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joshkaufman comments on The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world? - LessWrong
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I just registered http://worstargumentintheworld.com - it redirects to this post, and should be available shortly. Much easier to mention in conversation when other people use this argument, and don't believe it's a "real thing."
Great piece of work, Yvain - it's now on my list of all-time favorite LW posts.
"Real things" have their own domain. I registered this domain, therefore...
Hahaha, nice.
I was imagining a situation in which someone makes an argument of this type, you say something along the lines of "that's a great example of the 'Worst Argument in the World'," and the person replies "you just made that up..." or "that's just your opinion..."
Providing a pre-existing URL that links to a well-written page created by a third-party is a form of evidence that shifts "Worst Argument in the World" from something that feels like an opinion to the title of a logical fallacy. That can be quite useful in certain circumstances.
Exactly! Logical fallacies are bad, and the Worst Argument in the World is a logical fallacy!
(Actually valid because it's a typical, central logical fallacy, not an edge case. If you'd asked me to list the most common logical fallacies even before I saw this post, I'd hope that I'd remember to put argument-by-categorization-of-atypical-cases into the top 10.)
Is not the "Worst Argument in the World" itself a form of categorization (by form of argument), and how can you be sure any given instance of it is not itself an atypical case, that ought not to be compared against the obviously bad =murder or =hitler cases?
By checking.
When in the discussion under the well-written page created by a third party the first party openly admits registering the domain in order to use it as argumentum ad verecundiam, the whole thing loses much of its power.
If I debate with someone, he tells me something like "abortion is murder", I point him to http://worstargumentintheworld.com/ and he takes the pain to read the article AND the discussion and sees why/how the domain was registered, I would claim victory in "raising the sanity waterline".
The argument authority of having a domain pointing to may (I hope it'll) increase the chance the person does at least read a bit of the page instead of discarding it, but I doubt it'll do anything into making him/her accepting that the argument is wrong behind that.
OK, that sounds reasonable.
Anyone who visits this page can judge the merits themselves: there's no argument from authority involved. No one is claiming this form of argument is invalid because it's on LW, or because Yvain wrote it, or because it has a catchy name that's published on a website, or because it now has an easy-to-remember URL. I made a simpler citation, nothing more.
What other role, if not one of authority, play a pre-existing URL and the page being written by a third party, in shifting the status of the argument to a logical fallacy?
To clarify: I understood your comment as saying that when you encounter the "worst argument" somewhere on the internet, you would link to this article with the connotation "look, what you've just done is an officially recognised fallacy - a neutral party has written a nice article about it and there is even a domain for that". Which may work fine until your opponent sees who has registered the domain and for what purpose.
The point of the argument from authority here is to catch the opponent's attention. If he goes as far as looking up who registered the domain, we can be confident he has read the article as well. The argument from authority won't work any more, but we don't care: it has served its purpose.
I was writing an article and trying to refer to www.worstargumentintheworld.com but it appears to be down. Is the registration still valid and/or going to be renewed?
Sorry for the downtime - transferred the domain to a new registrar, and thought the forward would be automatically detected and carried over. It wasn't. Should be back up once the record updates.
It doesn't work anymore for me, and it's been less than a year (typical registration period).