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David_Gerard comments on Open Thread, April 27-May 4, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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There's the difference between logical fallacy and Bayesian fallacy. Most logical fallacies got evolved into human thinking because they often enough in fact constituted Bayesian evidence. e.g. authorities on a subject often know what the hell they're talking about.
Sure, many informal fallacies derive from useful heuristics. The problem is occurs when these heuristics are used as hard rules, especially when dismissing criticism.
For instance, the typical 'privilege' argument is: "You are white/male/heterosexual/cisgender/educated/upper class/attractive/fit/neurotypical, therefore your arguments about non-white/female/gay/transgender/uneducated/working class/unattractive/fat/neuroatypical people are wrong."
It is reasonable that people with certain life experiences may have difficulties understanding the issues of people with different life experiences, but this doesn't mean that you need to share life experiences in order to make an informed argument. The "therefore you are wrong" part of the privilege rebuttal is a fallacy.
Notice that this steelmanning of 'privilege' is completely symmetrical, i.e., an "unprivileged" person would have the same problems with respect to the "privileged" person as conversely. Given that this "steelman" has no connection to the common use of the word "privilege" the question arises, of why that word is being used at all? The answer, I suspect, is in order to sneak in the connotations from the regular meaning of the word "privilege".
The more power you have, the more damage you can do through ignorance.
Do you mean individual or collective power? Individually the average poor citizen may not have much power, but collectively they can do stupid things like voting for the candidate promising to "make the rich pay their 'fair share' ".
I think the privilege model is neither completely true nor completely false, and one of the ways it falls down is that it's framed as absolute about members of groups (and according to a static list) rather than being about a statistical tilt.
The problem is as I mentioned, to the extend it is true, it doesn't correspond to the connotations of the word "privilege".
The argument against symmetry is that the privileged perspective is massively over-represented in prominent cultural productions (movies, books, op-eds, etc.), so underprivileged people have many more resources available that allow them some access to the experiences of the privileged. See this, for instance.
Really? What definition of "privilege" are you using here? I agree that certain perspectives are over-represented in cultural products, but those are not the same ones that the SJ-types call "privileged".
Indeed, "therefore you are wrong" does not follow logically. The usage I more often see is "please, you're being a dick, stop it."
Which is even worse because it accuses the other party of bad faith. Clearly, that's a conversation stopper.
If the argument is about how the world of people (as distinct from scientific conclusions) works, then life experiences are important information. What sort of argument about the world (say, an argument about why people are poor) should ignore life experience? Admittedly, the experiences of two people aren't enough, but at least that's a start. It's also worth checking on whether one of the people is arguing from no experience.