Tautologically true, a truism. The “over”emphasise reduces your advice to “don’t emphasise more than you should emphasise”, which is a non-statement. The crux of the argument is, of course, to elicit how much is too much, and to find that right balance: “Do the correct action!” isn’t helpful advice in my opinion.
The rest of your advice, building up some authority first so that the argument you’re most interesting in will be taken seriously, is instrumentally useful, but epistemically fragile: “Become an authority so that people tend to believe you by default” has a bit of a dark arts ring to it.
While in generality it is a valid Bayesian inference to predict that someone who has turned out to be correct a bunch of times will continue to do so, if that history of being correct was built up mainly to lend credence to that final and crucial argument, the argumentum ad auctoritatem fails: like many a snake oil salesmen, building rep to make the crucial sale is effective, but it shouldn’t work, it’s building a “yes, yes, yes” loop when your final argument should stand on its own merits.
While in generality it is a valid Bayesian inference to predict that someone who has turned out to be correct a bunch of times will continue to do so, if that history of being correct was built up mainly to lend credence to that final and crucial argument, the argumentum ad auctoritatem fails
You’re right that the argument should stand on its own merit if heard to completion.
The point here is that heuristics can kick in early and the listener, either due to being irrational or due to time considerations, might not give the argument the time and attention to finish. This is about how to craft an argument so that it is more likely to be followed to completion.
Well, if we’re being pedantic, it’s an imperative, not declarative, sentence, so “tautological” doesn’t apply. And even if it were a tautology, communicative theory says that words communicate information through their meta-meaning, not their explicit meaning, so their literal meanings, in themselves, are not relevant. That a statement’s literal meaning is non-informative is not important if the meta-meaning is informative. In fact, given the implicit assumption that every statement is meaningful, the lack of information in the literal meaning simply makes the recipient look hard at the meta-meaning.
Also, that phrase doesn’t appear in the article, but that’s likely because the article was edited.
Tautologically true, a truism. The “over”emphasise reduces your advice to “don’t emphasise more than you should emphasise”, which is a non-statement. The crux of the argument is, of course, to elicit how much is too much, and to find that right balance: “Do the correct action!” isn’t helpful advice in my opinion.
The rest of your advice, building up some authority first so that the argument you’re most interesting in will be taken seriously, is instrumentally useful, but epistemically fragile: “Become an authority so that people tend to believe you by default” has a bit of a dark arts ring to it.
While in generality it is a valid Bayesian inference to predict that someone who has turned out to be correct a bunch of times will continue to do so, if that history of being correct was built up mainly to lend credence to that final and crucial argument, the argumentum ad auctoritatem fails: like many a snake oil salesmen, building rep to make the crucial sale is effective, but it shouldn’t work, it’s building a “yes, yes, yes” loop when your final argument should stand on its own merits.
You’re right that the argument should stand on its own merit if heard to completion.
The point here is that heuristics can kick in early and the listener, either due to being irrational or due to time considerations, might not give the argument the time and attention to finish. This is about how to craft an argument so that it is more likely to be followed to completion.
Well, if we’re being pedantic, it’s an imperative, not declarative, sentence, so “tautological” doesn’t apply. And even if it were a tautology, communicative theory says that words communicate information through their meta-meaning, not their explicit meaning, so their literal meanings, in themselves, are not relevant. That a statement’s literal meaning is non-informative is not important if the meta-meaning is informative. In fact, given the implicit assumption that every statement is meaningful, the lack of information in the literal meaning simply makes the recipient look hard at the meta-meaning.
Also, that phrase doesn’t appear in the article, but that’s likely because the article was edited.