| You wrote: I actually think that "A" is beyond dispute. But you forget that I said: you are not espousing a widely held belief about child support laws being "unfair to men." Thus, a discussion about your argument is likely to devolve into long exchanges about children's rights and anecdotes about ridiculous edge case judgments on both sides. I was careful not to discuss the validity of your belief, but merely to point out that your belief—whether true or false—is not WIDELY HELD. And as you can see, at least one other person disagrees with you, and the resulting exchange is getting further and further away from discussing the original point. When I use the words “beyond dispute,” I mean that people accept it as true, or a at least such a sufficiently large proportion of people that anyone disputing it is immediately understood to be ignorant or a crank. The Earth revolving around the Sun is beyond dispute. Although I personally believe that the evidence shows that punitive laws around marijuana possession are unhelpful, it isn’t “beyond dispute,” lots of people dispute that opinion every day. I stand by my assertion that if you say A -> B -> C and you choose an A that is not widely held to be true, you are going to spend a lot of time arguing about A even though your original intention was to try to convince other people of C. It doesn’t matter how certain you are of the truth of A, what matters when trying to convince people is whether they believe it to be true. If they don’t, you either have to find a forum where people are discussing “A,” and talk about that, or pick another argument that is going to have a high signal-to-noise ration when discussing “C." |