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jsteinhardt comments on The Relevance of Advanced Vocabulary to Rationality - Less Wrong
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Comments (41)
Thank you for the specific examples!
I like: jumping on the bandwagon, manipulation, self awareness. On the other hand, I disagree with the reductio ad absurdum. Reduction as absurdum is like this: "if X, then Y, but Y is obviously silly, therefore not X." The Y is somehow derived from X. Fully general counterargument is something that actually does not depend on X (this is what makes it fully general); it is a chain of words where you can substitute any value X and get the result "therefore not X". Being a fully general counterargument is a semantic property of some arguments; and probably most of them are syntactically reduction ad absurdum.
More meta: that's the point. If we have specific examples, we can discuss them specifically, and perhaps accept some and refuse others. (And even the act of refusing is helpful for communication, because it makes more clear what exactly we mean by saying something.)
Thanks for the feedback. I agree that reductio ad absurdum is the weakest of the examples I gave, but let me try to justify it anyways: if X is a fully general counterargument, then we can use it to argue against true statements as well as false ones. So applying X without any additional justification would lead to patently false conclusions, and therefore (by reductio ad absurdum) X is not a valid form of reasoning. Perhaps this is not the best word for it, but it is similar to a very pervasive idea in mathematics, where when formulating possible approaches to prove a theorem, a key criterion is whether those approaches can distinguish between the theorem and similar statements that are known or suspected to be false.
ETA: And yes, I agree that specific examples are good!
Yes, that's the usual application, but it's the wrong level of generality to make them synonyms. "Fully general counterargument" is one particular absurdity that you can reduce things to. Even after you've specified that you're performing a reductio ad absurdum against the proposition "argument X is sound", you still need to say what the absurd conclusion is, so you still need a term for "fully general counterargument".