With apologies for not commenting more on your other points until I’ve read the thread more closely:
I suggest avoiding changing your estimate of a person’s character, or assuming bad faith, just because “someone compared X to Y”.
I don’t know if there’s a formal name for this fallacy, but it never fails that when someone compares A to B regarding characteristic Y, someone else interprets them as implying A is also comparable to B regarding characteristic Z.
I can’t think of a real example at this hour of the night, but I did read a post a while ago where a mathematician tried to model the memetic spread of popular religions like Mormonism using equations from epidemiology. If you treat the religion as a disease which gets spread from a “case zero” to their close contacts and so on to their close contacts, then maybe you can use epidemiology to predict how quickly the religion spreads. I don’t remember if it worked or not but it was a clever idea.
But imagine some Mormon reading that and saying “Atheist mathematicians at liberal universities are writing papers explicitly comparing Mormons to bacteria now. I guess the next step is to recommend we get eradicated to ‘cure’ the ‘disease’”.
(sorry to pick on the Mormons, it was the first example that popped into my head)
Yeah, they’re comparing Mormonism to a disease, but only along one limited axis, not in general, and not in a way that implies what the objector thinks it implies.
I don’t trust anyone including myself to avoid this, so I try to avoid accusatory “he’s comparing X to Y!” statements. If someone is really digging themselves into a hole—if they say something like “Jews should be eliminated like vermin”—then you should just say “he said Jews should be eliminated like vermin!” and not the weaker “he compared Jews to vermin”. Yeah, occasionally you make a type ii error—if Hitler says “Jews are as common here as cockroaches” then he’s trying to imply something beyond just numbers—but usually you have more evidence against those sorts of people than just one comparative statement.
“Forbidden comparison fallacy”, maybe. Googling “forbidden comparison” turns up at least one example of it. It was called “Comparing Apples and Oranges” in this comment, but that seems less descriptive.
It’s sort of the converse of argument by association, whereby someone compares A to B regarding characteristic Y, then acts as though they’ve established it as equal in characteristic Z themselves. (I changed “comparable” to “equal” because it seems like using “comparable” that way is a minor instance of the fallacy in itself.)
With apologies for not commenting more on your other points until I’ve read the thread more closely:
I suggest avoiding changing your estimate of a person’s character, or assuming bad faith, just because “someone compared X to Y”.
I don’t know if there’s a formal name for this fallacy, but it never fails that when someone compares A to B regarding characteristic Y, someone else interprets them as implying A is also comparable to B regarding characteristic Z.
I can’t think of a real example at this hour of the night, but I did read a post a while ago where a mathematician tried to model the memetic spread of popular religions like Mormonism using equations from epidemiology. If you treat the religion as a disease which gets spread from a “case zero” to their close contacts and so on to their close contacts, then maybe you can use epidemiology to predict how quickly the religion spreads. I don’t remember if it worked or not but it was a clever idea.
But imagine some Mormon reading that and saying “Atheist mathematicians at liberal universities are writing papers explicitly comparing Mormons to bacteria now. I guess the next step is to recommend we get eradicated to ‘cure’ the ‘disease’”.
(sorry to pick on the Mormons, it was the first example that popped into my head)
Yeah, they’re comparing Mormonism to a disease, but only along one limited axis, not in general, and not in a way that implies what the objector thinks it implies.
I don’t trust anyone including myself to avoid this, so I try to avoid accusatory “he’s comparing X to Y!” statements. If someone is really digging themselves into a hole—if they say something like “Jews should be eliminated like vermin”—then you should just say “he said Jews should be eliminated like vermin!” and not the weaker “he compared Jews to vermin”. Yeah, occasionally you make a type ii error—if Hitler says “Jews are as common here as cockroaches” then he’s trying to imply something beyond just numbers—but usually you have more evidence against those sorts of people than just one comparative statement.
“Forbidden comparison fallacy”, maybe. Googling “forbidden comparison” turns up at least one example of it. It was called “Comparing Apples and Oranges” in this comment, but that seems less descriptive.
See also: http://lesswrong.com/lw/4h/when_truth_isnt_enough/
Sending someone a link to their own article: the new sincerest form of flattery?
It’s sort of the converse of argument by association, whereby someone compares A to B regarding characteristic Y, then acts as though they’ve established it as equal in characteristic Z themselves. (I changed “comparable” to “equal” because it seems like using “comparable” that way is a minor instance of the fallacy in itself.)