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I'm just going to talk about people even though you might call them "theories" or "evidence" or whatever depending on the specific question. -Totally agree that wikipedia is a good first step. -Pay attention to the authorship, it technically doesn't matter but it practically always does. -Most bad arguments fall in 20-ish categories... knowing the list of logical fallacies isn't a bad thing but reading person A describe how person B is wrong (which will usually involve some of those fallacies but 90% of the time it's rhetoric better described as creating-a-false-impression-with-technically-true-things) will usually give you a lot of what you need on a given topic and doing it on various topics with various persons A&B should develop your general radar. Usually the person who is right is more prone to get into a comprehensive deconstruction of the other person's argument. If a person who is wrong does it boy howdy does that almost always make them look even more wrong... usually they focus in on one point or sneakily fuzz the question or the goalposts. -Lots of questions don't have a simple answer or even an answer at all. edit: oh, I don't think I could come up with a general taxonomy of "what else do you need to know" evidence, it's kind of idiosyncratic to the question, but that comes into play all the time and I feel like a lot of smart people lose the forest for the trees sometimes. First example that comes to mind is Anthony Weiner dick pic press conference (first time)... lots of people were saying very reasonable things like "well it's Breitbart it must be BS" etc. but because he was cagey about whose penis was in the picture well poo poo what else did you need to know at that point. Only other one that comes to mind is rich people/companies lobbying hard against tax proposals or regulations "they would just dodge anyway you wouldn't get more revenue/better behavior/whatever". Right, you're going to the mat against something that wouldn't affect you makes a ton of sense. pangstrom fucked around with this message at 21:20 on Nov 14, 2014 |
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Nov 14, 2014 21:12
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 07:22 |
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