For a salient example, look no further than the politics board of 4chan. Stickied for the last five years is a list of 24 logical fallacies. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to dissuade the conspiratorial ramblings, but rather, lends an appearance of sophistication to their arguments for anyone unfamiliar with the subject. It’s how you get otherwise curious and bright 15 year olds parroting anti-semitic rhetoric.
I find on the internet that people treat logical fallacies like moves on a Chessboard. Meanwhile, IRL, they’re sort of guidelines you might use to treat something more carefully. An example I often give is that in court we try to establish the type of person the witness is—because we believe so strongly that Ad Hominem is a totally legitimate matter.
But Reddit or 4chan politics and religion is like, “I can reframe your argument into a form of [Fallacy number 13], check and mate!”
It’s obviously a total misunderstanding of what a logical fallacy even is. They treat it like rules of logical inference, which it is definitely not (and would disprove what someone said, however outside of exotic circumstances, such a mistake would be trivial to spot).
For a salient example, look no further than the politics board of 4chan. Stickied for the last five years is a list of 24 logical fallacies. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to dissuade the conspiratorial ramblings, but rather, lends an appearance of sophistication to their arguments for anyone unfamiliar with the subject. It’s how you get otherwise curious and bright 15 year olds parroting anti-semitic rhetoric.
I find on the internet that people treat logical fallacies like moves on a Chessboard. Meanwhile, IRL, they’re sort of guidelines you might use to treat something more carefully. An example I often give is that in court we try to establish the type of person the witness is—because we believe so strongly that Ad Hominem is a totally legitimate matter.
But Reddit or 4chan politics and religion is like, “I can reframe your argument into a form of [Fallacy number 13], check and mate!”
It’s obviously a total misunderstanding of what a logical fallacy even is. They treat it like rules of logical inference, which it is definitely not (and would disprove what someone said, however outside of exotic circumstances, such a mistake would be trivial to spot).