form of argument is invalid because it's on LW, or because Yvain wrote it, or because it has a catchy name that's published on a website, or because it now has an easy-to-remember URL. I made a simpler citation, nothing more.
What other role, if not one of authority, play a pre-existing URL and the page being written by a third party, in shifting the status of the argument to a logical fallacy?
To clarify: I understood your comment as saying that when you encounter the "worst argument" somewhere on the internet, you would link to this article with the connotation "look, what you've just done is an officially recognised fallacy - a neutral party has written a nice article about it and there is even a domain for that". Which may work fine until your opponent sees who has registered the domain and for what purpose.
The point of the argument from authority here is to catch the opponent's attention. If he goes as far as looking up who registered the domain, we can be confident he has read the article as well. The argument from authority won't work any more, but we don't care: it has served its purpose.
If I debate with someone, he tells me something like "abortion is murder", I point him to http://worstargumentintheworld.com/ and he takes the pain to read the article AND the discussion and sees why/how the domain was registered, I would claim victory in "raising the sanity waterline".
The argument authority of having a domain pointing to may (I hope it'll) increase the chance the person does at least read a bit of the page instead of discarding it, but I doubt it'll do anything into making him/her accepting that the argument is wrong behind that.
OK, that sounds reasonable.
More generally, it is worth noting that a very tempting class of bad arguments is those which are slightly true, such as this.
Reminds me of http://lesswrong.com/lw/aq2/fallacies_as_weak_bayesian_evidence/
That's more or less the point of http://lesswrong.com/lw/aq2/fallacies_as_weak_bayesian_evidence/.
It's bad when people use the dictionary to make political arguments, but it's worse when they write their own dictionary. For example:
Normal people define "selfishness" as "taking care of oneself, even if that means hurting other people." Objectivists define "selfishness" as "taking care of oneself, but never hurting other people." Hence, selfishness can never morally objectionable.
Normal people define "sexism" as "unfair treatment of a person based on their sex." Feminists define "sexism" as "unfair treatment of a person based on their sex, but it only counts if their sex has been historically disadvantaged." Hence, men can never be victims of sexism.
Normal people define "freedom" as "the ability to do a lot of stuff." Catholics define freedom as "the ability to do as God wishes." Hence, laws enforcing Catholic norms are pro-freedom.
That layer of indirection there is optional.
You think I could replace "unfair treatment of a person based on their sex, but it only counts if their sex has been historically disadvantaged" with "unfair treatment of a woman based on her sex" ? I don't think that would pass an ideological Turing test.
I am saying that the subset of feminists that are unsophisticated enough that they exclude unfair treatment of men from their definition of 'sexism' and yet sophisticated enough that the implicit definition in use is actually dependent on history is comparatively small.
I don't know what you're talking about. I'd wager 10-1 odds that women the "unsophisticated" feminists who ascribe to the "men can't be victims of sexism view" have more education than the general population. The historical dependency is taught in intro WS classes and feminism 101 blogs; they call it "power plus prejudice." Not all feminists agree with the redefinition, but more than a "comparatively small" number do.
I was talking about the subject of the context. I would now expand and simplify my claim to an assertion that your second bullet point is simply false.
I doubt you would find anyone with whom to make up such a wager---certainly not me.
Indeed. There are situations where the layers of belief-in-belief and tribe identity would cause individuals to hold this particular definition, but they most commonly split into:
"any unfair treatment where females are treated inferiorly is sexism" (while pressing the Ignore button whenever there are no women victims of unfair treatment),
"any inferred difference between genders that can be inferred to have negative connotation towards only women or positive connotation towards only men is sexism" (press Ignore when vice-versa) and
"any unfair treatment of someone based on their gender is sexism"
...in increasing order of sophistication, I guess.
I was trying to think of the right word to use for the kind of thought on the subject. Unfortunately all the most natural descriptions that sprung to mind like "prejudiced, hypocritical, sexist, inconsistent" were far more loaded than I wanted in the context. I settled on sophistication, which is at least at least subjective enough that we could consider "sophisticated in terms of adhering to the arbitrary ideal of treating people equally independently of superficial stereotyped features". Of course often 'sophistication' actually means being better at implementing convoluted and hypocritically self serving value systems so I'm still not comfortable using the word here. Should have gone with "more betterer".
Yeah, I was facing the same problem. Perhaps a sufficient reduction would be "progress in their personal understanding of the causes and harms of sexism".
Oddly enough, I usually don't find the term "sophisticated" to have nearly as much negative connotation as other readers.
Not to mention that they define "hurting" as "damaging or destroying other's life, health or property by direct action" where normal people understand the word much more broadly.
Normal people define "true" as "good enough; not worth looking at too closely". Nerds define "true" as "irrefutable even by the highest-level nerd you are likely to encounter in this context." Hence more or less all of Western philosophy, theology, science, etc.; and hence normal people's acceptance that contradictory things can be "true" at the same time.
(Yes, I'm problematizing your contrast between various groups you dislike and "normal people".)
Namespaced that for you.
[citation needed]
I'm not sure it's that tiny, especially once you're using the "steel man" version of the arguments; i.e. things like "Schelling fences" do not often appear in the reasons given for the disagreement, but that can still be what it boils down to.
People who object to abortion may be objecting to a weakening of the social stigma against the murder of innocents - that social stigma performs a useful function in society, so allowing anything that could be described as "murder of innocents" is perceived as bad, regardless of whether that thing is in itself bad.
In other words, even if words are hidden inferences with leaky generalizations etc. - social norms are still defined in terms of words, and so "pointless" debates over definitions still have their place in discussions of morality. Questions that shouldn't be morally relevant ("is abortion murder?") become so because of the instrumental value of social norms.
So yes, sometimes pulling out a dictionary in the middle of a moral argument may be justified. The discussion can then turn to something more useful, like "is it worse if the norm against murder is slightly weakened, or if women have to keep children they don't want?".
I don't think an analysis of either the rhetoric of abortion opponents or their stances on issues where one can make a similar Schelling fence argument supports that many people believe this Schelling fence argument.
For most people, beliefs are not supported by arguments at all. If we restrict our analysis to the tiny fraction of abortion opponents whose beliefs are supported by arguments, then I suspect they mostly do believe the Schelling fence argument. All but a tiny minority of that tiny minority believe specious arguments against abortion as well -- so what?
Then I think you agree with the statement of Yvain that Emile quoted and objected to. Indeed you use almost the same language.
I was trying to access, among those who have an argument, some notion of the primary argument: the one they find most convincing or most central to their beliefs. I think the Schelling point argument is the primary argument for only a tiny fraction of those who have an argument.
On abortion probably not - there are also big "those women are getting what they deserve" and "having children is good, not having children is selfish" components coming into play and probably play a bigger role than "murder is wrong".
Euthanasia, however, is probably mostly about Schelling fences.
I do not have sufficient data to have an opinion on that.
I want a Generalized Emergency Taboo button for just such cases; press the button and everyone is banned from using the word "murder" when talking about "abortion".
That way, in the future, we could talk about abortion using "abortion", and murder in general using "murder", whether abortion is murder or not, without weakening social norms in the process.
Or maybe Beisutsukai already have such a button? Perhaps they need a high enough level to unlock the skill? I had an idea of some third option we could use here to counter the social norm issue when I first read this, but got distracted and forgot it before I could follow up. Anyone else got any such ideas?
That's not really generalized, since it's specific to abortion and murder. A generalized emergency taboo button would be a custom where it's considered polite to ask people to taboo a word (if you think this might help the discussion), and impolite to ignore this request.
I think Less Wrong is pretty decent about this, at least compared to the rest of the world. It's the only place where I've ever seen such a request succeed. For most people it's far from onvious what the point of tabooing a word would be, and it's hard to give a compelling justification for it in a quick sound-bite that you can drop into an in-person discussion.
In the rest of the world, when I find it necessary to invoke the concept, I generally ask people to clarify what they mean by a word and then echo back the phrase they used the word in, substituting their explanation.
Generally speaking, people respond to this as though I'd played some dirty rhetorical trick on them and deny ever having said any such thing, at which point I apologize and ask them again to clarify what they mean by the word.
Among conversations that continue past this point, it works pretty well. (They are the minority.)
Yeah, that works pretty well for me too. Unfortunately, the side effects - extremely powerful dork and/or argument-winning sophist signalling, misinterpretation as a status move, etc. - often far outweigh the benefits I would get from this tactic.
Yeah, there's that.
For me it becomes a matter of tradeoffs.
If people decide to trust me enough to actually engage honestly with the question, I try to be careful about engaging honestly with their answer, and often that can lead to some exceptionally interesting conversations. I've made some excellent friends this way, as well as a few educational opponents.
Most people don't trust me that much, of course. But I'm at a stage in my life where efficiently working my way through lots of people in order to find one or two worth exploring as excellent friends, even if it means unnecessarily alienating dozens of people who would have made perfectly adequate friends, feels like a pretty good tradeoff. I already have more perfectly adequate friends than I'm capable of fully engaging with.
My intent wasn't to contextualize, thanks for making it more explicit.
Don't Try This At Home Capsule: Some dark arts work really well. I've found that out firsthand, both accidentally/involuntarily and in a tiny-sample controlled test (not scientifically relevant, but anecdotally sufficient for me to have good intuitive confidence thanks for confirmation bias vs VoI and different in expected utility). This was before I learned of confirmation bias and the risks of Dark Arts, though.
Even if that is true (and I stick to my guess that it's only a tiny fraction of the time) I still think deconstructing the argument is valuable. If people's true rejection of abortion is Schelling fences, then let's talk Schelling fences! I would ask why birth doesn't also work as a Schelling fence, and I would get to hear their response, and maybe one of us would change our mind.
But if their true rejection is based on Schelling fences, and instead they're just saying that abortion is murder, there's not much we can do except play Dueling Dictionaries. And the reason that has no chance of working ("Really? Merriam-Webster defines murder as killing a human after birth? Guess I'll go NARAL!") is directly related to it not being their real issue.
I agree that talking Schelling fences is usually more productive, and that it's probably not people's true rejection on abortion (norms around sexuality and fertility probably play a bigger role). Note also that unlike you, I never saw an "abortion is murder" sign in real life, and don't remember the topic ever coming up in real life.
Schelling fences probably play a bigger role for "justifiable killing" (like self-defense, the death penalty, euthanasia), where having a strong norm against killing in general discourages revenge killings (anti-abortion seem to be trying to hijack that norm to cover a case that doesn't fall under "killing" nearly as naturally). "Racism is bad" is another case where the norm is pretty valuable and useful in itself, and acknowledging that "non-bad cases of racism are not bad" would weaken it.
Eh, it probably depends of the reference class you're picking, and how charitable you're willing to be in interpreting people's reasons. when deconstructing a WAitW, it may be worth directing the discussion to one on Schelling Fences / norms etc., both as a way of raising the quality of the discussion, and of leaving a line of retreat.
There are real-world examples that could be described as getting the "dictionary" changed — for instance, the successful campaign to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the American Psychiatric Association's "dictionary" (as it were) of mental illnesses.
The "a fetus is a person" attempt to frame the abortion debate actually seems like it would weaken the norm against killing innocents. Most people agree with the rule that it's generally wrong to kill an innocent person, which is a relatively clear bright-line rule. If pro-abortion people can just say "well, a human fetus doesn't count as a person so the rule doesn't apply there" then the rule against killing a person remains relatively clear and simple for them. But if they have to count a human fetus as a "person" then the rule against killing a person becomes messy and complicated for them - they have to say "well, it's often wrong to kill a person, but there are various exceptions and factors to weigh."
Anti-abortion people might like having the abortion debate take place on those grounds, with a human fetus counting as a "person" by definition, because of the rhetorical advantage it gives them within that particular debate. But for the broader goal of establishing shared support for the "sanctity of life" it is counterproductive to cast the abortion debate in those terms. If you use a dictionary to remove the flexibility/disagreement in defining the domain where the rule applies, then that flexibility/disagreement gets shifted into the content of the rule.
Abortion was probably not the best example, "racism is wrong" is a clearer norm that depends on words. I agree with you, as I said later on:
For racism, you get the same problem you mention, with people trying to add more things under the "racist" umbrella (such as affirmative action, or opposition to affirmative action), at the risk of weakening the norm.
It might be worth noting that abortion proponents cluster with death penalty supporters, gun ownership advocates, and generally have a poor record on human rights for e.g. GLBT people. I'm not convinced that they hold the sanctity of life to be equally important for all people generally.
One person's modus ponens is another's modus tollens.
Given the whole emphasis on rejecting a commonly accepted form of persuasion an even more proper response may leave out the clearly empty rhetorical demand.
Is it always illegitimate to bring up the facts that abortion ends a life, that taxes are not paid voluntarily, and that affirmative action benefits some races at the expense of others? If someone with right-wing views on these policies does weave one of these facts into his arguments on less wrong, will he be adoringly referred to this page as though it were a drop-dead refutation?
If in the course of an argument you become frustrated by the other party mentioning true things, perhaps he is making the worst argument in the world. And perhaps there is another explanation.
No and no (hopefully) and yes and yes.
The examples you give bring up specific points of those, the specific facts that are negative. The Worst Argument In The World is when you don't state the particular negative fact, but instead (truthfully) proclaims that X is part of larger set Y which notoriously also contains that one specific negative fact (which X really does have), but also many others which give Y a large net negative value, making X have a large net negative value (to uninformed audiences) by virtue of being part of Y.
Bring up the specific fact, not an arbitrary large subgroup which also contains both X and the specific fact and is known to have a massive net connotation.
In Lesswrong discussion, I've seen similar arguments made, and the most frequent response was "Taboo X and Y", followed closely by a more elaborate reduction.
No. If you didn't get that, you should reread the post. The point is to discuss the relevant features of the subject in question, not say "murder" or "theft" and stop thinking.
That is the author's stated intention. But what he's created is an easily referenceable refutation of weak versions of strong arguments. You're concerned about someone crying "murder" or "theft" instead of thinking. I'm concerned about someone linking to this very popular article instead of thinking, or anyway instead of grappling with a strong argument.
There is no general way to make people think. Everything can be misused.
...therefore, we should not be concerned when well-intentioned articles risk generating new Fully General Counterarguments and having other possible negative effects on rationality. Even if the net expected utility is negative.
No case was made that this is actually problematic; it was simply claimed. How is this more likely to cause trouble than anything else?
It isn't, as far as the evidence I have indicates. I was just disagreeing with the usefulness of that line of reasoning, since it was dangerously close to an Argument of Gray.
As Alex Mennen brought up on my blog, the problem you're worrying about is that someone will say "That's an example of the Worst Argument In The World, which is typically a weak argument", even though that particular version of the argument is actually quite strong.
Luckily, I hear there's a new post addressing exactly that error!
Taxes are not paid voluntarily and affirmative action benefits some races at the (immediate) expense of others, I agree. But note that in saying "abortion ends a life", you described things on somewhat of a higher level and used a more value-laden word than in the other two cases - like saying "Taxes are stolen" or "Affirmative action discriminates". "Abortion ends a life" is still sneaking in connotations, since we imagine ending a human life, rather than a cat's life or an ant's life, and the other person may well object that the embryo's life hasn't quite reached the ant level yet. In general, there's no license to bring up a categorization like 'life', as an unquestionable assumption or 'fact', if the other person is going to disagree with the connotations of the categorization, like "life is precious".
You can bring up as a fact that the embryo has 256 cells capable of metabolism but not capable of surviving outside the uterus. Calling it a 'life' is an attempt to Sneak in Connotations and establish a value judgment, because we all know that life is precious, even though we don't care very much about accidentally inhaling a dust mite. Perhaps you think an embryo is more precious than this because of the (likewise lower-level and harder to dispute) fact that if left in the uterus the embryo will probably become a human baby. But if you merely attempt to enforce the connotation of preciousness by pulling out a dictionary and looking up the definition of 'life', see the fallacy of the Argument from Common Usage; dictionary editors can't settle moral arguments.
As a general rule, whatever you wanted the other person to conclude from hearing the word 'life', such as that an embryo is precious, is something that you need to address directly - not try to establish by looking at other qualities which don't immediately establish preciousness, such as cell metabolism (which also appears in dust mites), and then pulling out a dictionary to try to establish that whoever edited the dictionary wrote a definition of 'life' that matches that.
Or as I would've written then, if I'd known then what I'd known now about training skills instead of conveying insights:
The counterpattern to Sneaking in Connotations is to Directly Argue the Connotation!
I think it's fair to say that on LW, anyone who tried to indignantly take a "But X is a Y!" stance, whether liberal or conservative or libertarian or transhumanist, would be referred to the Human's Guide to Words sequence. It's in one of the first core sequences and lots of commenters will recognize it on sight.
I think you will be often but not always right about the motivations you are suggesting we read into the word "life." Many abortion critics do Directly Argue the Connotation that a fertilized egg is alive with a capital A L I V E, as part of a package of arguments of mixed quality. (If you wanted to emphasize that the total quality of these arguments is usually low, I wouldn't object). The connotation is not even always about human life: at one time there was a Salt Lake City based pro-life vegan punk rock community, whose package of views was unusually coherent for antisocial teenagers.
M, they may be able to argue some, though it's a minority; for example if I promised to my grandmother on her deathbead to never eat fish on Tuesdays, than the morality of certain actions may hinge on the common usage definition of "fish".
Similarly, the morality of saying "I did not have sex with that woman" may depend on what is understood exactly by "sex" (not that a dictionary is necessarily the final arbiter!).
And more generally, rules and norms and laws may refer to words, and while the rules themselves should be evaluated on consequentialist grounds, judging whether one followed the rules may depend on common usage definitions.
For example, it's a nearly universal norm in western societies that racism is wrong. With the way humans are now, it's probably better than a situation where there was no norm against racism itself, but rather acts and beliefs were judged individually as right or wrong - that would leave too much leeway for rationalization. So instead we have the lesser evil of the definition of "racism" becoming overly broad and contested.
(Overall I mostly agree with you; definitions are totally useless on settling empirical disagreements, and mostly useless for moral disagreements)
Yvain, here is a challenge. Many of your examples are weak versions of strong right-wing arguments that you do not accept. (by your remark about Schelling fences, it seems you're aware of this). I challenge you to replace each of these examples with a weak version of a strong left-wing argument that you do accept. Since policy debates should not appear one-sided, there should be no shortage of weak arguments "on your side." And it would be an interesting kind of ideological Turing test.
Perhaps I'm wrong about "what side you're on" and you already accept the strong right-wing arguments. In which case you got me, well done!
Off the top of my head:
Economic inequality is an unequal distribution of resources. The most salient example of this is an unequal distribution of resources that all have equal claim to, like a pie a parent bakes for their children. But [various convincing arguments in favor of at least some economic inequality.]
War is killing, which is bad because murder is bad. (Or eating meat, or capital punishment.)
Gay marriage is good because it's a right, and the most salient rights are good.
Welfare is good because it's a form of helping people, and helping people in ways that don't produce bad incentive effects and without taking from anyone else is good.
Processed food is bad because putting the most salient synthetic chemicals in food would be a really bad idea.
Note that "genetic engineering to cure diseases is eugenics" and "evolutionary psychology is sexist" are probably left-wing viewpoints, though not ones Yvain agrees with.
ISTM that categorizing many of those as "Left-wing viewpoints" or "Right-wing viewpoints" is a strong category error, one that we should attempt to reduce rather than redraw or blue boundaries. "Evolutionary psychology is sexist" is, afaict, a word error. It is not a position, but an implicit claim: "Because evolutionary psychology is sexist, it is bad, and thus evolutionary psychology is wrong!" - this is usually combined (in my experience) with an argument that the world is inherently good and that all humans are inherently equal and so on, which means that theories that posit "unfair" or "bad" circumstances are wrong; the world must be "good" and "fair". Stereotypicalism would call for a reference to religion here.
It may be a word error - I don't think it is, "Evolutionary psychology is riddled with false claims produced by sexist male scientists and rationalized by the scientists even though the claims are not at all well-supported compared to nonsexist alternatives" is a coherent and meaningful description of a way the universe could be but isn't, and is therefore false, not a word error - but if so, it's a word-error made by stereotypically left-wing people like Lewontin and Gould who were explicitly political in their criticism, not a word-error made by any right-wing scientists I can think of offhand.
In general, we should be careful about dismissing claims as meaningless or incoherent, when often only a very reasonable and realistic amount of charity is required to reinterpret the claim as meaningful and false - most people are trying to be meaningful most of the time, even when they're rationalizing a wrong position. Only people who've gotten in a lot more trouble than that are actively trying to avoid letting their arguments be meaningful. And meaningless claims can be dismissed immediately, without bringing forth evidence or counterobservations; meaningful false claims require more demonstration to show they're false. So when somebody brings a false claim, and you dismiss it as meaningless, you're actually being significantly logically rude to them - putting in less effort than they're investing - it takes more effort to bring forth a meaningful false claim than to call something 'meaningless'.
I dislike accusations of sexism as much as the next guy, but in the last year or two I have started to think that ev-psych is way overconfident. The coarse grained explanation is that ev-psych seems to be "softer" than regular psychology, which itself is "softer" than medicine, and we all know what percentage of medical findings are wrong. I'd be curious to learn what other LWers think about this, especially you, because your writings got me interested in ev-psych in the first place.
As in about the likelihood of certain kinds of explanations?
This seems like a qualitative argument, when a quantitative argument would be more interesting. Who is the John Ioannidis of evolutionary psychology? Or, what research has been published that has later turned out to be false?
(Also, why do you dislike accusations of sexism? Shouldn't you only dislike false accusations of sexism?)
Can't think anything without a concrete example.
I am going to rehearse saying this in a robotic voice, while spinning round and round flailing my arms in a mechanical fashion.
Can you put it up on Youtube when you're done?
Excellent idea. It would be beneficial to how the community deals with politics, something that I've been very concerned about recently, to see this written out.
Some tentative to sanitize political debates needs more data. In this post, one common strategy is criticized, I suposse are others, but doubt someone will write a sequence about it.
I have tried constructing a pro-choice example similar to "Abortion is murder!" ("Forced pregnancy is slavery!"???), but it ended up pretty unconvincing. Hopefully someone can do better:
Leaving rape cases aside, the archetypal example is an unwanted teenage pregnancy due to defective or improperly used birth control or simply an accident. Forcing her into letting the embryo develop into a fetus and eventually into a human baby would likely make the woman significantly worse off in the long run, financially, physically and/or emotionally, so she should have an option of terminating the pregnancy.
An example a pro-life person thinks of: aborting a healthy fetus, possibly in the second trimester, as a habitual birth control method.
"Denying euthanasia is Torture!"
Given the majority of legislators are male, for abortion: "Forced pregnancy is mysogyny!" though that may be too tenuous.
I find "Forced parenthood is slavery!" to be pretty convincing, actually. Though I may be prejudiced by having grown up around a Libertarian father (now, alas, more Republican(!??)) who went about proclaiming that jury duty was slavery.
Does this qualify as "a weak version of a strong left-wing argument that you do accept"?
Mm... sure. "X is Y!" is generally pretty weak, and I'm pro-choice, so, sure.
Thanks for the link to Caplan's post, it's a very nice thought experiment. How about a thread where right-wing folks can give their strongest versions of left-wing arguments and vice versa, all the while quietly laughing about each other's misconceptions but not stepping in to correct? I could give it a try, as a right-winger imitating a left-winger, but I'd probably just embarrass myself.
The boundaries are inherently fuzzy and ill-defined, but I count 5 right wing arguments and 3 left wing arguments. Doesn't seem too unbalanced.
What is the strong version of "taxation is theft", for example? I can recall arguments against taxation stronger than this, of course, but none of them I would consider a version of the "taxation is theft" argument.
As for the arguments mentioned in the OP, "taxation is theft", "abortion is murder" and "euthanasia is murder" are typically right-wing, "affirmative action is racist" is also probably right-wing (although general accusations of racism fit better into the left wing arsenal) while "capital punishment is murder", "ev-psych is sexist" and "genetic engineering is eugenics" sound quite leftist to me. Not sure about "M.L.King was a criminal", but the examples seem balanced with respect to the stereotypical left/right division. With respect to Yvain's opinions the choice might be less balanced, of course.
Well I can give you one example. Neoclassical economics makes a pretense of being neutral about how resources are distributed. The focus is instead on the absolute amount of resources. As I think Steven Landsburg puts it, taxes are no fun to pay, but they are fun to collect. The problem is that taxes can be avoided, and that resources put into avoiding taxes (and collecting them) are wasted. There is an identical economic argument against theft: the issue isn't that the thief deserves to have the painting less than the museum, it's that resources the museum puts into defending the painting (and that the thief puts into procuring it) are wasted.
Naturally that is a criticizable line of reasoning, but it gave me a lot to think about the first time I heard it.
But private property also requires resources to defend it (which are wasted like the ones to collect taxes), so in fact, neoclassical economics agree with Proudhon that "property is theft" ? :)
Agreed that the anti-capital-punishment stance exemplified by "capital punishment is murder" is more attached to the American left than the American right, as are accusations of sexism in general (including but not limited to those applied to evo-psych).
"Genetic engineering is eugenics" seems trickier to me.
In the U.S. at the moment, I'd say Republican voters are more likely to endorse a "science can't be trusted" argument than Democratic ones, and Democratic voters are more likely to endorse a "corporations can't be trusted" argument than Republican ones. "Genetic engineering is eugenics" can be spun both ways, I think.
That is, if I wanted to convince a randomly selected Democratic voter to vote against genetic engineering, I could use rhetoric along the lines of "evil corporations want to use genetic engineering techniques to breed a so-called superior race of food crops, which will eradicate the food crops ordinary consumers know and trust and leave us at their mercy. Don't let them get away with it!" pretty effectively. (Though less effectively than they could have 30 years ago.)
If I wanted to convince a randomly selected Republican voter, I could use similar rhetoric with "corporations" replaced by "scientists" and "consumers" replaced by "ordinary people".
Both of those, I think, would be invoking the spectre of eugenics, the only change would be how the eugenicists are characterized... that is, are they elite academic eugenicists, or greedy corporate eugenicists?
All of that said, I endorse eugenics, so I'm probably not a reliable source of information about the rhetorical charge of these words for the mainstream.
Different perspectives, probably. In most European countries, I dare to say, everything associated with genetics is suspect to the left and the left also more often sides with the anti-science rhetoric in general. This is partly because the European right-wingers are less religious than in the U.S. (although I have heard creationism had become political issue in Serbia few years ago) and perhaps somehow related to the differences between Continental and analytic philosophy, if such intellectual affairs have real influence over practical politics.
Yeah, that's been a significant shift over the last few decades in the U.S. There's still a significant anti-scientific religious faction within the American left (New Agers and such) but they've been increasingly joined by factions that thirty/forty years ago would have been considered right, making the coalition as a whole a lot more secular than it was. Meanwhile the right's power base has increasingly moved towards more rural states, and the . anti-scientific religious faction within the American right (evangelical Christians and such) have gained more relative power within it.
Three or four decades ago I think were were more aligned with the European model.
I have no idea whether the distinctions between continental and analytic philosophy have anything to do with it, and am inclined to doubt that the philosophical schism is causal if so, but I'd love to hear arguments supporting the idea.
It gets more complex once you include other groups, too — such as libertarians. In the '60s and '70s, the libertarian movement was closer to the New Left than to the Right, for instance.
This. The lack of examples from the left makes me uncomfortable sharing this article with people that will likely see it as an attack on their ideology. If they have some things to cheer for too, they are far more likely to accept it as a good post.
Which is unfortunate since this seems to be one of the few recent articles with relatively short inferential distances.
See above. Come up with a good leftist example beyond the three already there and I'll add it.
The challenge is an interesting exercise, and I will try to think up some examples, but your comment also contains an implied accusation which I'd like to respond to first.
By my count, this post includes critiques of four weak right-wing arguments (abortion, euthanasia, taxation, affirmative action) and three weak left-wing arguments (eugenics, sexism, capital punishment). As far as I know, neither side thinks MLK was a criminal. That means I'm 4-3, ie as balanced as it's mathematically possible to get while seven remains an odd number.
And I think the responses I see below justify my choice of examples. Shminux says the pro-choice converse of "abortion is murder" would be "forced pregnancy is slavery"; TGM suggests below it "denying euthanasia is torture". These would be excellent examples of TWAITW if anyone ever asserted them which as far as I know no one ever has. Meanwhile, I continue to walk past signs saying "Abortion Is Murder!" on my way to work every day. I don't know who exactly it would be helping to give "Forced Pregnancy Is Slavery" equal billing with "Abortion Is Murder" here and let my readers conclude that I'm arguing against some fringe position irrelevant to the real world.
If you can think of left-wing WAITWs that are as well-known and catchy as "abortion is murder!", I will happily edit the post to include them (well, to include one of them; otherwise it'll be 5-4 and the leftists will start complaining). The best I can do at the moment is anti-war arguments that seem to equate for example humanitarian intervention in Rwanda with invading your next-door neighbor to steal their land because they're both "war", but that one doesn't come in convenient slogan form as far as I know.
Either this is a joke or you mean "odd".
You saw nothing!
"Property is theft"
Is an example of the left using the WAITW.
American liberals aren't that kind of left. And Proudhon did mean "property is wrong for the same class of reasons theft is".
I think the difference is that the right wing examples are examples of core beliefs that many stereotypical conservatives believe. Thus leftists feel like they are scoring points when they read it. The left examples, however, aren't really core beliefs of the Democratic party. Democrats may lean against capital punishment, but no presidential candidate in my memory has made that a core tenant of eir campaign.
I also think it's wildly generous to suggest eugenics as a leftist issue. I can't remember ever hearing someone seriously suggest that genetic engineering is eugenics. And typically, it's conservatives who are opposed to genetic engineering, generally on the grounds of playing God.
And when I was reading it, MLK got lumped in with conservatives for a number of reasons. First, the strong conservative examples primed me to put it there. Second, the civil rights act was largely pushed for by a Democratic legislature and president. Lastly, African Americans tend to line up with democrats in modern demographics.
The best leftist example I could come up with is "Meat is murder". I think that merits including. Or mixing in with the abortion one.
While I can see this argument apply as a sort of justifiable use when humans are doing such profiling, though even in that case I think it should be used sometimes, I find it a bit absurd when applied to say data mining systems. Are we to apply Bayesian reasoning to everything except predictors tied to certain sacralized human traits like gender, dress, class, race, religion and origin? Why don't we feel averse applying it to say age?
To avoid nitpicking that cancer cells have no ideology, I will point out that if they did, they would share the ideology with all life forms on the planet.
Doesn't sound as evil no?
Of course not!
MLK was a Communist philanderer. That's worse. ;)
I was surprised people didn't notice that both the sexism and eugenics arguments where somewhat "right wing". I think a key thing might be that perception of "right" and "left" are tied to the current American political landscape. The important role of religion in it means that conservative politicians don't often make arguments for their policies based on evolutionary psychology or the high heritability of IQ or conscientiousness. The America right seems almost as invested in blank slate notions as the left.
No blood for oil!
Willie Nelson: How much oil is a human life worth?
Economist: Well, in the United States workers value their lives at about $7 million. With current crude oil prices at around $100 a barrel, a human life is worth about 70,000 barrels of oil.
Judith Jarvis Thomson? (Well, she didn't use the word slavery but still.)
As for the euthanasia-is-torture one, I heard that a lot on the media at the time of Terri Schiavo and similar cases. (Maybe none used the word torture but still.)
I lost a lot of faith in contemporary philosophy when I heard "A Defense of Abortion" was "the most widely reprinted essay in all of contemporary philosophy".
It might be easier to come up with examples if you go back to your original definition and note that it allows for categories with positive qualities lending their positive qualities to category members who lack those physical qualities. (Leftist arguments as a rhetorical class are usually phrased in terms of including things in positive categories, whereas rightist arguments are more well-known for including things in negative categories.)
I don't understand how you get from "policy debates should not appear one-sided" to "there should be no shortage of weak arguments 'on your side'". Especially if you replace the latter with "there should be no shortage of weak arguments of this sort on your side" -- which is necessary for the challenge to be appropriate -- since there could be correlations between a person's political position and which sorts of fallacies are most likely to infect their thinking.
In particular, I predict WAITW use to be correlated with explicit endorsement of sanctity-based rather than harm-based moral values, and we've recently been talking about how that might differ between political groups.
I think this is because of the way you're deconstructing the arguments. In each case, the features you identify which supposedly make us dislike the arcetypal cases are harm-based features. Someone who believed in sanctity instead might identify the category as a value in itself. Attempts to ascribe utilitarian-style values to them, which they supposedly miss the local inapplicability of, risks ignoring what they actually value.
If people genuinely do think murder is wrong simply because it is murder, rather than because it causes harm, then this is not a bad argument.
Absent any reason to do so, disliking all murders simply because they are murders makes no more sense than disliking all elephants simply because they are elephants. You can choose to do so without being logically inconsistent, but it seems like a weird choice to make for no reason. Did you just arbitrarily choose "murder" as a category worthy of dislike, whether or not it causes harm?
At the risk of committing the genetic fallacy, I would be very surprised if their choice of murder as a thing they dislike for its own sake (rather than, say, elephants) had nothing to do with murder being harmful. And although right now I am simply asserting this rather than arguing it, I think it's likely that even if they think they have a deductive proof for why murder is wrong regardless of harm, they started by unconsciously making the WAITW and then rationalizing it.
But I agree that if they do think they have this deductive proof, screaming "Worst argument in the world!" at them is useless and counterproductive; at that point you address the proof.
Absent any reason to do so, disliking instances of harm simply because they are instances of harm makes no more sense than disliking all elephants simply because they are elephants.
I don't want to assume any metaethical baggage here, but I'm not sure why "because it is an instance of harm" is an acceptable answer but "because it is an instance of theft" is not.
Keeping your principle of ignoring meta-ethical baggage, dis-valuing harm only requires one first principle, whereas dis-valuing murder, theft, elephants, etc require an independent (and apparently arbitrary) decision at each concept. Further, it's very suspicious that this supposedly arbitrary decision almost always picks out actions that are often harmful when there are so very many things one could arbitrarily decide to dislike.
I have the impression that (1) when people post things in LW that are politically leftish, it's quite common for them to get a response along these lines -- complaining about leftward bias and suggesting that it should be addressed by a deliberate injection of rightward bias to compensate -- whereas (2) when people post things in LW that are politically rightish, they basically never receive such responses.
I have no statistics or anything to back this up, and it's not clear that there's any feasible way to get (or informatively fail to get) them, so I'd be interested in other opinions about whether this asymmetry is real.
If it is real, it seems to me quite interesting.
(One possible explanation, if it's real, would be that leftish views are much more common here than rightish ones, so that people with rightish views feel ill-treated and want the balance redressed. Except that I think I see distinctly more rightish than leftish political commentary here, and the rightish stuff more often gets large numbers of upvotes. I suppose it's possible that what we have here is a lot of slightly leftish people and a smaller number of rightish ones who feel more strongly. Again, this is probably hard to get a good handle on and I'd be interested in others' impressions.)
-- Yvain's 2011 survey
Aha, thanks.
Well right wing people are almost certainly a minority here, but don't forget that makes such positions convenient for hipster fun. Some LWers who argue for right wing positions have stated that they feel more and more unwelcome in the past few months. Not only that I think they make a good case for pro left bias being very prevasive on LessWrong. I think what you are seeing is some users trying to correct for it.
I find the fact that both people who see themselves as left leaning and those who see themselves as right leaning suddenly feel there is favouritism for those who disagree with them is a much more worrying sign. I think this is what being on one side of a tribal conflict looks like from the inside.
Thorium reactors are a nuclear technology.
OK, I don't accept that one, but it's left wing.
Support/opposition to nuclear technology seems pretty orthogonal with left/right to me. The anti-nuclear left tend to be more pro-solar/wind/hydro instead, while the anti-nuclear right more pro-oil/coal/gas instead, but there are pro-nuclear and anti-nuclear is both "sides". Even in a country like France where we have like a dozen of significant political parties, all the parties but one (the greens) have internal disagreement about nuclear energy in general.
That said, yes, "thorium is nuclear" is a good example of TWAITW.
This is the original definition given for TWAITW. Note that the examples Yvain gave all had the form of: "X is in a category whose archetypal member has certain negative features. Therefore, we should judge X as if it also had those features." However, working with the explicit definition outlined by Yvain, as opposed to the implicit definition used by Yvain, we can easily conjure liberal examples:
Other liberal examples, using Yvain's implicit definition:
However, I am not entirely sure if our capacity to conjure examples matters.
Edit: Changed the free speech examples.
Someone uttering this may claim that they are not using the worst argument in the world as defined:
They claim that it does have the critical features in question. Even the person they are arguing against may agree that it is equivalent to shouting out loud "My country is a @#$% disgrace! Screw my country!". The disagreement seems to be whether one should be permitted to do that kind of thing.
"Flag burning is freedom" should be a legitimate example along the same lines.
I do not possess any particularly strong intuitions regarding freedom of speech, for better or for worse. For this hypothetical arguer, could you outline what they think are the critical features?
Something along the lines of being able to say (or otherwise express) whatever you wish without fear of punishment.
How would you say the War on Some Drugs is different than Prohibition?
I very much like "Abortion is a medical procedure". It's actually a believable WAitW to make, and has the admirable feature that it completely ignores every aspect of abortion relevant to the debate.
I think the "free speech" examples don't quite have the right form: the central question probably is whether or not pornography or flag burning is free speech, and the conclusion "Flag burning is free speech, therefore it should be legal" is valid if you accept the premise.
I'm not sure "This specific example has something to recommend it" saves the example from being legitimately described in terms of the category. I'm minded of "Yeah, I killed him, but he deserved it" - that is, everybody thinks their example has something to recommend it, something that makes it distinct from the categorical description, that's why they support it/did it to begin with.
I think most contemporary invocations of "That's racist!" are examples of the worst argument in the world so I'm not so sure about that.
This post could also be titled "Why Kant was Stupid, Part One of One Thousand".
Even if your post remains voted down, I thought it was funny.
I like it too.
Voting up things purely because they're funny tends to be bad for serious discussion forums like this one. If encouraged, purely funny content has a tendency to take over and crowd out insightful content.
I like funny content, but not at the risk of insightful content.
My comment provided an insight insofar as it explicitly connected the analysis to Immanuel Kant's writing in order to criticize it.
Can you think of an example of Kant using this form of argumentation?
-Original (and in my opinion better) version of this article
I think this should be explicitly connected to "policy debates should not appear one-sided". The incorrect response to the worst argument in the world results from forgetting this and trying to deny the downside to your position that your opponent has pointed out. The correct response is to acknowledge the downside but argue that the upsides outweigh it.
Arguably, a better response (depending on the "goal" of the "debate") would be to demonstrate confidence in the upsides and their superior worth in a manner which connotatively implies that the downside is far overshadowed. That's somewhat Dark-Side-flavored, though.
Since we think largely in words, pointing out similarities between Thing We Think Is Bad and Thing We Think Is Good requires us to examine the connotations of the words we use. We should be doing that all the time. Just as this alleged "worst argument in the world" can be used to sneak in connotations, it can also be used to force examination of connotations that have previously been sneaked in.
If I wanted to do that, I would phrase things differently, to avoid the connotation issues (of, for example, Taxation is Theft!):
"We think burglary is bad, but tax is good, yet they have some similarities. Are we right to judge them differently?" or even "I think the things that make burglary bad are X Y and Z, but X is shared by taxation, and Y is partly shared by taxation. I conclude that taxation is not as bad as burglary, but still a bit bad"
Great, clear statement of the position. Wouldn't the "worst argument in the world" taboo apply just as strongly to any use of figurative language in the context of an argument? Instead of making an analogy, for instance (e.g., "X is the mindkiller"), why not just use literal language? No danger of connotative contamination, then. Instead of making a joke, why not just explain what you mean, rather than requiring your audience to grasp for the insight it contains? (Apparently hyperbole is allowed, as it's incorporated into the NAME of the argument - why is hyperbole okay, but not metaphor?)
I understand the ideal here. But I think cutting off our own linguistic balls, so to speak, gives us only the illusion of cognitive cleanness - and much is lost. We are not motivated by pure logic to engage logically with an idea. We are motivated by "epistemic emotions" like curiosity and confusion. A title like "Should Trees Have Standing?" is emotional and poetic and could be literally replaced with "Should our legal system treat inanimate objects as ends in themselves for social reasons not entailed by property rights?" But I don't think the former is cheating, and I don't think the latter would have been as successful in motivating cognition on the topic.
I would even defend good old "Meat is Murder!" as a compact little ethical puzzle for beginners, rather than the Worst Argument in the World!
I think the salient point here is whether we are talking about a theft close to the archetype, such as mugging or burglary, or one further from it, such as Robin Hood enacting his redistribution scheme, or the government taxing.
So when we have "X is the mindkiller", that's okay if "X" happens to be party politics, or factions disagreeing in a fricticious boardroom meeting. A fringe example of mind-killing might be a recurring disagreement between spouses over whether to buy skinned or unskinned milk (you can still have entrenched positions, but it doesn't really reach the same level).
Not sure I'm being too clear. What I'm saying is that words refer to a cluster of things, with varying strength, and we use the WAITW when we talk about things on the fringe of that cluster as if they were in fact slap bang in the middle.
I agree. I'm not saying that this form can't be used as a means of examining our intuitions. For example, "meat is murder" is a snappier way of asking "Why, given that we're so worried about harming humans, are we so callous about harming animals?"
But then once the other person answers you with something like "It's because animals have no natural rights" or "Because animals don't have sophisticated enough nervous systems to suffer" or whatever it is they say, the debate has to shift to whether or not that objection is valid. So "but meat is murder!" shouldn't be used as a counterargument to "Animals don't have sophisticated enough nervous systems to suffer", because this latter statement is already answering the question the former was intended to ask.
Theft is however not solely harmful, obviously one party gains.
For most people I know, that is in the swedish libertarian community, theft is theft whether or not it has socially beneficial effects, because we use the definition that you gave; theft is taking from others without their consent. The implication is not that "As theft is always bad, it should be dismissed without a thought", because some libertarians do favor theft and are explicit about it, because they believe it's necessary. The moral breach of treating others as mere means to one's own goals can be (hypothetically for most) mended if it has other good consequences (or such). The point is that taxation is bad, which doesn't mean it should be dismissed out of hand, but it shouldn't be adopted out of hand! That is, taxation should be considered a bad, until it is proven necessary or otherwise positive.
This seems to presume that using others' property as a means to an end constitutes using others so, which seems dangerously close to question-begging the whole issue.
How else is one meant to categorise instances, other than by noting that they share features with training data?
Just because (e.g.) archetypal cases of theft have other things wrong with them doesn't mean that theft also isn't wrong qua theft. I think you're just choosing to favour some categories (e.g. benefit/harm) over others.
When you say,
I think you bed the question against those who oppose criminality qua criminality.
It's true that you should also consider the advantages of this specific case of theft. But individual exclaimations aren't meant to be complete arguments.
This implies that there is an intrinsic "wrongness" somewhere inside "theft" itself. Where, then, does the human hand reach into the vast void of existence to retrieve this wrongness to which theft is associated?
"Theft", the word, does not have any wrongness. Otherwise, we could use "Borbooka" instead. Let's do that. Does Borbooka have inherent wrongness? Well, what is Borbooka?
Borbooka is, apparently, when an item, which some animals apparently say verbally and apparently implicitly mutually agree is for the exclusive use of "one particular" animal, is moved from one point in spacetime to another point in spacetime such that another animal gains implicit exclusive use of this item without there being an apparent verbal exchange between animals that would apparently make them all understand that both animals "wanted" this item to be displaced thus.
Where, in the Borbooka defined above, is this mystical "wrongness" you insinuate? Are these not all simple conventions and agreements between said animals? Does Borbooka somehow create or destroy matter, or anything at all? If these conventions were not there and all the animals never had the implicit agreement that one item "belonged" to one animal, would Borbooka still be wrong? Would it still even exist?
I thought this was completely covered by a conjunction of the Metaethics and Guide to Words sequences.
I don't understand why you're making this point. It makes no difference to my point which metaethics you wrap it up in. Certainly, I had no intention of implying "that there is an intrinsic "wrongness" somewhere inside "theft" itself".
Then please answer my main question: Where does the "wrongness" come from?
How is a crime wrong simply by virtue of being a "crime"? If we defined crimes to be "every time you touch your own sexual organs", would it still be bad because it's a crime? Does the wrongness come from the fact that society agrees to punish crimes?
You're making a very strong claim. One that almost begs the question. "Theft is wrong because it is theft", one could put it. Where does the wrong come from?
If I have a device of unexplained origin that can supply food and unlimited electrical power to all of Earth's human population indefinitely, and am keeping it in a locked safe, with a notice saying "PRIVATE PROPERTY - DO NOT STEAL!", but I clearly have no intention of ever using or even acknowledging the existence of said device, and have stated publicly (with verified truthfulness) that I really don't get if my stuff gets stolen because I just steal other stuff in return... is it still wrong to "steal" it, because it is theft? If not, where is the line? Where does the wrongness come from?
I don't see how your argument could possibly be valid if theft and criminality do not have an intrinsic wrongness to them. If they don't have intrinsic wrongness, then something else which does not share all of their wrongness and has other goodness is clearly not to be lumped into the same point on the map.
Individual exclamations aren't meant to be complete arguments, but each argument is a soldier, and it is Dark Arts to make inefficient, biased human brains automatically associate two different things like this. The argument simply works in convincing people and "defeating" opponents, despite being "incomplete" and encouraging incorrect reasoning. Reduction is important here.
ETA: I'm not sure I still hold all the beliefs and agree with the content or form of this comment anymore, but removing it would make it difficult to understand the rest of the conversation. Take the statements above with the appropriate measure of critical thinking.
The wrongness comes from wherever the wrongness of harm comes from.
Obveously if you redefined the word 'crime' to point at a different part of the territory it wouldn't make that territory wrong. But I don't know why you're suggesting it would.
Are you begging the question? I honestly can't tell from that:
What am I missing? The above doesn't seem to clearly follow.
This line of argument is frustrating me and I'm having unwarranted strong emotional responses, which is a sure warning bell that something is wrong somewhere here. It also makes me want to give up and leave, which (in my case) is usually also a good sign that there's some unresolved issue or missing information that I really should solve/find right now, lest it bite me in the ass later. As such, I'd be much obliged if you can bear with me until I mange to sort this out.
I'm not trying to suggest that redefinitions would make new territory wrong. I'm trying to figure out how there exists a case in which X is wrong because it is Y, and Y is known to be wrong for Z, when X does not have Z.
My fictive, overblown example in the grandparent might be a good thought experiment for this. Where does the harm in the theft of the magical device come from, if is it explicitly stated in the problem statement that no harm shall be derived from said theft by the owner but that the owner does not consent to the device being taken from his "possession"? Assume zero external noise and complicating factors (such as encouraging future, more harmful forms of theft). If that assumption doesn't work, assume there are zero laws against theft, and that laws against theft were never invented, and humans had never evolved to be angry towards having "their shiny claw" stolen.
Personally, in such a thought experiment, I see exactly zero harm from the theft, and large beneficial effects. I can't conceive how a theft that causes no harm once reduced to its baser components of availability, usage, emotional value, instrumental value, etc. would still cause harm somehow, simply by virtue of it violating an agreement between animals not to do it. If I cede seeing harm on "violating social agreements", then I fail to see the clear schelling point / distinction between that and causing harm by not submitting to any arbitrary social norm, regardless of other values (e.g. we would all be causing harm to a lot of people simply by not praying in X manner to Y god).
From there, I infer that the only way there could remain any wrongness is that some other source of wrongness, other than harm, would shine in from above into theft specifically (and possibly other specific things humans just happen to have opinions about) - which is where my strongly adversarial responses come from.
He's not implying that theft is intrinsically wrong, but rather that some people really might have something like "all theft is bad, period" as a terminal value. In this case it may not help to point out the differences between taxation and archetypal theft. Probably your best bet in trying to get such a person to support taxation would be argue to them that the benefits of taxation should outweigh the negative utility they assign all instances theft.
I didn't understand his message like that. What you're saying is exactly the core problematic that makes this the Worst Argument In The World. People will assign terminally bad value to something, simply because it is part of X and in their model all X is bad, despite that something only having part of X's "badness".
I have a strong urge to reject the "all theft is bad" terminal value as being stupid, incomplete, unworthy, etc., but this urge is Type 1 and I have no idea where the intuition comes from. I don't have enough information, but I'm confident that, in some way, assigning terminal value to such a virtual concept and social norm is either detached from reality, a "floating node" so to speak, or otherwise generates net negative utility somehow, including for the person holding this value. I'll have to think and learn more on this.
Because there's an ethical injunction against it.
You may want to look at this post.
Given a general case, you should be able to argue about harms. Injunctions only come into play where you have some reason to rationalize a bad conclusion in an unusual-seeming case. As no society has so far collapsed due to lack of injunction against taxes, an injunction against all non-consensual-things-taking is unnecessary.
You miss the point. There's the denotation of criminal which includes King, and the connotation of criminal which very rarely includes King. By categorizing King as a criminal, most people will take it to mean "King has committed unlawful acts (denotation) and King is bad (connotation)." People using the worst argument in the world count on this (most of the time probably unknowingly), because without the connotation their argument has no force (or at least not the desired amount) behind it. I.e., the worst argument in the world has the same effect as arguing King is bad even though that was never actually argued.
I actually thought this argument was quite poor. There are lots of possible features in different cases of a type, and to claim some are vitally important seems to beg the question. Murdering a homeless loner estranged from any family or friends may lack many of the features mentioned, but there's little dispute it would qualify. And preventing the creation of a new life prevents the relationships that person would eventually develop. Pointing out that an example falls into a commonly understood category seems a pretty good starting point before delving into what features of that category are important (which isn't something universally agreed on or even consciously thought about). My preferred approach is what you said for eugenics: just admit that I'm alright with murder some of the time, as per the economically efficient amount of crime (such as theft!).
I also think it is a good thing there is a general norm against breaking laws (even stupid ones) and that it is highly questionable whether George Washington & other "patriot" actions did more good than harm, requiring actual justification in each case against an initial presumption.
Really? An appeal to counterfactual consequences? By this line of reasoning, each day you're not having sex with the intent to procreate is tantamount to murder, starting from the moment you hit puberty until you're no longer fertile. There are no remaining schelling points in-between, AFAICT. All that remains is cold hard utilitarian multiplication. Cold hard utilitarian multiplication is, well, hard - and it might not agree with you.
You're hitting Cooperate and telling this the other player (whose game habits you have no information on) on a one-shot P.D. Are you sure you really want to do that?
Here's a fictive example of the "argument":
Blue: X is good!
Green: But X can in theory be defined as an element of Y!
Audience: *gasp!* Ys are bad!
Green: Indeed, Ys are bad!
Blue: Ys are bad because of K, P, Z, C and G. 50% of the badness comes from G, 40% from K, P and Z, and the remaining 10% is C. X only has C. Moreover, X also has B, which is very good, more than twice the amount of C.
Green: But all Y is bad, and X is in Y¹, so X is bad!
Audience: (ignores math) Agreed! *clap for Green*
ETA: ¹. I realized afterwards that this might not be obvious, but it is expected that an informed reader understands that X might not be exclusively part of Y, which Green leaves out (either intentionally, or out of ignorance or concern for efficient communication or whatever other reason). The rest and what follows from this is covered in the main article.
The cold hard utilitarian calculus is hard in many cases because it aims to maximize rather than satisfice. In many ways that seems a feature rather than a bug. Deontological ethics tend to rely heavily on the act-omission distinction, which I must admit I would prefer as the bar I have to pass. But if, as Kant suggested, I ask how I would prefer others to behave, I would want them to act to increase utility. From a contractarian perspective, we can indicate to others that we will increase their utility if they increase ours. It's hard to make contracts with beings that don't exist yet, but there can still exist incentives to create them in the case of farm animals now (which I believe are produced through insemination rather than sex in factory farms) or ems in the future.
My preferred approach also includes not bothering to argue with a great many people. The folk activism* of argument is not going to be very effective at changing anything for most people (I definitely include myself in that set). Like Stirner, I instead converse for my own benefit. This actually makes points in disagreement more valuable because it's more likely to tell me something I don't already know. *Yes, I intentionally linked to a post critiquing the actual argument I am relying on.
I find this a pretty unconvincing analysis of the "X is murder" type arguments and "taxation is theft." My linguistic intuitions are pretty strongly on the side of all of those claims being false, or at least open to debate.
No one outside of extreme libertarians ever refers to taxation as theft, as far as I can tell.
And the reason we have a word "murder" that's separate from the word "killing" (or even "homocide") is that murder is taken to be, by definition, unjust. There doesn't seem to me to be anything too-clever about saying that, any more than there's anything too clever about saying that canines are a particular type of mammal.
A fun special case of this is applying it to arguments:
Pointing out the that an author accepted money from interested parties is an ad-hominem argument.
Hey, let's take a class of arguments and call them unilaterally bad because of a few bad archetypes!
Note, however that "X is in a category whose archetypal member has certain features", is strong evidence that X does in fact have those features. Thus the burden is on the person arguing otherwise to show that it doesn't.
Keep in mind that your brain's corrupted hardware is designed to fail in just this kind of "special pleading" situation. Or to put it another way there's a reason ethical injunctions exist.
Until some other bozo comes up with a different category. Then we get to play tennis.
You know who else made arguments? Hitler.
No, Hitler didn't make arguments, he made assertions; and you know what else was an assertion? Your comment!
Apple uses the WAITW when commenting on the Apple vs Samsung case:
"In a statement the firm [apple] thanked the jury for sending 'a loud and clear message that stealing isn’t right' "
Source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/08/apple-versus-samsung?spc=scode&spv=xm&ah=9d7f7ab945510a56fa6d37c30b6f1709
Judging from the comments this is receiving on Hacker News, this post is a mindkiller. HN is an audience more friendly to LW ideas than most, so this is a bad sign. I liked it, but unfortunately it's probably unsuitable for general consumption.
I know we've debated the "no politics" norm on LW many times, but I think a distinction should be made when it comes to the target audience of a post. In posts aimed to make a contribution to "raising the sanity waterline", I think we're shooting ourselves in the foot by invoking politics.
Reading that HN thread, the problem appears to be a troll (who also showed up on Yvain's original blog post).
If we must use an acronym to refer to this, could it be WAitW or WAW instead of WAITW? My delicate sensibilities thank you in advance.