Point taken - in some cases, the significance of the gaps is more evident to the outside view.
In that case, we can replace "point out where in their argument they went wrong" with "point out where our underlying value judgments seem to diverge."
If they then try to argue that your values are wrong and theirs are right, either you have to move the discussion up a meta-level or, yes, screaming.
An application of this hierarchy:
Jack the Scarecrow. My crystal healing pills will give you eternal life. For $50.00 each, you need never die, suckers.
--
DH0: "I'm not interested for myself, but can I buy you a border collie and give her some? If you're going to live forever, you're going to need a smart friend to make the really tricky decisions."
DH1: What, exactly, is your profit margin on these crystal healing pills? If we don't live forever, would you still make money off of them?
DH2: Any post that ends in the word "suckers" directed...
Why are my opponents ignoring what I say because I said it angrily, or sadly, or confrontationally, or in passing, or whatever?
The way you say something may signal that you are trying to diminish their status. If you say it with a sufficiently negative tone, it may even be taken as a signal (a generally reliable signal) that you care more about diminishing their status than about having a truth-seeking discussion.
In other words, what wedrifid said, but less simply and more explicitly.
I think that in some contexts, like arguing over mathematical proofs (as orthonormal noted), spending a little time arguing with yourself to bring out X'Y'Z' is polite and a sign of good faith. In other cases, I'd rather just trot out A'B'C' early on, as long as it doesn't require too much effort, and deal with both arguments at once without ever explicitly raising X'Y'Z'.
I was aware of the genre it spoofed, but I didn't know that it was so specifically targeted. I'm tempted to try to find that made-for-TV movie and watch clips just to increase my appreciation of Airplane!
In this case, I'd even drop my initial thoughts about rudeness. If you can prove that somebody's gone down mathematical blind alley, it's downright polite to do so, since there's no ambiguity about the relevance of the steel man here.
Ideally, a reasonable counterargument that applies to the strong form will also apply to the weak form without significant editing. If the person one was arguing with would have been receptive to DH7 in the first place, that alone should stop them from making the strong form argument - the countering evidence has already been provided.
Where this fails... well, I said "at first" in my thread-starter for a reason.
I don't ALWAYS have low confidence in the other arguer's ability to tolerate a steel man version of their own argument. I do have low confidence in the ability of most people, especially me, to decide what constitutes a non-gratuitous steel man. I have an unfortunate, but understandable, bias in favor of my own creations, and I suspect that this bias is widely shared.
I can respect the person I'm arguing with, and consider them to be truth-searching, and still not want to antagonize the part of their hardware that likes winning. I also dislike having my primate hardware antagonized unnecessarily; I tolerate it for the sake of truth-seeking, but it's not fun.
I see two likely cases here:
A) I come up with a tougher version of their argument in my head, in order to be as careful as possible, but I still have a good way to refute it. This is DH7.
In this case, announcing the tougher version doesn't get us any closer to the tr...
DH7 should be kept internal, at least at first. Being misinterpreted as trying to construct a straw man when you've been trying to do the opposite can derail a conversation. To actually believe that you've made a steel man, not a straw man, the person you're arguing with would have to admit that you've created a stronger argument for their own position than they could.
It's probably best to practice up to DH7 internally, and only up to DH6 vocally.
If we imagine arguments as soldiers, as they tend to be, the problem becomes even clearer:
(A and B are about t...
If the original work is itself a satire, do you try to make a humorless version of it?
Hmm...
"In the seminal Zucker, Zucker, and Abrams opus Airplane!, one character, played by Leslie Nielsen, asks another to pilot an passenger airliner in an emergency. The would-be pilot responds with incredulity, but is coolly rebuffed by the Leslie Nielsen character. This evinces laughter from the audience, as the exchange involves a confusion between two near-homophones."
Heh, heh... still funny.
For less goofy, more drily satirical stuff, I think that making a satire of the satire is still a viable option.
Because I accidentally derailed my last post into pedantry, let me try again with a clearer heuristic:
A TEST FOR ART YOU REALLY LIKE:
Try to make fun of it.
If you can make fun of it, and you still like it, then you don't like it just because it's sacred.
This doesn't have to be a deep parody - I don't really think I could write a deep parody of Bach's Magnificat in D. But I can definitely imagine the parts that move me the most, the sublime moments that touch me to my core, played by a synthesizer orchestra that only does fart noises.
If somebody enjoys something that they read or experience alone, then they must get some utility from art that isn't connected with the associated social signals. I suspect that there are many people who are capable of appreciating art without talking about it.
(This does not apply if they read something alone, brag about it, and try to signal super-high status and nonconformity by only liking obscure things. THAT is the status game that I associate with hipsters.)
I consider that sort of social signaling basically orthogonal to liking art for being pretty, ...
That's common to every art, apart from perhaps cinema or literature. Modern art? Just a load of paint thrown at canvases and unmade beds. Modern music? Just a load of random notes strung together. Modern poetry? Doesn't even rhyme.
I'm not sure which is worse - liking all modern art because one is supposed to like it, or hating all modern art because one is supposed to hate it. Either way, the category lines are not being drawn usefully. As the original post notes, there ought to be more to this than just going along with social signals.
W. H. Auden had an excellent heuristic for dealing with this problem:
"Between the ages of 20 and 40, the surest sign that a man has a taste of his own is that he is unsure of it."
I can like or dislike anything I want, as long as I'm willing to update. The space of possible art is huge, and I would cheat my future self if I excluded entire genres from consideration on the belief that they exist solely as pedant-bait.
I was slightly unhappy to see "Prufrock" mentioned in the same rhetorical breath as modern poetry that relaxes the demand...
I dislike The Catcher in the Rye, feel as if I ought to like Animal Farm, and genuinely like Moby-Dick. I can see why other people would dislike Moby-Dick, but I still like the damn thing.
My hypothesis: Because I was not taught Moby-Dick in school, I did not associate reading it with work, but with relaxation. This is borne out by my love of David Copperfield (read alone) and only vague enjoyment of Great Expectations (assigned in school).
Downvoted for telling me what I'm arguing for and against, for something like the third time now, when I am fairly certain that our intuitive ideas of how abstraction works are somewhat different. This is one of the few things that breaks my internal set of "rules for a fair argument."t.
(Note: I am NOT downvoting for the paragraph beginning "OF COURSE they do", because it's given me a hunch as to what is going on here, is clearly written, and makes your actual objections to the candy bowl case clearer.
I SHOULD not be downvoting for the ...
The article says:
Second-order simulacra, a term coined by Jean Baudrillard, are symbols without referents, that is, symbols with no real object to represent. Simply put, a symbol is itself taken for reality and further layer of symbolism is added. This occurs when the symbol is taken to be more important or authoritative of the original entity, authenticity has been replaced by copy (thus reality is replaced by a substitute).
If I'm reading this correctly, it leaves me even more leery about the value of second-order simulacra.
Also from the article:
...B
I'd say that the incoherent speaker is arguing at DH(-1). DH0 would be an improvement. You would be counterarguing at DH(No) - argument by pointing out conversational emptiness.
(edited to clarify that it is the person who makes the incoherent argument who is arguing badly, and the person arguing against that who is doing something entirely outside the hierarchy.
Other DH(No) arguments-that-are-about-non-argument include "We aren't actually arguing about the same thing" and "let me take some time to do more reading before I reply.")