Thanks for spending the time to respond point by point. I'd love to do the same, but this thread would become a bit unwieldy. However, of all the argument mapping software I've looked at, this one seems to be the best: http://workflowy.com/
I transferred your points and counter-points into this and then responded to a few of them (I'll finish responding when I've got a bit more time):
This document can be edited by anybody with this link, so please feel free to chime in. As I mentioned earlier, I'm starting a blog. The goal being to crowdsource ideas on how to make better argument mapping software from the LW community (rather than having discussion isolated to scattered posts). A huge part of this is sketching out example argument maps like the one aove.
For the most part, I agree with the sentiment expressed by Rosenhan. In fact, I agreed so much that I failed (I blame wikipedia :) ) to look at counter-arguments until recently as part of an effort to re-examine my old beliefs and formalize them into argument maps. Thanks for posting this. I wouldn't have been motivated to formalize this into bullet points otherwise.
Did someone delete all of your arguments? I got there, and nothing was there. Maybe I'm doing something wrong and so I can't see what you're talking about?
I haven't seen any links to this on Lesswrong yet, and I just discovered it myself. It's extremely interesting, and has a lot of implications for how the way that people perceive and think of others are largely determined by their environmental context. It's also a fairly good indict of presumably common psychiatric practices, although it's also presumably outdated by now. Maybe some of you are already familiar with it, but I thought I'd mention it and post a link for those of you who aren't.
There's probably newer research on this, but I don't have time to investigate it at the moment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment