Tuesday, June 26, 2012

How not to argue

Has anyone else ever noticed that internet arguments either extremely stupid or extremely pedantic? What I mean by this is that I rarely see any kind of argument that doesn't eventually end up with either people just trying to troll the shit out of each other, or people trying to prove the other one is AN UTTER MORON by pointing out some kind of logical fallacy or syntactic error.

So here is one type of argument:


And the other is something like this (though usually much, much longer, more pretentious, and more insufferable):

"You stated that people who get up early are more likely to like the colors orange and pink, since they are the colors of sunrise. Well, correlation does not equal causation. Where is your evidence?"
"First of all, I never said that. You're misrepresenting my words and creating a straw man argument. My exact words were: most people I know who get up early like orange and pink because they remind them of the sunrise."
"That's anecdotal evidence. That doesn't prove anything. Can you cite a study that backs up your claims? Until you can, I'm going to continue to assume you don't know what you're talking about."
"You're completely incorrect; anecdotal evidence is absolutely admissible in many cases, not the least of which includes witness testimony in court. You're being deliberately obtuse. Are you always so stupid?"
"AD HOMINEM!!!"

And so on, and so forth...  

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