It’s quite common for people to try to explain a phenomenon or trend before actually having checked whether it’s happening. Don’t do that, follow the establish-then-explain heuristic.
Example: People were debating a lot why attention spans were decreasing, without having established that they were decreasing. Or: People want to explain why AI models loose social skills after RLVR before having established that they do.
True, but sometimes it still makes sense to do such a conditional analysis of a phenomenon: “Assume that X is happening. Why might that be the case?”, while also making it explicit that this is a conditional.
Sometimes, when evidence is too sparse, this is the main thing you can do.
Although there’s also the risk of modality escape / people may not get that you’re hypothesizing conditionally.
Another example of this is Bulverism: explaining how your opponent arrived at such an erroneous belief — what biases or ignorance caused their foolishness — before you’ve established that their view is in fact erroneous.
You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly.
It’s quite common for people to try to explain a phenomenon or trend before actually having checked whether it’s happening. Don’t do that, follow the establish-then-explain heuristic.
Example: People were debating a lot why attention spans were decreasing, without having established that they were decreasing. Or: People want to explain why AI models loose social skills after RLVR before having established that they do.
True, but sometimes it still makes sense to do such a conditional analysis of a phenomenon: “Assume that X is happening. Why might that be the case?”, while also making it explicit that this is a conditional.
Sometimes, when evidence is too sparse, this is the main thing you can do.
Although there’s also the risk of modality escape / people may not get that you’re hypothesizing conditionally.
Another example of this is Bulverism: explaining how your opponent arrived at such an erroneous belief — what biases or ignorance caused their foolishness — before you’ve established that their view is in fact erroneous.
This is an example of begging the question: A because B presupposes A.