Catchy Fallacy Name Fallacy (and Supporting Disagreement)

It's probably a good mental discipline to go through this process in your own head, to check that you're not firing off an unwarranted accusation, but sometimes it really is pretty obvious that a particular error has been committed, and in such cases the shorthand seems both useful and justified.

It is really easy to give yourself too much slack when checking these things in your own head. Actually committing your justification to a public comment that others can scrutinize helps to honestly evaluate your own position.

Further, though it can be reasonable to present a position without support when no disagreement is expected, in the case of a counterargument, there is already disagreement, which you should attempt to resolve by presenting your actual reasons for holding your position.

If it's still unclear to others, I'm fairly sure someone will come forward and say so (and they should be encouraged to do so).

A large part of my motivation for this post was to encourage this behavior.

...sometimes it really is pretty obvious that a particular error has been committed...

I favor more detail over less. Obviousness isn't an intrinsic characteristic of an error -- the danger of not spelling something out is a miscommunication due to typical-mind-type hidden assumptions (on the part of either person in the conversation). The key is to keep the level of detail below the "excruciating" threshold.

Assuming your primary goal is to communicate the error then being able to communicate the reasons for the classification of the error to yourself may be of some use, but that is not equivalent to successfully communicating the reasoning to the person who has committed the error.

On the other hand, if your primary goal is to signal status, then inconspicuously failing to communicate your reasons is good, as long as others do not point out your own errors. Which makes self-checking closer to sufficient.

Admittedly, that doesn't mean that this post's obligatory explianation is the best way to communicate reasoning either. Reliably successful communication is a hard problem, which means applying serious rationality to it.

sometimes it really is pretty obvious that a particular error has been committed

The degree or lack of obviousness is a fact about the reader's mind, not about the error.

dismissing the arguments of others by simply linking to the relevant OB/LW article

Not just when dismissing arguments. Discussions here--even top-level posts--often remind me of my sister's complaint about Louis Diat's Basic French Cooking--every recipe refers to other recipes, so you end up having to slaughter a calf in order to make vichysoisse.

It makes it bloody hard for us newbies who have read less than a few dozen posts on LW and OB--and internalized even fewer.

I realize it's difficult with many concepts being discussed here, but when possible try to define concepts briefly and clearly when writing about them?

And yes: instead of just naming a fallacy, clearly demonstrate how it is instantiated in the material being replied to. (In itself, an excellent teaching moment.)

Actually, seems to me it's more like the idea of a Fully General Counterargument. But

Your counterargument should distinguish good arguments from bad arguments, in that it specifies criteria that systematically apply to a class of bad arguments but not to good arguments. And those criteria should be matched up with details of the allegedly bad argument.

hasn't been stated so plainly before (AFAIK), and is a good point – a definition of what isn't Fully General.

Well, it intersects rationalist taboo, in that if you avoid the problem I describe, you should be able to communicate your objection without naming any fallacy. However, the more general concept of a vague counterargument can apply in situations when you are not sure what word to taboo to fix the problem. And taboo can solve other unrelated problems, such as people arguing whether sound is acoustic vibrations or sensations.

Hehe. You said baculum.

[Insert obligatory request for clarification, accompanied by faux scolding for failing to link to the wikipedia entry on argumentum ad baculum, and gratuitous link to the wikipedia entry on baculum proper.]

That is why I specified that the real essence of the problem is being vague, and advised to avoid it "whether [the counterargument] makes a fallacy accusation or not".

This reply also applies to thomblake's comment.

True. Nevertheless, it's not very useful to be right if the person who's wrong can't get your point.

ETA: As freyley points out, no goal was specified explicitly, so "useful" is ambiguous in the above sentence. Good catch!

The "fallacy" alleged here is not the using of acronyms, but your calling it a mind projection fallacy when I said a statement was deliberately obscure.

I was projecting a motivation onto the speaker. That's bad, but not actually the mind projection fallacy, because it wasn't my motivation that I was projecting. That was some other error; maybe the "Bad effects are caused by bad people" fallacy. The mind projection part would be me saying, "This statement is not clear to me; therefore, this statement is not clear."

Is that the mind projection fallacy? Technically, yes. I could have found a more E'-like way of saying that I didn't know what the acronym meant. But I did at least make it clear that the trouble was that I didn't know what the acronym meant. It's enough of a common convention to say "That statement is confusing" when you mean "That statement is confusing to me" that I don't think we should call it the mind projection fallacy; especially when it is invoked as a justification for ignoring the issue of whether the original statement was confusing.

(I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have said anything if I hadn't very recently puzzled over, and wasted a few minutes googling, what SWPL stood for.)

Correct - I wonder in what sense this is supposed to be a 'fallacy'. If anything, it more resembles skipping steps in a proof. Top-level comment to follow.

ETA: link

Being right is a weak defense against failing to communicate that fact.

No it is not a fallacy to use abbreviations correctly. I don't think anyone said it was.

It can be a failure of communication to use even correct abbreviations the audience is not familiar with. And invoking the Mind Projection Fallacy, implicitly pointing out that the ignorance is in the mind of the reader who doesn't get it, misses the point that the communication failure lies in the failure to account for the probable ignorance of some portion of the audience, and communicate the point anyways by using full English words, which is rightly assigned to the commenter that used the abbreviation.

Of course, I understand that you did not get all that from the phrase "deliberately obscure", which itself is the sort of vague accusation I think we should avoid. (And I also doubt the obscurity was deliberate.)

I dislike the idea of doing this; as Eliezer said

it feels to me like I'm dumping all the sins of humankind upon their undeserving heads - I'm presenting one error, out of context, as exemplar for all the errors of this kind that have ever been committed, and showing none of the good qualities of the speaker - it would be like caricaturing them, if I called them by name.

Is this just me? Should we try to have social norms that permit this?

Evil Mirror JGWeissman asserts that you have committed the Correspondence Bias, though he offers no explanation, because he can't, as you have not even talked about the relative effects of circumstances and personality on a person's behavior.

But if you believe that his commission of the Catchy Fallacy Name Fallacy is a special case of Equivocation, then what two different but accurate definitions is he equivocating?

Would you rather call it the "Catchy Bias Name Bias", or maybe the "Catchy Cognitive Error Name Cognitive Error"? Whatever. The name was just a silly hook. The concept that you should support your counterarguments in a way that actually ties it to the argument you mean to refute is the central point I wanted to make. Call it, and the failure to do so, whatever you like.

There's room for some confusion as to who commits the fallacy. If the speaker correctly classifies a mistake (that really is a mistake) as part of a category of structurally related mistakes, that's hardly a fallacy. The fallacy is, as you point out, taking a nice sounding label itself as evidence. Using quotes from famous people creates a similar danger.

I think there is a name for this effect, "association" or "framing" or something. But whatever.

I think we should be more careful about separating heuristics and biases. Heuristics are biased compared to perfect thought, but that's a pointless comparison. You can accuse someone of overusing a heuristic beyond optimal use, but that's a lot weaker than saying it would be better not to use it. Calling things fallacies implies that they're not worth using at all, which is often wrong. Arguments never take the simple deductive form you portray. Ad hominem is a legitimate heuristic and calling it a fallacy is a mistake. But everyone does it, so "fallacy" is a pretty weak word.

I don't see much difference between (A) and (C). Translation between formal and informal usually is contentious.