Related to: List of public drafts on LessWrong

Draft of a critical response to this article

1. The worst argument in the world already has a different name. Philosophers call it the logical fallacy of Accident.

2. 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.