A thread through the archive
Essays tagged “argumentation”. Follow an idea across the archive.
Scott Alexander dissects and criticizes a common argument against AI safety that compares it to past unfulfilled disaster predictions, finding it logically flawed and difficult to steelman.
Scott Alexander describes 'fallacies of reversed moderation,' where moderate positions are misinterpreted as extreme opposites of the consensus view.
Scott Alexander proposes a hierarchy of types of disagreements, from low-level meta-debate to high-level philosophical differences, and discusses how to engage in more productive arguments.
Scott Alexander reviews 'The Anti-Racialist Q&A', praising its approach to arguing against racism and its display of epistemic virtue.
Scott Alexander outlines and criticizes ten fallacious argument styles that misrepresent an opponent's beliefs, demonstrating how they can be used to unfairly attack any position.
Scott Alexander explores the 'Proving Too Much' fallacy as an efficient tactic to quickly dismantle complex arguments, particularly those using Dark Arts techniques.
Scott Alexander introduces 'Guilt by Association' as a fallacy where people judge things negatively based on category membership rather than actual shared features, using examples like calling MLK a 'criminal' or abortion 'murder' to illustrate when this reasoning fails.
Scott proposes the "noncentral fallacy" as a candidate for the worst argument in the world: applying emotional reactions from archetypal category members to non-archetypal examples, illustrated through examples like calling Martin Luther King Jr. a "criminal."
Scott analyzes when assertions should be trusted, showing that their evidentiary value depends on whether you already know the belief's distribution, the asserter's credentials, and how you encountered them, while claims of having 'evidence' mostly serve as signals of rationality rather than factual proof.
Scott distinguishes between a statement's denotation (factual content) and connotation (emotional implications), showing how technically true statements can mislead through subtext, and proposes ADBOC as a response technique.
Scott argues that to persuade people rather than just demolish them, you should leave them a social line of retreat by being genuinely nice and not treating the discussion as a status contest.
Scott argues that rationalists should test their objections against 'the least convenient possible world,' where convenient excuses are removed, in order to find their true reasons and avoid dodging hard questions.