[MAJOR UPDATE: I have changed "Woo" to "Pitch" everywhere on the website and on this post due to extensive feedback from everyone. Thanks!]
I'm adding rhetorical-device/common-argument/argument-fallacy tags to the expert quotes on TakeOnIt and calling them "pitches".
The list of pitches so far is here.
Arguments have common patterns. The most notorious of these are rhetorical devices and argument fallacies. While these techniques are obviously not new and are published on several sites on the internet, they are woefully under appreciated by most people. I contend that this is partly because:
- Argument fallacies and rhetorical devices can be too general. Most of their real-world usage occurs in a larger number of specialized forms. These specialized forms are often unlabeled yet are intuitively recognized and prey on our cognitive biases. It takes a lot of cognitive energy to consciously connect the general form(s) to the specialized form.
- The sites about argument fallacies and rhetorical devices are not integrated with debate sites. A google for argument fallacies will give you pages with stagnant lists of fallacies where each one has perhaps a couple of historical or hypothetical applications of the fallacy. Why can't I see every debate where some expert or influential person used that fallacy, and why can't I see every fallacy used in a debate?
To solve these problems, I'm introducing the concept of a "pitch". Any quote from an expert or influential person on TakeOnIt can now be tagged with a pitch. A pitch is a label for a commonly used argument or strategy to persuade. You can think of pitches as the "tv tropes of argumentation". Here's some examples:
"The Consensus Pitch"
"The Patriot Pitch"
"The Convert Pitch"
Pitches encompass both argument fallacies and rhetorical devices. However, they allow for greater specialization. For example, there is the "The Evil Corporation Pitch". On a more minor note, I personally think the names should be simple and ideally guessable from the name alone (e.g. maybe it's just me, but "Post hoc ergo propter hoc" feels like it has some Web 2.0 marketing issues).
Eliezer's "Conversation Halters" and Robin Hanson's "Contrarian Excuses" are good candidates for pitches. (My impression is the "halters" and "excuses" listed are perhaps too specialized for pitches, but in any case at minimum provide fertile material for pitches.)
I only implemented this feature over the last few days and before developing the concept further I'd like to get some feedback.
Careful incremental steps are the way to proceed. Let me explain the current step I'm taking. People generally visit TakeOnIt from a Google search to find out opinions about a particular issue that they searched for. Let's say that they arrive at this page, to find out opinions on whether evolution is true:
http://www.takeonit.com/question/27.aspx
I've annotated some of these quotes - it's just a start - with "woos", or whatever we want to call them. Now let's say none of these quotes were annotated. The result? A person can be persuaded without seeing the general patterns of how they got persuaded. This happened to a friend of mine. He got persuaded by a quote where I was like: "you can't see why this argument is duping you?!". It took me a while to explain the persuasion tactics used in the quote. It was basically a slow process of me identifying and communicating persuasion patterns.
That's where labeling the quotes comes in. It allows a smaller community who's familiar with these patterns of persuasion to pre-process those patterns for the larger community. Now, there's an additional step we could take. We could categorize the various kinds of persuasion patterns. So X is an "alleged fallacy" while Y is "rhetoric" and so on. I actually suspect that more than one category per label is required and it's a mistake to think these labels naturally fall into discrete mutually exclusive categories. However, this label categorization step is secondary. The highest order bit is to simply label the persuasion in the first place. That's where most of the cognitive work is.
I considered allowing a truly broader notion than a "woo", which was simply to allow any tag at all on a quote. However, I think restricting the tags to persuasive patterns gives good focus and avoids dilution.
Perhaps you have not realized how this blows up your whole site.
At present it is a neutral record of expert opinions. Who said what. On the record.
To label something as "woo" - or even the far more innocuous "persuasion pattern" - is not a neutral act. People disagree about what is woo or not woo. They disagree about whether persuasion patterns are being used. They disagree about what constitutes a logical fallacy, both in general and in the specific.
If someone claims that the Singularity is religious woo, do I get a chance to defe... (read more)