The use of the Worst Argument in the World in practice is as a heuristic for tabooing words that don’t fit very well (and hence leaking inapplicable/misleading connotations). You are not refuting arguments with it, you are drawing more attention to certain parts and calling for unpacking. A good argument should be unpackable to significant degree, but in practice it’s too much work to unpack everything, so it’s useful to have heuristics that would point where to start digging.
If the argument remains sensible after you unpack, then there is no problem. The bad thing is when an argument was relying on not being unpacked and crumbles once you look inside. So the refutation or the lack thereof depends on what happens after you unpack, the heuristic for deciding what to unpack doesn’t itself perform any refutation.
I find myself questioning how many readers will actually do the unpacking you describe rather than just use the Worst Argument in the World as a club to beat their opponents over the head. Especially since title is such that it will probably attract many readers off LessWrong.
“Taboo murder.” works better than “Calling X murder is the worst argument in the world!”
I’ve heard anecdotes of philosophy professors dreading the lesson on logical fallacies because the students use them as a weapon. But even so, logical fallacies are pedagogically useful like the worst argument in the world. To know that you should taboo murder rather than continue presupposing “all murder = bad” requires a degree of sophistication, and learning logic and logical fallacies is exactly how you learn to unpack those presuppositions and actually argue rather than score political points.
I think the best practice is to taboo saying “X is Y bias or X is Y logical fallacy”, and rather require people to explain or question the exact flaw in reasoning and possibly why it’s important enough to bring up.
So, for example, if someone says “that’s murder, so it’s evil,” you should then reply with something like “why does something being murder necessitate it being evil?” (all the while internally thinking, “ah ha! I think that was the worst argument in the world.”)
The use of the Worst Argument in the World in practice is as a heuristic for tabooing words that don’t fit very well (and hence leaking inapplicable/misleading connotations). You are not refuting arguments with it, you are drawing more attention to certain parts and calling for unpacking. A good argument should be unpackable to significant degree, but in practice it’s too much work to unpack everything, so it’s useful to have heuristics that would point where to start digging.
If the argument remains sensible after you unpack, then there is no problem. The bad thing is when an argument was relying on not being unpacked and crumbles once you look inside. So the refutation or the lack thereof depends on what happens after you unpack, the heuristic for deciding what to unpack doesn’t itself perform any refutation.
I find myself questioning how many readers will actually do the unpacking you describe rather than just use the Worst Argument in the World as a club to beat their opponents over the head. Especially since title is such that it will probably attract many readers off LessWrong.
“Taboo murder.” works better than “Calling X murder is the worst argument in the world!”
I’ve heard anecdotes of philosophy professors dreading the lesson on logical fallacies because the students use them as a weapon. But even so, logical fallacies are pedagogically useful like the worst argument in the world. To know that you should taboo murder rather than continue presupposing “all murder = bad” requires a degree of sophistication, and learning logic and logical fallacies is exactly how you learn to unpack those presuppositions and actually argue rather than score political points.
I think the best practice is to taboo saying “X is Y bias or X is Y logical fallacy”, and rather require people to explain or question the exact flaw in reasoning and possibly why it’s important enough to bring up.
So, for example, if someone says “that’s murder, so it’s evil,” you should then reply with something like “why does something being murder necessitate it being evil?” (all the while internally thinking, “ah ha! I think that was the worst argument in the world.”)
Right, it’s a bad name (but not a bad idea, if you correctly unpack the name).