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Sewing-Machine comments on The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world? - Less Wrong
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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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.