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Error comments on The Hostile Arguer - LessWrong
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Comments (76)
Mmm. I recognize the type of arguer described in the post, but I can very easily see the Hostile Arguer concept turning into a label people slap on others to evade legitimate arguments. (Related.)
Eliezer warned against the use of the Clever Arguer as a fully general counterargument in the referenced post on that subject. I tried to do the same at the end of this one, because yeah, it's a legitimate issue. I'm hoping someone with a better grasp of human signalling will suggest a way to tell the difference.
It seems to me to boil down to the difference between honest disagreement and dishonest disagreement; between argument as contest of truth and argument as contest of dominance. Characterizing that difference alone doesn't help, though. The piece I'm missing is: What signals indicate one or the other? Especially, what signals that are hard to misread through biased thinking? Everyone wants a reason to dismiss the other guy while believing their hands are clean.
The heuristic that comes to mind first, and isn't necessarily correct but might squint towards correctness: Someone who's unwilling to let you tap out is probably hostile.
ETA: Another possible heuristic: If the other party insists on attacking your position, but is unwilling to explicitly defend the one they want you to adopt against attack, that is probably also a bad sign. Especially if they act offended by counterargument, repeatedly cut you off, or take other actions that indicate that they don't really have any interest in anything you have to say.
I suspect that (hostile|clever) arguer is a continuous rather than a binary classification. It's probably possible to be a slightly hostile arguer, and most everyone is probably a clever arguer to some degree or another.
By "explicitly defend", do you mean "specify"?
Here's another heuristic: if they criticize what you're saying, but don't provide any positive claims of their own when asked. It's much easier to attack an idea as flawed than it is to prove an alternative idea is better than it.
It seems like this would cover Devil's Advocate cases too, though. I do that all the time with friends.
[ETA: usually involves political discussion, because I know people who have strong political opinions but I try to avoid having too many myself.]
Sounds like it's not worth them spending time trying to convince you?
That assumes trying to convince is the only point of having a discussion.
Just a heuristic, remember. I agree there are legitimate purposes for problem stating without problem solving, but problem solving almost always needs to be at least the implicit goal of an argument or it will go nowhere.