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gwern comments on The End of Bullshit at the hands of Critical Rationalism - Less Wrong
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1) There are different definitions of a fallacy. What I am talking of here are clear cases of argumentative cheating. 2) I do think that factchecking does help, yes. Politicians would have lied much more if they hadn't known that they could be caught out with those lies.
Most people would consider ad hominems cheating if it were pointed out to them.
Based on...?
Media do now and then reveal that politicians have lied on important topics (Watergate, Clinton on Lewinsky, etc). This a) had negative political consequences for the lying politicians and b) arguably made all other politicians less likely to lie (since these incidents taught them which consequences that could have), though this latter point is harder to prove.
See also my comment above.
So, your justification for the claim that factchecking improves politics is based on 2 anecdotes: a scandal from 40 years ago; and another scandal from 20 years ago which to many epitomizes the irrational & tribal nature of politics in which partisan hacks look for any excuse to attack an enemy no matter how trivial or unrelated to the job of governing the country it is?
Obviously not. Please apply the principle of charity. These are some salient examples. Of course there are others.
You're a smart guy. I can't understand why you're being so nit-picky. It's not helpful.
Of course there are others, but I am not interested in arguing by anecdote especially when the anecdotes don't seem to support your thesis. (Seriously, of all the scandals you had to pick the Lewinsky scandal?) What exactly am I supposed to be applying charity to here? Do you have any systematic, concrete, empirical data that supports your claim that factchecking improves politics?
gwern might be a smart guy, but he is below average at charitably interpreting opposing arguments, at least this is my impression based on my interaction with him here and on IRC. It's not an uncommon failing, Eliezer comes across as uncharitable, as well, especially when dealing with those perceived as lower status (he was very very charitable to Karnofsky).
Of course, the impression of uncharitabilty (uncharitableness? is it even a word?) is often given off when the person is a few levels above you and goes through the most charitable interpretations of your argument in their head quickly, realizes that they are all wrong, as well, and rejects the argument without explicitly discussing why the charitable versions are no better than the uncharitable ones. I don't know how to tell the difference.
How are either of the two examples of something being improved?
Maybe these were not well organized enough or didn't reach a critical mass.
There are related organizations like Vroniplag (explained on wikipedia) which did have a very notable effect - at least in Germany. These are specialized in pointing out very grave errors in doctoral thesis - esp. plagiarism and so can and do have significant consequences for the subject under scrutinity.
I think if you could reach a significant mass this could work.
How were they not well-organized? Why do you think this sort of phenomenon has any sort of 'critical mass' effect to it? And why would any future effort not be doomed to fail to reach the critical mass just like all the past ones obviously?
If that's the best you can point to, that does not fill me with hope. When are political questions ever as clear as copy-paste plagiarization? That is not a success story, that's something that fills me with horror - things are even worse than I thought:
And you hope factchecking can make a difference in real politics?!
Well. Politics is the mind-killer. Surely such a fact-checking site would be prone to all the hacks politics can master to ''limit'' its effect. Wikipedia and Vroniplag are good (real: illustrative) examples of this.
Whether I have ''hope''? My post wasn't about hope but intended to point out structures with 'critical mass' that did have an effect. One can learn from that. How to build on these, tweak their logic to maybe achieve a better result.
A critical mass is in my opinion always needed to have any noticable effect because local uncoordinated effects are dealt with by self-stabilizing effects of the existing norms (politic powers can use e.g. regression toward the mean, coordinated salami tactics, fogging and noise).
Not to mention the fact-checkers themselves are subject to being mind-killed.