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by yummyfajitas 3846 days ago
To make the argument the conclusion can't be neutral. It has to be definitively and obviously wrong. That's why I chose Trump and Islam - it's such a ridiculously wrong conclusion that I doubted anyone here could support it.

I agree that the particular X/etc sometimes matters. And a valid argument against mine would be to give a clear limiting principle (something unstated in the original post, but perhaps implicit?) that applies to the critique of less wrong but fails for Islam.

Pron kind of tried to do this - he said Johann30's argument can only apply to small groups and Islam is large (though where this large vs small distinction comes from is unstated).

To take a mathematical (and hopefully completely uncontroversial) example of this:

Fool: "The sum of IID random variables is gaussian. Therefore $Z"

Smartass: "Oh yeah? What about C/(1+x^2)? Your argument is invalid."

Fool: "Oops I meant IID random variables with finite variance, just thought that was implicit and obvious."

Of course, if Fool can't come up with that added clause then the Smartass has disproven him.

1 comments

You can still construct an example that is "definitely and obviously wrong" but emotionally neutral. Which you did above.