It’s especially popular in Silicon Valley.

Quite possibly, places like Reddit and Hacker News, are training for the required level of intellectual smugness, and certitude that you can dismiss every annoying argument with a logical fallacy.

That sounds smug of me, but I’m actually serious. One of their defects, is that once you memorize all the fallacies (“Appeal to authority,” “Ad hominem,”) you can easily reach the point where you more easily recognize the fallacies in everyone else’s arguments than your own. You more easily doubt other people’s cited authorities, than your own. You slap “appeal to authority” against a disliked opinion, while citing an authority next week for your own. It’s a fast path from there to perceived intellectual superiority, and an even faster path from there into delusion. Rational delusion.

▲

sunshowers 8 days ago | parent | next [-]

While deployment of logical fallacies to win arguments is annoying at best, the far bigger problem is that people make those fallacies in the first place — such as not considering base rates.

▲

shadowgovt 8 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It's generally worth remembering that some of the fallacies are actually structural, and some are rhetorical.

A contradiction creates a structural fallacy; if you find one, it's a fair belief that at least one of the supporting claims is false. In contrast, appeal to authority is probabilistic: we don't know, given the current context, if the authority is right, so they might be wrong... But we don't have time to read the universe into this situation so an appeal to authority is better than nothing.

... and this observation should be coupled with the observation that the school of rhetoric wasn't teaching a method for finding truth; it was teaching a method for beating an opponent in a legal argument. "Appeal to authority is a logical fallacy" is a great sword to bring to bear if your goal is to turn off the audience's ability to ask whether we should give the word of the environmental scientist and the washed-up TV actor equal weight on the topic of environmental science...

▲

gjsman-1000 8 days ago | parent [-]

… however, even that is up for debate. Maybe the TV actor in your own example is Al Gore filming An Inconvenient Truth and the environmental scientist was in the minority which isn’t so afraid of climate change. Fast forward to 2025, the scientist’s minority position was wrong, while Al Gore’s documentary was legally ruled to have 9 major errors; so you were stupid on both sides, with the TV actor being closer.

▲

shadowgovt 8 days ago | parent [-]

True, but this is where the Boolean nature of traditional logic can really trip up a person trying to operate in the real world.

These "maybes" are on the table. They are probably not the case.

(You end up with a spread of likelihoods and have to decide what to do with them. And law hates a spread of likelihoods and hates decision-by-coinflips, so one can see how rhetorical traditions grounded in legal persuasion tend towards encouraging Boolean outcomes; you can't find someone "a little guilty," at least not in the Western tradition of justice).

	▲	Vecr 7 days ago \| parent [-]
		https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolo_contendere There you still have booleans, just two of them instead of one.