[Original first point deleted, on account of describing something that resembled Bayesian updating closely enough to make my point invalid.]
I don’t think this approach applies to most actual bad arguments.
The things we argue about the most are ones over which the population is polarized, and polarization is usually caused by conflicts between different worldviews. Worldviews are constructed to be nearly self-consistent. So you’re not going to be able to reconcile people of different worldviews by comparing proofs. Wrong beliefs come in sets, where each contradiction caused by one wrong belief is justified by other wrong beliefs.
So for instance, a LessWrongian would tell a Christian that positing a God doesn’t explain how life was made, because she’s just replaced a complex first life form with an even more-complex God, and what made God? The Christian will reliably respond that God is eternal, outside of space and time, and was never made.
This response sounds stupid to us, but it’s part of a philosophical system built by Plato, which he designed to be self-consistent. The key parts here are the inversion of “complexity” and the denial of mechanism.
The inversion of complexity is the belief that simple things are greater and more powerful than complex things. The central notion is “purity”, and pure, simple things are always superior to complicated things. God is defined as ultimate purity and simplicity. God is simple because you can fully describe Him just by saying he’s perfect, and there’s only one way of being perfect. He’s eternal, because if he had a starting-point or an ending-point in time, then other points in time would be equally good, and “perfection” would be ambiguous. “God is perfectly simple” is actually part of Catholic dogma, and derived from Plato. So a Christian doesn’t think she’s replaced complex life with a more-complex God; she’s replaced it with a more-simple and therefore more-powerful God.
The denial of mechanism is the denial that anything gets its properties mechanistically. An animal isn’t alive because it eats food and metabolizes it and reproduces; it eats food and metabolizes it and reproduces because it’s alive. Functions are magically inherited from categories (“Forms”), rather than categories arising from a cooperative combination of functions. (This is why spiritualists who believe in a good God dislike machinery. It’s an abomination to them, as it has new capabilities not inherited from any eternal Form, and their intuition is that it must be animated by some spirit other than God. They think of magic as natural, and causes other than magic as unnatural; we think just the opposite.)
Because God is perfect, He is omnipotent, and hence has every possible capability, just as he is perfect in every way. Everything less than God is less powerful, lacking some capabilities, and more-complex, because you must enumerate all those missing capabilities and perfections to describe it. (This is the metaphysics behind Tolstoy’s saying, “Every happy family is happy in the same way. Every unhappy family is unhappy in different ways.”) The Great Chain of Being is a complete linear ordering of every eternal Form, proceeding from God at the top (perfect, simple, omnipotent), down to complete lack and emptiness at the other end (which is Augustinian Evil). Each step along that chain is a loss of some perfection.
Hence, to the Christian there’s no “problem” of complexity in saying that God created life, because God is less-complex than life, and therefore also more-powerful, since complexity implies many losses of perfection and capabilities. There is no need to posit that God is complex to explain His powers, because capabilities arise from essence, not from mechanics, and God’s perfectly-simple essence is to have all capabilities. This is because Plato designed his ontology to eliminate the problem of how complex life arose.
If you argue with Marxists, post-modernists, or the Woke, you’ll similarly find that, for every solid argument you have that proves a belief of theirs is wrong, they have some assumptions which to them justify dismissing your argument. You’ll never find yourself able to compare proofs with an ideological opposite and agree on the validity of each step.
If you argue with Marxists, post-modernists, or the Woke, you’ll similarly find that, for every solid argument you have that proves a belief of theirs is wrong, they have some assumptions which to them justify dismissing your argument
They might well say the same about you. All arguments are based on fundamental assumptions that are necessarily unproven.
[Original first point deleted, on account of describing something that resembled Bayesian updating closely enough to make my point invalid.]
I don’t think this approach applies to most actual bad arguments.
The things we argue about the most are ones over which the population is polarized, and polarization is usually caused by conflicts between different worldviews. Worldviews are constructed to be nearly self-consistent. So you’re not going to be able to reconcile people of different worldviews by comparing proofs. Wrong beliefs come in sets, where each contradiction caused by one wrong belief is justified by other wrong beliefs.
So for instance, a LessWrongian would tell a Christian that positing a God doesn’t explain how life was made, because she’s just replaced a complex first life form with an even more-complex God, and what made God? The Christian will reliably respond that God is eternal, outside of space and time, and was never made.
This response sounds stupid to us, but it’s part of a philosophical system built by Plato, which he designed to be self-consistent. The key parts here are the inversion of “complexity” and the denial of mechanism.
The inversion of complexity is the belief that simple things are greater and more powerful than complex things. The central notion is “purity”, and pure, simple things are always superior to complicated things. God is defined as ultimate purity and simplicity. God is simple because you can fully describe Him just by saying he’s perfect, and there’s only one way of being perfect. He’s eternal, because if he had a starting-point or an ending-point in time, then other points in time would be equally good, and “perfection” would be ambiguous. “God is perfectly simple” is actually part of Catholic dogma, and derived from Plato. So a Christian doesn’t think she’s replaced complex life with a more-complex God; she’s replaced it with a more-simple and therefore more-powerful God.
The denial of mechanism is the denial that anything gets its properties mechanistically. An animal isn’t alive because it eats food and metabolizes it and reproduces; it eats food and metabolizes it and reproduces because it’s alive. Functions are magically inherited from categories (“Forms”), rather than categories arising from a cooperative combination of functions. (This is why spiritualists who believe in a good God dislike machinery. It’s an abomination to them, as it has new capabilities not inherited from any eternal Form, and their intuition is that it must be animated by some spirit other than God. They think of magic as natural, and causes other than magic as unnatural; we think just the opposite.)
Because God is perfect, He is omnipotent, and hence has every possible capability, just as he is perfect in every way. Everything less than God is less powerful, lacking some capabilities, and more-complex, because you must enumerate all those missing capabilities and perfections to describe it. (This is the metaphysics behind Tolstoy’s saying, “Every happy family is happy in the same way. Every unhappy family is unhappy in different ways.”) The Great Chain of Being is a complete linear ordering of every eternal Form, proceeding from God at the top (perfect, simple, omnipotent), down to complete lack and emptiness at the other end (which is Augustinian Evil). Each step along that chain is a loss of some perfection.
Hence, to the Christian there’s no “problem” of complexity in saying that God created life, because God is less-complex than life, and therefore also more-powerful, since complexity implies many losses of perfection and capabilities. There is no need to posit that God is complex to explain His powers, because capabilities arise from essence, not from mechanics, and God’s perfectly-simple essence is to have all capabilities. This is because Plato designed his ontology to eliminate the problem of how complex life arose.
If you argue with Marxists, post-modernists, or the Woke, you’ll similarly find that, for every solid argument you have that proves a belief of theirs is wrong, they have some assumptions which to them justify dismissing your argument. You’ll never find yourself able to compare proofs with an ideological opposite and agree on the validity of each step.
When you say ‘this approach’, what are you referring to?
They might well say the same about you. All arguments are based on fundamental assumptions that are necessarily unproven.
Is the set of real numbers simple or complex? What information does it contain? What information doesnt it contain?