Cleaning up the "Worst Argument" essay

I like the new title better.

I like this version better, but I was confused at the end by the question

Are they of the first, second, or third type?

because I am not clear what are the defining features of the three types. Rereading, it seems that the first type is saying "x is A" when x is technically A but shares very little in common with the prototypical examples of A that make us think A is bad. Type 2 is saying it when it shares some features but not others, and type 3 is when it shares most of the features but (perhaps) not the key ones that make the prototypical case bad. But these seem like a continuum rather than clear-cut "types".

Whatever you do, please don't change the title to "Guilt by Association". That phrase is a tired cliché, completely devoid of any rhetorical force it may once have possessed. Saying "you're just arguing guilt by association!" will never produce gasps and whispers in the audience, the way that

That's an example of what is technically known as the Worst Argument In The World

(complete with link to dedicated domain) will.

Even worse, this proposed usage would actually be different from the common meaning of "guilt by association" -- and subtly different, which is the worst kind of different. The common usage has to more to do with people than ideas. To use a terrible, political example: consider an opponent of Obama claiming that Obama is a terrorist, because he hangs around with people like William Ayers, and an Obama supporter replying "You're just arguing guilt by association!"

I like the original title better.

The Map is Not the Territory crowd - Korzybski and General Semantics practicioners - dealt in depth with just the issues you raise, so much so that they have particular terms for what you're getting at - the Is of Identity, the Is of Predication, and intensional versus extensional statements.

You're plowing the same dirt. I think you should refer to them, and show how you either extend what they did, or depart from what they did.

1. Efforts to cure hereditary diseases through genetic engineering are eugenics.

Offhand, that doesn't seem to be "the true rejection", as it were, of many people concerned about attempts to cure hereditary diseases. Very few people object, in principle, to a cure for Huntington's, or Gaucher's disease. What people are differing over here is which conditions constitute a disease in the first place.

This is a big part of the resistance among, say, autistics to a cure for autism -- disagreement over the significance and best responses to the condition that defines much of their life experience. When someone with autism says something like "attempting to cure this is eugenics", usually what's behind that utterance is a thought process that can be expressed in the following paragraph:

"Trying to eliminate this condition is trying to make the future not-at-all us-shaped. I wouldn't be me if you changed this about me, I'd be another person. Also, I feel it likely that if you succeed you'll create pressure for people like us to submit to invasive, personality-altering procedures for the sake of your own convenience and comfort, or create societal pressure for us to just not reproduce, which is something we already deal with... and if you think that concern is misplaced because it's not a logical, necessary consequence of the hypothetical scenario, then we suspect you don't know much about how things go for people with little social power or acceptance, and experience has taught us it's a bad idea to trust people with that much power and that little understanding of our perspectives to have our interest in mind when making decisions that affect us."

I'm not really loving the way you're inventing two Title-Cased Important Concepts in this version of the essay; you're title-casing both "The Worst Argument In The World" and "Guilt by Association." In general, I don't love the "filled with buzzwords" feel, and you definitely don't need the redundancy, but there are also some specific reasons why "Guilt by Association" is a poorer choice to title-case.

I could swallow title-casing just "The Worst Argument In The World" in the first version of the essay, as it's not a phrase I had heard much before and the casing helps to signify that it's being used to refer to a specific bad argument rather than an abstract worst argument. In this version, you're using "Guilt by Association" as the name, which doesn't seem to be pointing to an abstract argument and therefore doesn't need the title case; furthermore, "guilt by association" is already a widely-used name for a slightly different fallacy, and it's a bit confusing to see it used to mean something different here.

I don't think the abortion example is a good example. The people who say "abortion is murder' genuinely believe it is murder, that everything wrong with murder is wrong with abortion for the same reasons. If you believe in souls and in "thou shalt not kill" as the fundamental reasons why murder is wrong then abortion is murder, not just technically but actually, associations and all.

Now from an outside perspective, you could argue that the reasons why Christianity considers murder to be wrong ultimately boil down to the fact that it's generally a good view to have, which in turn is because of the reasons you give. Those reasons also prevent your typical Christian from feeling a sense of dissonance between the rule 'thou shalt not kill" and reality, because the two mostly match. But to an actual Christian, the reason murder is wrong is entirely "God said so".

My description of Chirstians there of course doesn't cover all of them (indeed no non-trivial description does), but it covers the people making those signs. To them, the problem appears to be that other Christians have forgotten this self evident fact and need reminding of it.

In short, from the worldview of the people making that argument, the fallacy is not being comitted. Whether abortion is murder is not clouding the debate, it basically is the entire debate.Therefore it is not a good example to use for this fallacy.

How about "Archetypal Association" as an alternative to Guilt by Association? I'd just like a term that is more descriptive than TWAitW without the prior baggage of GbA. "Saying taxation is theft is just an Archetypal Association. In fact, taxation differs from the archetypal case of theft in the following relevant ways..."

There are a lot of ways to mention that racial profiling is belittling and offensive without using the r-word; for example, you could say "Racial profiling is belittling and offensive."

This is the best line in there.

This edit is much, much better than the original. And the original was very good.

Edit: You might want to link to the post on rationalist taboo when you mention it. I would anticipate a number of people outside LW will see this post at some point.

If he can unilaterally declare a worst argument, then so can I. I declare the Worst Argument In The World to be Guilt By Association: "If we can apply a word to something, we must judge it the same as we judge more prototypical instances of that word."

This part happens way too fast.

I liked the original one better, because it had more examples (with slightly detailed analysis) allowing to grasp how often that argument is used and in how many various situations it is.

But I also like the more balanced view of this version, the part on "Canadians are people too".

Would it be possible to do a merge between the two versions ? ;)

Racial profiling seems to avoid the first three sins of racism, but it definitely hits the fourth.

Because of the halo effect, it is inevitable that profiling at airports will lead to violence and discrimination outside of airports. There are plenty of cases where people are attacked merely for being members of outgroups; making the othering official will only enhance that.

Also, as Schneier points out, it is empirically false that it will actually reduce terrorism. And it was already clear that the motivation is animus rather than security, since the same politicians who endorse racial profiling tend to also (for instance) oppose the existence of mosques. (That's not why profiling is wrong; it's why it's closer to prototypical racism)

[edit] I should also note that people tend to be somewhat deontological about racism, which is why people say things like "racial profiling is racism", or "affirmative action is racism".

I think you would do better with some of the other suggestions from the previous thread -- "pornography is art", or the original eugenics example, or "health care is a human right".

I dislike the introduction. Stove's contest seems no longer relevant now that you're not using the name.

Unless the irony of "shored up his politics" was intentional, in which case it should stay. (But even then, now that the post is way less political it's way less ironic.)

"it doesn't share any of the characteristics that make you object to murder of the usual sort." I disagree -- it shares the most salient aspect of murder, namely the harm it does to the future of the human being being murdered. The other features are also objectionable, but a case of murder that doesn't have any of those features (say, the painless murder of a baby with no close acquaintances, friends or family) is still rightfully considered murder. This is why most abortion advocates (unlike the author of this article) do not consider a fetus a "human being" at all. If they did, they would have to confront this argument head on.

Looks much better to me. I think you could improve it even more by adding a precautionary addendum that's something like the following:

So, there we have the Worst Argument In The World, but what about the Second Worst Argument In The World? I declare that to be: "If we attribute a fallacy or bias to an argument without demonstrating why exactly an argument is fallacious or biased, and especially when the particular flaw isn't fundamental to the point of the argument." So, for example, saying something like "well, that's obviously the worst argument in the world!" would be the second worst argument in the world.

I thought one of the most important things in the original essay, and which has been missing from the later versions, was that you explicitly said that the WAitW really only becomes a problem when you use it to shout down the opposition, instead of asking for an explanation for an inconsistency. Even in that original version, several people who I linked the essay to seemed to miss that very important point, and I had to point it out to them. (See e.g. the discussion between me and Panu here.) It'd be better if this version said it too, possibly in caps, bolding, and underlining. Oh, and a tag. ;)

I enjoyed reading the essay, finding it insightful and well-written, which is probably why the bit I disagreed with prompted me to argue.

or because they know it has a gruesome history of occasionally killing the falsely accused. But I still don't think this is a good argument.

I've never understood how proponents of capital punishment can simply sweep aside the possibility of killing even a single innocent person as a negligible consequence.

But taking something with both costs and benefits and then placing it next to something that only has costs

Capital Punishment benefits:

• Possibly reduces crime rate, presumably as a deterrent or by reducing criminal population (up for debate),

• makes victims and their families feel better (sounds more like vengeance than justice),

• saves on the costs of keeping convicts locked up and alive,

• makes politicians who endorse it look "tough on crime" (it's a benefit for them if not for society)

I'm being cynical but I suspect the financial and political benefits are more significant factors in the continued implementation of capital punishment than the two benefits you suggested.

Archetypal Cold-blooded Homocide benefits:

• Helps to counteract population growth,

• can help keep us (i.e. the victim pool) from getting soft and incautious in cozy danger-free lives,

• sometimes the victims are evil people and/or criminals in which case substitute the same benefits ascribed to capital punishment,

• draws legal system resources away from targeting various victim-less crimes such as (depending on the jurisdiction): recreational drug use, sodomy, gambling, polygamy, etc. in which free individuals should be free to partake.

taking something with both costs and benefits and then placing it next to something that only has costs

They both have, let's say, possible benefits.

and saying "Look! It's exactly like this thing here!" misses the entire point of the argument.

I don't say that these two different things are exactly alike. But these two different things do have the same cost - the deliberate and forceful termination of a sapient being who isn't in a position to harm you - which many find unacceptable. That's the point of the argument.

If humanity can embrace formalised, institutionalised punishment-by-death, with the acknowledged possibility that some of those punished are innocent, I find that more worthy of condemnation than the fact that it occasionally spawns a murderously psychopathic individual.

If you want to argue that the costs are worse than the benefits, argue that

The thing is, the costs in this case are pretty much just "cold-blooded murder", and in many peoples' ethical systems that cost outweighs any benefit (with the most common exception probably being the reciprocal survival of others), so perhaps it just seems more efficient to condense the argument into "Capital Punishment is Murder"?

Now if you had said "Killing in self-defense is murder" is an example of Guilt by Association there would not have been a peep out of me :)

4 Marijuana is a drug.

Aspirin is a drug.

5 Taxation is theft.

Only when the people taking their cut don't command force of arms on a national scale, amirite?

1. Efforts to cure hereditary diseases through genetic engineering are eugenics.

The objectionable sort of "eugenics" was historically imposed by violence and deceit; and was not intended for the benefit of the people subjected to it but that of "society", "the nation", or "the taxpayers". It also reinforced and implemented prejudices against racial minorities, non-neurotypical people, etc. These properties are not shared by the development of cures for hereditary diseases.

However, developing human genetic engineering creates new possibilities for forcible or prejudiced eugenics; and specific treatments may have results that in the future we might regard as bad choices born from prejudice.

1. Evolutionary psychology is sexist.

Some people draw conclusions (or speculations) from evolutionary psychology that purport to justify treating people in unfavorable ways on the basis of their sex. Some of these involve claims that all men or women share some personality trait, e.g. "all men are attracted to lithe young women" or "all women are attracted to rich older men", which can be reasonably termed prejudice when applied to individuals. Also, some turn to evolutionary psychology for support for their existing sexist beliefs or behaviors, "as a drunkard uses lampposts."

However, this doesn't differ substantially from other abuses of the human sciences; evolutionary psychology is not distinct in this regard.

1. Euthanasia is murder.

Both involve killing someone — and someone who has clearly been a person, not an undifferentiated lump of cells. There's still a long way from Kevorkian to Manson, though.

1. Marijuana is a drug.

No problem here. (A bigger problem is when people put alcohol in the complement of the set of drugs!)

More later, perhaps....

Poll!

Re: No 9. Hell yes it is!;)

Link to original essay for the lazy

This argument is relatively clear-cut, but other real world arguments are more complicated.

I agree, but only because you include previously

If your objection to murder is predicated entirely upon the four reasons [emphasis mine]

However, most people would still condemn the silent murder of freindless, depressed homeless people, suggesting that they actully have more subtantial objections to murder. In which case this isn't a clear-cut case of TWAitW.

Doesn't the actual problem lie in the inappropriate attachment of universal value to certain classes? For instance "X is an existential risk" might be a persuasive premise that would convince someone on LW, but would it convince anyone else? If anything, the best argument in the world against X has as its premise "X yields less utility than not X". If people always tabooed words until they reached explicit statements about utility they could avoid more than just one class of wrong arguments. Unless a class is universal (forall X, X yields less utility than not X) classes should not be used. Even existential risk is not a safe class because there are scenarios where humanity living forever yields less overall utility than humanity dying out.