The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world?

Is not the "Worst Argument in the World" itself a form of categorization (by form of argument), and how can you be sure any given instance of it is not itself an atypical case, that ought not to be compared against the obviously bad =murder or =hitler cases?

If I debate with someone, he tells me something like "abortion is murder", I point him to http://worstargumentintheworld.com/ and he takes the pain to read the article AND the discussion and sees why/how the domain was registered, I would claim victory in "raising the sanity waterline".

The argument authority of having a domain pointing to may (I hope it'll) increase the chance the person does at least read a bit of the page instead of discarding it, but I doubt it'll do anything into making him/her accepting that the argument is wrong behind that.

Anyone who visits this page can judge the merits themselves: there's no argument from authority involved. No one is claiming this form of argument is invalid because it's on LW, or because Yvain wrote it, or because it has a catchy name that's published on a website, or because it now has an easy-to-remember URL. I made a simpler citation, nothing more.

"Argumentum ad verecundiam" translates to "argument from authority" in sounding-smart-speak (saving effort of googling for those who come after me)

And he doesn't appeal to authority, he's correctly addressing the points made by the theoretical opponent: "you just made that up..." and "that's just your opinion..."

Indeed. Many evolutionary biologists are highly dismissive of evopsych. In evolutionary biology you have to start with a variation in a trait, in an environment where - overall, over all interactions - one side of the variation gets a strong enough advantage... then there's genetic studies, and so on. One has to deal with the bother of doing a whole lot of actual science.

If you look at evolutionary psychology - Tooby and Cosmides, or Pinker, that's folks literally making up caveman stories with no well defined physical traits and mechanisms to start with, no demonstration that a trait is a net benefit, no genetics... and, usually, not even any evolution, in the sense that there's no identification of the original proto-trait and it's gradual path of evolution.

I do not possess any particularly strong intuitions regarding freedom of speech, for better or for worse. For this hypothetical arguer, could you outline what they think are the critical features?

Something along the lines of being able to say (or otherwise express) whatever you wish without fear of punishment.

I would say that the War on Some Drugs is sufficiently like Prohibition to make this not an instance of the WAitW. It's still a fairly weak argument, since it's lacking in details, but I don't think it's trying to sneak in any connotations, and I think basically all of the problems with Prohibition are also problems with the War on Some Drugs.

Prohibition was unpopular with a large portion of the population. It caused a lowered respect for the law in general, because so many people casually broke the law in response. It funded organized violent crime. It invaded personal liberty in order to prevent something that only caused harm as a contributing element, not direct harm. It didn't work.

Prohibition was a war on a different subset of drugs. It had a constitutional amendment that made it unquestionably legal for the federal government to be doing. It had few medical implications. There was not an obvious historical argument that it would fail catastrophically when it was implemented.

In other words, I think one could reasonably come to different conclusions on the two cases based on cost/benefit analyses, but I think it's reasonable to call them two instances of the same thing. I also think it's reasonable to say that most of the reasons Prohibition was bad also apply to the War on Some Drugs.

As an example of the fallacy, I think it's less than ideal.

Arguments that your stereotypical leftist and stereotypical rightist will both see as bad are the sort of thing that would, ideally, dominate the article.

Let Y = (Not Z)

X is Y.

Using this, I'd argue that "Corporations are not people" is somewhat valid as an example of the WAitW, since the idea is to put the emphasis on people, and everything else is just property, things. It puts Corporations in some abstract, undefined category of not-people things that, when phrased appropriately, can carry a strong connotation.

I fail to see the connotation in the "not-speech" for the third example though, and I don't quite see how one would use that example to argue against or for money - the label / categorization doesn't seem like it would sway anyone either way.

The archetypical example of a struggle for equal rights has been identical political enfranchisement (e.g. the suffragette movement) or identical legal equality (equal right to property, etc) on an individual level.

Things like gay marriage or adoption rights don't fit those archetypical examples -- hence the rather silly counter-argument by its opponents that "gays are already allowed to marry - they're allowed to marry people of the opposite gender."

I'm saying all this as a huge supporter of gay rights, btw.

This is the subjective value of one's own life. The market value of human life, i.e. the price for which one life can be saved, should be much lower.

I didn't downvote, but on your 3 examples, only the first one qualifies for me, which can justify downvotes (I didn't because the first one qualifies, making it enough to not be worth a downvote).

"Rethuglican" is not an argument, just a typical pun on words against the ones you don't like, but it doesn't pretend to be a reason to not like republicans, just something democrats say between themselves. It's an happy death spiral, but not a WAitW.

"We are the 99%" doesn't share much of the WAitW features. It doesn't try to sneak in connotations, it doesn't attack an typical example of a cluster by assimilating it with the archetype of the cluster.

This site is about refining the art of human rationality, while we certainly do try to get a good map of the world we spend most of our time thinking about thinking. The fundamental realization at the heart of our community, that to a certain extent distinguishes it from traditional rationality, is that humans are biased and broken thinkers who can't rely on their naive reasoning too much. You can think as long and as calmly as you like but if you base your thinking on broken axioms or bad epistemology you won't get much closer to truth.

I did not say or even wish to imply a set of arguments was wrong because of political affiliation, neither where the users I linked to. What I was implying quite strongly is that we are unlikely to hear the best arguments or to update appropriately to those that are politically inconvenient. Not even because of a desire to engage in propaganda for ones cause, but because the world simply looks a certain way to them! There are many correct arguments one can make for incorrect positions, by selectively only hearing correct arguments one does not by default hear the counter-arguments or correct arguments for other positions and perhaps doesn't' even realize they may exist. These are not a controversial observations at all.

Following this reasoning and promoted by complaints and observations observations of my own I stated my argument by pointing out the dominant political affiliation and ideological assumptions on the site and how this harms the rationality of the community on certain subjects.

This rationality quote by Jonathan Haidt may explain this better than I have. Also here is me making an argument explicitly along those lines.

I am thinking that one possible asymetry between "the left" and "the right" is that the former is a rather homogenous group, while the latter is heterogenous. [...] The left is a fuzzy blob in the concept-space, the right seems like a label for points outside of this blob.

Beware the out-group homogeneity effect. People tend to see their own group as more heterogeneous than other groups, as differences that look small from far away look bigger up close.

With left and right, I have also heard the exact opposite claim: that the "right" represents a narrower, more coherent group. In the US, the "right" is based in the dominant, mainstream social group (sometimes called "real America"), drawing disproportionately from people who are white, male, Christian, relatively well-off, straight, etc., while the "left" is a coalition of the various groups that are left out of "real America" for one reason or another. Alternatively, conservatives are the people who support the existing social order and want to keep things roughly how they are; liberals are the ones who want change - and there are more degrees of freedom in changing things than in keeping things the same.

This is an interesting point, that one about the left being more homogeneous than the right. I am not sure whether to believe it, so let me present some objections that I can think of, without evaluating their merit.

A) Assuming the left is indeed more homogeneous, isn't it true just because of greater variability of right between different countries, with a typical single country's right being as homogeneous as the same country's left? (The objection hasn't a particularly strong bearing on the perceived LW left/right imbalance, but may be relevant to the more general question of how the categories of left and right are defined.)

The left generally means socialist(-ish), and the right generally means non-socialist.

B) This may not be accurate; beware availability heuristics.

Environmentalists aren't necessarily socialists as their opinions about the optimal economic order aren't the defining part of their ideology and may differ. Yet the environmentalists are usually classified on the left. Anarchists aren't necessarily socialists; many of them oppose any form of organised society, while archetypal socialism is a very organised society, from many points of view more than market capitalism. Feminists rarely dream about socialist utopias as they have a different fish to fry. Yet both feminists and anarchists are usually considered standing on the left. In fact I could use the examples of these groups to make a mirror argument of yours, namely, that the right is capitalist(-ish) while the left is everything opposed to capitalism. I don't think this is a good definition since there are counter-examples to it too (e.g. the nazis who are against capitalism but still "right-wing") but at least I don't immediately see this description being less reasonable than yours.

Of course this all hinges on the definitions of socialism or capitalism, discussions about which might better be avoided for their pointlessness. It is not clear whether there is a sensible definition of left and right other than "arbitrary convention set up by historical accident", but if there is, I suppose it would go along the lines of social status: the right are those who side with the elites and wish the present distribution of power preserved, the left are those who side with the underclasses and therefore wish to shift the balance towards more egalitarianism, from which would the lower status people profit (in terms of relative status increase, not necessarily materially). This definition has several advantages: for one thing, it has no problems with the fact that in the late 18th century the market liberals were considered left.

As an example, both Ayn Rand and Chesterton would be examples of "the right". What exactly do they have in common?

C) Both Jacques Derrida and Lenin would be examples of "the left". What do they have in common? Or Pol Pot and Bertrand Russell? Neither of them was a big fan of free markets (or hinduism, for that matter), but that doesn't guarantee much ideological homogeneity.

I am from eastern Europe, where "the left" basically either wants "what communists did" or "something similar to what communists did, just less, and if possible without all the violence".

D) When I still thought that "left" and "right" were more than two rather arbitrary labels, I considered myself a leftist and "something similar to what communists did, just less, and if possible without all the violence" wasn't the way I would summarise my political preferences. Of course, there is a sense in which any government intervention into the markets is "what communists did, just less", but it is a sense on such a level of vagueness and generality that it lacks significant information value. In any case, for ideologically oriented both social democrats and greens communism is primarily a negative example rather than an attractor. (I don't claim deep knowledge of the contemporary left in Slovakia, but feel quite certain to object to your statement being formulated as valid for the whole Eastern Europe).

But there are any number of sub-varieties of socialism, so it is itself a fuzzy blob. Moreover, the non-right in many countries, particularly the US, barely has a whiff of classical socialism, Who is advocating a centrally planned economy or worker control of production in the US? It's a standing joke in Europe that the US has two parties of the right. That's "perception" of course. It's also a US perception that public healthcare "is" socialism -- the idea is seen as mainstream and cross-party elsewhere. What is going on is that the right have this convenient label "socialist" to lambast the non-right with, and the non-right don't have a corresponding term to hit back with. That doesnt mean anything about ideaspace.

I think you are severely underestimating the strength of conviction among people whose beliefs disagree with your own,

Very possibly. The Christian who gets infected by LW might be terrified of telling their family, friends, and church group that they're now an atheist; similarly, the anti-racist who gets infected by LW might be terrified of telling their family and friends that they're now a race realist.

Isn't that reasonable though? If you're a X-winger, isn't the whole point that X-wing positions are in fact morally superior?

Morally superior perhaps, but they lack the hull plating and durability to survive ongoing combat and the offensive payload pales in comparison to what the Y-wing can deliver.

Assuming that everyone would see it the same way when manifestly they do not is just an empirical mistake.

Yes, everyone think's their position is right, but not everyone speaks to audiences who disagree with them expecting them all to agree.

How about the other side of that - my characterization of the tone of non left wing views?

I think the standard rejoinder is that private property incurs greater benefits than the general cost of securing it, owing to true "tragedy of the commons" type situations it attempts to avoid.

Yeah, that's been a significant shift over the last few decades in the U.S. There's still a significant anti-scientific religious faction within the American left (New Agers and such) but they've been increasingly joined by factions that thirty/forty years ago would have been considered right, making the coalition as a whole a lot more secular than it was. Meanwhile the right's power base has increasingly moved towards more rural states, and the . anti-scientific religious faction within the American right (evangelical Christians and such) have gained more relative power within it.

Three or four decades ago I think were were more aligned with the European model.

I have no idea whether the distinctions between continental and analytic philosophy have anything to do with it, and am inclined to doubt that the philosophical schism is causal if so, but I'd love to hear arguments supporting the idea.

Yeah, I think in a global context I would agree with you.
The U.S. Left and Right are at this point their own beasts.

Also, at this point in the U.S., pretty much everyone compares everyone else to Hitler, and pretty much nobody remembers exactly who Stalin was. Actually, I suspect that >60% of the population, if asked whether the Soviet Union was allied with the U.S. or with Nazi Germany during WWII, would state confidently that it was allied with Nazi Germany.

Absent any reason to do so, disliking all murders simply because they are murders makes no more sense than disliking all elephants simply because they are elephants. You can choose to do so without being logically inconsistent, but it seems like a weird choice to make for no reason. Did you just arbitrarily choose "murder" as a category worthy of dislike, whether or not it causes harm?

At the risk of committing the genetic fallacy, I would be very surprised if their choice of murder as a thing they dislike for its own sake (rather than, say, elephants) had nothing to do with murder being harmful. And although right now I am simply asserting this rather than arguing it, I think it's likely that even if they think they have a deductive proof for why murder is wrong regardless of harm, they started by unconsciously making the WAITW and then rationalizing it.

But I agree that if they do think they have this deductive proof, screaming "Worst argument in the world!" at them is useless and counterproductive; at that point you address the proof.

An important part of WAitW is that it uses an atypical member of a category to attach to it the rejection of a typical member of the category. Both abortion and death penalty are atypical members of the "murder" category (if they are), and associating them with "murder" is trying to associate them with the connotation of the "typical" murder.

Guns are quite the typical weapon. They are not border-line weapons like a kitchen knife or a hammer, they are not military grade weapons. Saying "guns are weapons!" doesn't try to associate guns with something different, it doesn't add much to the debate, but it doesn't carry the same attempt to sneak in connotations as "abortion is murder!" is.

For "Burning fossil fuels is environmentally irresponsible!" it's also quite different. "Environmentally irresponsible" is more a description, a feature that "burning fossil fuels" has (or doesn't have, but that's another issue), than a broad category in which we are trying to tie "burning fossil fuels".

Not every "A is B" satisfies the definition of "the worst argument in the world" (truly a horrible name for a fallacy which should be replaced by something shorter, more descriptive and less exaggerating). "A is B, therefore A is C" qualifies as the discussed fallacy if

1. A belongs to the category B as far as technical/denotational meaning of B is considered,
2. using the technical meaning, not all B are C,
3. most (or most typical / available) members of B are C and therefore B has C in connotations, and
4. all C-relevant information about A is known, screening off potential C-relevant information about A coming from its membership in B.

In "burning fossil fuels (A) is environmentally irresponsible (B) [and therefore is bad] (C)"

1. holds
2. is subjective but for many audiences fails (i.e. "irresponsible" means "likely to cause bad outcomes", which makes the whole category tautologically bad)
3. is problematic, since the denotational and connotational meaning of B aren't different (badness-wise)
4. fails, since presumably the listener doesn't know about A's environmental irresponsibility

The argument may be fallacious if the listener doesn't care about the environment but is tricked into accepting the badness of A based on connotations of "irresponsible", but that isn't exactly the fallacy described in the OP.

In "guns (A) are weapons (B) [and therefore should be banned] (C)"

1. holds
2. holds if the listener agrees that all weapons should be banned, else fails
3. depends on the listener's idea of a typical weapon, if it is a hydrogen bomb, then (3) holds, if it is a knife, (3) fails, if it is a gun, we are building a circular argument
4. probably holds

So this argument may qualify, but it is so obviously tautological that I have problems imagining someone actually using it.

Would any of the (at least four) people who have upvoted Eliezer's comment but not my response -- or Eliezer, if he happens still to be reading -- like to explain to me in what way Eliezer is right and I'm wrong here? Thanks!

Mm... sure. "X is Y!" is generally pretty weak, and I'm pro-choice, so, sure.

I dislike accusations of sexism as much as the next guy, but in the last year or two I have started to think that ev-psych is way overconfident. The coarse grained explanation is that ev-psych seems to be "softer" than regular psychology, which itself is "softer" than medicine, and we all know what percentage of medical findings are wrong. I'd be curious to learn what other LWers think about this, especially you, because your writings got me interested in ev-psych in the first place.

This is a worthy steel-manning when trying to reach an accurate conclusion about ev-psych, but I think you give the typical person who claims "ev-psych is sexist" too much credit here.

The sexism associated with evolutionary biology is typically the result of the perceived (or actual) claim that because sexual differentiation has a historical and evolutionary basis, it is morally correct to reinforce those differences today.

You can point out that that type of claim is not commonly made my evolutionary psychologists, but when lay people perceive that that claim is true and use it to justify sexist actions that they would not have taken in the absence of their perception of such a claim, then it is the case that evolutionary psychology contributes to behavior which unfairly discriminates on the basis of sex.

One of the key points is that "Evolutionary psychology is sexist" and "evolutionary psychology contributes to behavior which unfairly discriminates on the basis of sex" are very nearly the same statement, while "Evolutionary psychology is riddled with false claims produced by sexist male scientists" is a radically different statement.

Depends where, here in France, of the 4 left-wing parties (PS, PCF, Les Verts and PG) two (PS and PCF) are mostly in favor of nuclear energy, the two others (Les Verts and PG) mostly against it, while all but Les Verts are internally split.

But that may also be because France has a strong nuclear industry, and the left-wing parties tend to be friendly with the unions, and the unions defend nuclear energy because it creates jobs (both for our own energy and because we export nuclear technology).

It won't work because jargon is relevant? What?

I don't know what you're talking about. I'd wager 10-1 odds that women the "unsophisticated" feminists who ascribe to the "men can't be victims of sexism view" have more education than the general population. The historical dependency is taught in intro WS classes and feminism 101 blogs; they call it "power plus prejudice." Not all feminists agree with the redefinition, but more than a "comparatively small" number do.

Indeed. There are situations where the layers of belief-in-belief and tribe identity would cause individuals to hold this particular definition, but they most commonly split into:

"any unfair treatment where females are treated inferiorly is sexism" (while pressing the Ignore button whenever there are no women victims of unfair treatment),

"any inferred difference between genders that can be inferred to have negative connotation towards only women or positive connotation towards only men is sexism" (press Ignore when vice-versa) and

"any unfair treatment of someone based on their gender is sexism"

...in increasing order of sophistication, I guess.

I just meant that a non-feminist trying to pass a feminist Turing test would get nicked if they used the ""unfair treatment of a woman based on her sex" definition, but would probably get away with "unfair treatment of a person based on their sex, but it only counts if their sex has been historically disadvantaged." There's a difference between the definitions a well-read feminist would pick up on.

From Finally Feminism 101:

Sexism is both discrimination based on gender and the attitudes, stereotypes, and the cultural elements that promote this discrimination. Given the historical and continued imbalance of power, where men as a class are privileged over women as a class (see male privilege), an important, but often overlooked, part of the term is that sexism is prejudice plus power. Thus feminists reject the notion that women can be sexist towards men because women lack the institutional power that men have.

This is a fairly mainstream feminist blog, a popular site for feminists to redirect critics if they feel the critics have little to offer. Google sexism + "power plus prejudice" and you can see other sites explaining why, according to the feminist definition of "sexism", it's impossible for men to be victims of sexism.