We're built to play games. Until we hit the formal operational stage (at puberty), we basically have a bunch of individual, contextual constraint solvers operating mostly independently in our minds, one for each "game" we understand how to play—these can be real games, or things like status interactions or hunting. Basically, each one is a separately-trained decision-theoretical agent.

The formal operational psychological stage signals a shift where these agents become unified under a single, more general constraint-solving mechanism. We begin to see the meta-rules that apply across all games: things like mathematical laws, logical principles, etc. This generalized solver is expensive to build, and expensive to run (minds are almost never inside it if they can help it, rather staying inside the constraint-solving modes relevant to particular games), but rewards use, as anyone here can attest.

When we are operating using this general solver, and we process an assertion that would suggest that we must restructure the general solver itself, we react in two ways:

Initially, we dread the idea. This is a shade of the same feeling you'd get if your significant other said, very much... (read more)

You know those puzzles you get on the back of cereal packets, where there's a big spaghetti-mess of lines, and you have to help the monkey by finding which line leads to the banana?

Up to a certain level of complexity I can usually look at one of those once, and immediately identify the appropriate line. Bad logic feels like being presented with one of those puzzles, only there is somehow no route to the banana. I can tell, on sight, that there's no route to the banana. There's some sort of holistic wrongness about the puzzle, and it really distresses me that the monkey can't get to the banana!

I tend to find bad reasoning painful when I feel it's likely to be accepted by many, and I can't do anything about it. When it's not likely to be accepted, I just find it funny. I don't remember where I read it, but I like the advice of treating crazy (and otherwise bad or annoying) people as unique objects of art in a mental collection.

People might feel better about this entry if it were in the discussion section rather than in the main section. Also note that one needs to be careful about focusing on such arguments. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence. Moreover, the argument you mention about faster than light travel has non-trivial forms. A classic puzzle given to beginning physics students is very close to this, where one has a laser beam that is focused on a very far away object. If you move the laser pointer a little bit the dot will move much faster than the speed of light. The problem is to explain why this doesn't violate special relativity.

To me, a bad argument for something I disagree with feels like frustrating rudeness or obstruction, even if I have no reason to believe the misargumentation is intentional. I suppose, in a way, it is: the perpetrator has an intention to persuade someone of their (wrong) view, and they are at least negligent in their poor reasoning if not actively dishonest. Physically, it's like the symptoms of mild anxiety with a hint of anger.

A bad argument for something I do agree with feels similar, like unhelpful interference, but with a dash of embarrassment thrown in. I suppose it's likely I don't notice as many bad arguments for things I believe as for things I don't.

Hrm... I tend to get more a feeling of irritation/"GAH! SHADUPSHADUPDHADUP" (depending on mood/how bad it is)

The problem is, I'm not sure I can properly separate the "bad logic" reaction from the "how dare you argue against a position I support and thus implicitly challenge my status?" thing. (Actually detecting explicitly the bad logic is one thing, but the "feel" of it might just be that other feeling. ie, I might simply be noticing or remembering as more egregious the instances of bad logic that were against my position. Although I do find bad logic that supports my positions to be annoying too.)

"What's the worst argument you can think of?"

Since you asked... Some people told me I shouldn't be vegetarian because I kill plants.

And my reaction to such arguments is the surprise of learning that the human mind really is that broken. I used to be under the impression that as intelligence rises, the ability to spot certain fallacies should be reached before the ability to ride the long bus.

I don't feel any pain, but sometimes I feel like I'm SUPPOSED to get an ice cream headache from the overwhelming stupidity.

I am not sure if this counts as an argument per se, but several works of fiction have had instances where a time machine moves a small amount into the future, (say 1 second), and always travels to 1 second ahead of the protagonist, and thus is invisible. Wouldn't this just give the protagonist a 1 second head start against the villain?

At a time of t=5, both would be visible and present, but the protagonist would have 5 seconds of action time, but the "clever" villain would only have had 4 seconds.

For bad arguments in that class, the feeling I get is the same sense of emptiness that I get when I think about a closed, opaque box that I know is empty. There's just nothing useful there, the sentence is a shell with no logic inside. (I get a similar sense of a disorganized but full box when I contemplate a possibly-correct but currently not understood train of logic, and a related sense of a complex but working potentially-visible machine when contemplating a train of logic that I understand but am considering as a whole rather than as its constituent p... (read more)

So, how did you feel when you read that bit of sf hand-waving?

Interestingly, my reaction wasn't negative. Instead, my curiosity was stimulated, and I immediately set myself the task of figuring out what was wrong with it. (Turned out to be easy, of course.)

On a larger scale, I've found the exercise of going through a certain 427 pages of wrongness, and coming to precise understandings of the mistakes, to be strangely satisfying (and informative). Perhaps it could be compared to the feeling of satisfaction a repairman might get from fixing a broken machi... (read more)

I don't know about science fiction, but when I'm working on a RationalWiki article about stupid or crazy things, I really do feel like I'm getting dumber doing the research - finding the original sources of stupidity, going through the bad thinking and trying to understand it enough to describe it and mentally shouting "WHAT. WHAT." all the way through. The pseudoscience equivalent of being boxed in the head repeatedly. There's a reason why skeptics who write about pseudoscience have a tendency to get snarky. Of course, I keep going back to it.

The stomach pain from mental distress is quite a common phenomenon, due to the enteric nervous system (also referred to as "the brain in the gut"). We have an amazing number of neurons in our digestive system-- roughly the size of a cat's brain. Strong emotional responses (like fear, anger, or disgust) are transmitted from the brain in the head to the brain in the gut, often resulting in pain or other discomfort.

When I hear a bad argument, it feels like listening to music and hearing a wrong note.
In one case it is the logical causality that is broken, in the other the interval between notes.
Actually it is worse because a pianist usually goes back on track.

Profound sadness, would be my answer.

On some primitive gut level you’d expect to be oddly satisfied by your own superiority, and amusedly angry at bad logic. But here’s what made me change my thinking pattern.

In college, I came across this (self-reportedly) highly-acclaimed web site of creationist science. On the front page, complete with pictures, were abstracts of young kids from a creationist science fair. There was this one girl, 6-8 year old, whose project was essentially this: She poured clean water into jars, prayed to God for six days not to creat... (read more)

A relative once told me they believed in god because;

"If god exists and I believe I go to heaven, If god exists and I don't believe I suffer for eternity in hell, if god does not exist then It does not matter if I believe. The logical and sensible thing to do therefore is to believe in god."

This is truly someones logic. When confronted with what happens to a person who has not been told to believe the reply was "I'm sure god will take that into account". When asked what happens to people of different faiths and beliefs "all thats i... (read more)

I think the most extreme reaction I've had to stupidity was while reading Kent Hovind's "dissertation" and similar creationist work. That level of failure made me dig my fingernails into my arm like I was trying to cut myself.

This may be a similar phenomenon: really bad grammar, especially spoken, gives me a mild version of that sensation you get when you bring your teeth together wrong.

It's even more interesting to see how people react when faced with arguments that are either very bad or very good, but they can't tell which. I have described the doomsday argument to many random people. The typical reaction is a kind of nervous laugh, followed by quick dismissal. Not a single one became genuinely curious and tried to work it out. It's awful.

If you need more examples to test your reaction, I suggest browsing here, but be warned, this can be a TVTropes style time waster.

http://notalwaysright.com/

Noticing myself making bottom lines is kind of kinesthetic; it feels as though my thoughts are diving too rapidly to the privileged conclusion.

Aside: The Bottom Line has waaay too little karma IMO. But this is generally true of Eliezer's older posts.

I can't find a direct link to a strip, just an indirect mention, but there was a running joke in a few weeks' worth of Peanuts comics where Lucy would give Linus an absurd explanation for a natural phenomenon, and Charlie Brown's stomach would start to hurt. So you're generalizing from at least a considerable subset, not just one example.

For me, it's a feeling like I'm about to be hit in the stomach. If you've ever observed your internal reactions while doing full-contact sparring, you've probably noticed the patterns of tension that arise from hits and ... (read more)

Is it possible that what you're actually feeling is an abrupt drop in empathy? "I would never reason this way; this person is less like me than I had assumed."

A good resource for distilled bad arguments is Hundreds of Proofs of the Existence of God.

This seems rather odd-- what sort of physical connection might that be?

Hmm. It almost sounds like you have a physical reaction to confusion - a biological 'noticing you are confused'. That is, well, cool.