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siodine comments on The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world? - Less Wrong
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Related to: List of public drafts on LessWrong
Draft of a critical response to this article
The worst argument in the world already has a different name. Philosophers call it the logical fallacy of Accident.
Calling out the worst argument in the world is not useful in practice. It is really hard to stop it from being a fully general counterargument against any high level abstract argument. The article seems to hold that for communication to work properly all statements must refer to “archetypes”, central members of a cluster in thing space. If so, this conflicts with the very idea of parsing reality into clusters-in-thingspace, which is inevitable. Every cluster, being a cluster and not a point, has more and less central members. If arbitrarily marginal members of clusters are invalid members, arbitrarily many things said by humans are The Worst Argument In The World. To banish statements that don’t locate one cluster-in-thingspace right into the centre of another cluster-in-thingspace is faulty, especially when the statements are slogans and the words highly abstract. To use it properly you have to come up with an argument that shows that either the rule or generalization you are attacking is wrong or the case considered is sufficiently exceptional that it no longer applies. I wouldn't trust myself to use that line of reasoning against an argument I already dislike to discount it. And if this really is a way to defend oneself from the dark arts as it presents itself doing, it should be good for precisely that! The article seems much more well made as a weapon to add to that arsenal but then it should be marked as such.
I think the most critical response to the worst argument in the world is that so many people are misunderstanding it (it was better explained on Yvain's blog where he didn't speak in LessWrongese). However, you are right that it is the logical fallacy of accident (as it is probably a form or child or parent of various other types of fallacies), but it's been put in LessWrong's clothes like Yudkowsky has done with other existing biases and fallacies, as such it assumes the LWian worldview and thus imports some nuances which kilobug partly noted.
To your second point, no line is ever drawn on what thing inside cluster-space is outside of the cluster for a given argument. Instead, the entire cluster is banished. Instead, you must argue for the tautology of which the cluster represents (e.g., murder cluster = tautologically bad), and even that's assuming the cluster should be noncontinuous tautologies (shouldn't things farther away from the center of the murder cluster be less bad?). This is no different than the philosophical process of unpacking statements to avoid begging the question.
Can you explain what part on my blog you thought was better, so I can maybe replace it here?
Inference and context are annoyingly important in communication; you start off on the blog by making your definition more personal while on LW it's more abstract and thereby it doesn't convey your intention as well (although, it should be inferred from the rest of the post). It's kinda the same throughout the LessWrong post.
Blog: "If we can apply an emotionally charged word to something, we must judge it exactly the same as a typical instance of that emotionally charged word."
LW: "X is in a category whose archetypal member has certain features. Therefore, we should judge X as if it also had those features, even though it doesn't."
Suggestion:
Yesterday, I had a conversation with a friend about slavery. My friend said, "you know, capitalism is evil." I replied, "Why is that?" He said, "You see, the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines slavery as 'submission to a dominating influence' which clearly includes working for a wage, so therefore capitalism is slavery!" I said, "you mean like slavery-slavery? Whips and shackles?" He said, "sure, see working for a wage is clearly submitting to a dominating influence, so it's slavery all the same. But let's not get into semantics..."
If David Stove 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 prototypical member has certain features. Therefore, let's presuppose X has all of those same features."
A pretty bad argument is this widespread idea that one should never "get into semantics", even if that is what is causing problems. Many even use "semantics" to mean something like "pointless pedantry". I can remember when semantics was a respectable academic discipline...
Amen to this. Indeed, I fear that an actual majority of "people out there" may have no idea that "semantics" means anything other than "pointless pedantry".
Actually, though semantics is perhaps the hardest hit, this is a general phenomenon, afflicting many unfortunate disciplines. You might call it the Argument from Circumscription of Subject Matter, or the "...But That Would Get Us Into X" Fallacy. Essentially, it goes like this: "that line of inquiry can't possibly be relevant, because it comes under the heading of a different academic discipline from the one our discussion falls under". It is particularly common (and insidious) when the "other" discipline has some kind of "bad" reputation for some reason (as in the case of semantics, which is evidently regarded as "pointless pedantry").
As a fictional (yet particularly illustrative) example of this fallacy, one could imagine EY and his colleagues at SIAI a decade ago saying "Well, we could worry about making sure future AI is Friendly, but....that would get us into philosophy [which is notoriously difficult, and not techno-programmer-sounding, so we won't]."
To which the response, of course, is: "So it would. What's your point?"
I have even been in a conversation (with some MENSAns) where the primary subject was actually the meaning of a particular word. One person tried to support his position by retorting that the other person's argument was "just semantics". Well, obviously, yes. But that's a literal description of the subject matter, not an excuse to use "Hah! Semantics!" as a general counterargument!
(Not that I endorse the conversation itself as especially useful, just that "Semantics! My side wins!" is very different to "Semantics! Let's not have this conversation".)
Yeah, that was the joke.