If there’s something wrong with the senator’s argument, you should say what it is; and if there isn’t, what difference does it make that he’s a senator?
Finding things wrong with an argument is not effort-free. The fact that someone may be biased may in some cases be enough to make me not want to spend the effort. Furthermore, most real-life arguments are not purely logical deductions and involve a certain amount of trusting that the other person has presented facts honestly and in a way that is not one-sided or based on motivated reasoning, especially when perceptions and personal experience are involved.
There’s also a certain chance that someone will sneak a bad argument by me simply because I am human and imperfect at analyzing arguments. I can minimize the chance of this without causing other problems if I only argue with people who are relatively unbiased.
It matters much more whether [person] is wrong or right than what their tone is.
No, it doesn’t. Imagine replacing “abusive tone” with “breaks the windows of my house”. Whether someone is right or wrong is unrelated to whether he breaks the windows of my house, but I’d probably call the police and ignore his arguments.Abusive tone is negative utility for me and I’m not interested in getting negative utility when I can avoid it.
Agreed; like many things, these are guidelines for a conversation with someone you want to have a conversation with. You’ll notice that I didn’t include Counterspells for things like Social Shaming from Varieties of Argumentative Experience or Name-Calling from How to Disagree. Alexander discusses the whole issue at length in his essay.
That isn’t enough, though. First of all, some of what I said applies directly to the quality of the argument—someone could be sincere, but biased, and I may have a reason to avoid arguments based on personal experience or personal expertise from him about certain subjects, without completely avoiding conversation with him. Second, what I said applies when you’re arguing with person A (who you can have a discussion with) and they’re referencing person B (who you can’t), and you want to dismiss the reference to B—in the example above, someone is referring back to the argument made by a senator, but he is not the senator himself.
Finding things wrong with an argument is not effort-free. The fact that someone may be biased may in some cases be enough to make me not want to spend the effort. Furthermore, most real-life arguments are not purely logical deductions and involve a certain amount of trusting that the other person has presented facts honestly and in a way that is not one-sided or based on motivated reasoning, especially when perceptions and personal experience are involved.
There’s also a certain chance that someone will sneak a bad argument by me simply because I am human and imperfect at analyzing arguments. I can minimize the chance of this without causing other problems if I only argue with people who are relatively unbiased.
No, it doesn’t. Imagine replacing “abusive tone” with “breaks the windows of my house”. Whether someone is right or wrong is unrelated to whether he breaks the windows of my house, but I’d probably call the police and ignore his arguments.Abusive tone is negative utility for me and I’m not interested in getting negative utility when I can avoid it.
Agreed; like many things, these are guidelines for a conversation with someone you want to have a conversation with. You’ll notice that I didn’t include Counterspells for things like Social Shaming from Varieties of Argumentative Experience or Name-Calling from How to Disagree. Alexander discusses the whole issue at length in his essay.
That isn’t enough, though. First of all, some of what I said applies directly to the quality of the argument—someone could be sincere, but biased, and I may have a reason to avoid arguments based on personal experience or personal expertise from him about certain subjects, without completely avoiding conversation with him. Second, what I said applies when you’re arguing with person A (who you can have a discussion with) and they’re referencing person B (who you can’t), and you want to dismiss the reference to B—in the example above, someone is referring back to the argument made by a senator, but he is not the senator himself.