Since i suck at arguing i would love to see more posts on this subject. I also agree with previous commenter's that a clear distinction needs to be made for things that are darksidey or purely meant for winning an argument no matter what.
there are times when winning the argument is better for your terminal values than always trying to convince the other party of truth.
I'm newly subscribed but looking to contribute, and I was wondering if anyone would be interested in an article (or series thereof) teaching, in a formal and well-defined manner, how to argue. It would cover things like:
There are two reasons why I think such an article might be helpful for this community: Firstly because having learned those skills you could apply them in the privacy of your own head, both to your own arguments and those of others, which in my experience gives a huge boost to critical thinking ability. Secondly because I think most of this community would like to actually make the world a saner place, and those skills are really handy when trying to explain to some intelligent-but-uninitiated schlub why a given silly belief or deduction is in fact silly, or conversely why any of the tools of rationality we use here are in fact rational. It's not magic, but it helps.
It might also improve the level of discourse on the site, of course, but frankly the level of actual argument here is really high in comparison to that of most real-world forums (let alone most Internet forums), and I'd guess with about .75 certainty that nothing I could teach would make it noticeably "better" (a higher growth rate for the function describing the probability of reaching truth as dependent on resources spent arguing). But at the moment I'm inclined to attribute that to the kind of people doing the arguing, rather than the training they have.
And yes, I've noticed articles here that touch on the subject, like Yudkowsky's on inferential distances or language, but I haven't seen anyone having the hubris to try and cover the entire subject in broad strokes. Hubris is a personal speciality of mine.
If this would be helpful, and particularly if there's anything you feel should fall under this heading that I missed in the above list, please say so. If you don't think such an article would be helpful, also please say so. Two reasons I've considered for why that might be the case:
PS: No, of course it's not a good idea to finish an argument with reasons that it's likely to be wrong! Who told you to do that?