Todd Suomela's Library tagged argument →  View Popular, Search in Google

"As much fun as it is to kick around the Boomers, we gotta move past it. Generational politics is a dead-end. Fuck it, someone slap the shit out of me if I ever say the word “Millennial’ after this. Because once we’ve set up this economic collapse as nothing more than generational warfare, we’re already lost–we’ve created a narrative which the wealthy can easily co-opt and spin for their own fiendish ends.

So keep your eyes on the prize, Millennials: it’s capitalism that’s the problem. Not the grey-hairs."

generational-analysis generation politics argument capitalism social-security propaganda

"Furthermore, by the nature of overlapping generations, there is no point at which a coherent distinction between current and future generations can be drawn. In the absence of some general catastrophe, many children alive today will still be alive in 2100, at which time people already alive will reasonably be able to anticipate the possibility of survival well into the 22nd century."

philosophy future generation intergenerational argument

dispute argument behavior learning

"What I’ve tried to do over time is embody more and more of my main advisor’s approach to critiquing the work of his students and colleagues. He didn’t want to break you on the wheel, convert you to his church, capture you for his tribe: he generally tried to help people make their work better, more acute, in their own terms, to help them find the best versions of their claims, the richest grounds for convening debates. "

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I’m not saying that arguments based on rationality are necessarily wrong in particular cases. (I can’t very well say that, given that I wrote an article on why it can be rational to vote.) I’m just trying to understand how pop-economics can so rapidly swing back and forth between opposing positions. And I think it’s coming from the comforting presence of rationality and efficiency in both formulations. It’s ok to distinguish economists from ordinary people (economists are rational and think the unthinkable, ordinary people don’t) and it’s also ok to distinguish economists from other social scientists (economists think ordinary people are rational, other social scientists believe in “culture”). You just have to be careful not to make both arguments in the same paragraph.

economics rationality academic boundaries boundary-policing argument form genre

global-warming climate climate-change skepticism feedback measurement science argument conservative libertarian

politics morality argument leftism

"Imagine that economists were surveyed and had to choose how they’d best like to describe economic policy recommendations, as:

Morals – Arguing for the morality of actions,
Deals – Helping groups find and make deals, or
Showing Off – Academics do hard things in order to be certified by other academics as impressive, so that students, patrons, and readers can gain status by affiliating with them. Economic policy analysis is such a hard thing.

I’d bet that at least 25% would choose option #2, and even more among those whose style leans sci/tech. And #2 seems to me a better public face for economists to present to the world – economists will prosper more overall if they say this is what they are doing."

economics argument purpose genre academic communication style goals

politics organizing therapy relationship community opposition argument social-movement

politics organizing therapy relationship community opposition argument social-movement

"In terms of the debt ceiling issue in specific, I feel like this is sort of the Cuban Missile Crisis of my middle-aged life and you know what? At this point I almost just want them to get it over with and fire off the policy nukes. Just go ahead and wreck it all, because if we’ve come to the point where there’s a significant political faction with real social foundations that so thoroughly hates its fever-dream boogeyman vision of “government” that nothing else and no one else matters, we’re just going to be stuck right at a perpetual blockade line, a permanent schism. "

politics argument stalemate america debt debate medium-chill good-enough

""The article,” Haidt said, "is a review of a puzzle that has bedeviled researchers in cognitive psychology and social cognition for a long time. The puzzle is, why are humans so amazingly bad at reasoning in some contexts, and so amazingly good in others?"

"Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments. That's why they call it The Argumentative Theory of Reasoning. So, as they put it, "The evidence reviewed here shows not only that reasoning falls quite short of reliably delivering rational beliefs and rational decisions. It may even be, in a variety of cases, detrimental to rationality. Reasoning can lead to poor outcomes, not because humans are bad at it, but because they systematically strive for arguments that justify their beliefs or their actions. This explains the confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and reason-based choice, among other things.""

cognition psychology bias decision-making argument evolution rationality reasoning theory confirmation-bias belief justification

philosophy identity religion culture politics self-definition psychology argument conflict war

"Hirschman pointed out that conservative arguments come in three distinct theses. First is the “Perversity thesis” where any well meaning reform produces its opposite outcome: ‘welfare makes you poor’ – that sort of thing. The second is the “Jeopardy thesis” where reforms put at risk more than they can ever deliver–­ the fear of extending the suffrage is typical. Third is the “Futility thesis” where reforms are simply pointless – fill in any and all opposition to global warming.

Greenspan begins with a few vignettes concerning Ford’s inability to get a credit rating on an ABS and how the banks will suffer if their ATM card fees are regulated, but he soon hits his stride. I gave him a “Hirschman Scorecard” of four perversities, three jeopardies, and two futilities in one column, which is the rhetorical equivalent of carpet-bombing the opposition. These ranged from bemoaning how “consequences cannot be readily anticipated” (Jeopardy), to noting how prop-trading rules will force operations abroad (Futility), and hand waving about complexity regarding “undesirable repercussions that might happen” (Perversity)."

economics argument crisis consensus conservatism

"This is a familiar move in political argument (it is related to the tu quoque, or “so’s your old man” move). We saw it in spades a while ago when Democrats lamented the incivility of public discourse and blamed right-wingers for proclaiming over and over that President Obama was a foreign Islamic usurper working to undermine American values. The right replied by rehearsing the litany of things said by democrats about George Bush — he was a tool of corporate interests, a warmonger and an enemy of civil liberties. So what gives you the high moral ground, those on the right asked, when you were equally vile in your accusations?

I want to say that this is a bad move (and a cheap trick) because it deflects attention from the substantive claims being made and puts the spotlight instead on propositional consistency. The better move (by either party) would have been to insist that Obama or Bush was in fact those things and to back up the assertion with the marshaling of evidence. The better move, in short, would have been to take a stand on truth rather than shifting the focus to a calculation of reciprocal fairness. What gives someone the high moral ground is that he or she is right, not that he or she is fair."

politics rhetoric argument fairness logic

"The fear of slippery slopes is not the fear of a legislative or judicial process leading by its own wicked logic to the abandonment of common sense. It’s the fear of cultural change. Or rather, the fear that the future will not always agree with you. Less charitably, it’s the fear that you might just be plumb wrong on a lot of things that you would find highly embarrassing to reconsider."

argument slippery-slope change fear

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argument debate slippery-slope rhetoric

An imagined argument that Sarah Palin is lying.

extremism argument form lying truth fundamentalism

Grid of Disputation. It’s just a reminder that, when it comes to other people’s views on controversial issues, they should be classified within a two-dimensional parameter space, not just on a single line of “agree/disagree.” The other dimension is the all-important “sensible/crazy” axis.

argument disagreement debate dialog