Arguments are like boats. Very few ways of making shapes out of metal and wood will sail and won’t sink. Likewise, very few arguments have predictive power and survive scrutiny.
The difference is that it’s expensive and physically tiring to build boats, and there’s no benefit to building a useless boat, so most people don’t do it unless they plan to do it right. By contrast, it’s fun and easy and selfishly beneficial to craft and publish arguments, even if they’re sloppy. So people do it all the time.
You want to know how to build seaworthy arguments, and avoid climbing into leaky ones.This is difficult, because the overwhelming majority of the arguments you’re going to find docked in people’s blogs are of the leaky variety.
Unfortunately, checking the facts is often a thankless task. The author almost certainly won’t thank you, and the audience has usually moved on by the time you get to it. “A lie can travel halfway around the worldwhile the truth is still putting on its boots.” It’s fun to disprove arguments, though. On this level, I think it’s usually best to just assume in your gut that most things you’re reading are somewhere on the spectrum of wrong, mostly in inverse proportion to adjacency to math and the hard sciences, the author’s specific expertise, and the page count of the document and especially its bibliography.
Once you have a read on those factors, decide which ones it would be the most fun or useful to try and disprove. Occasionally, you’ll be pleasantly surprised. You might even find authors who consistently surprise you by being frequently accurate.
A second option is to patch up the argument, which I’ve attempted to do in another comment here. If the original argument is flawed, is there a piece of it that can be salvaged, reinterpreted, cut away?
A third option is to just focus on making your own arguments sturdy and true. This is difficult, for the same reasons that engineering any useful new product is difficult. You have competition, reality is surprisingly detailed, your customers don’t always know what they want, communication and cooperation is hard, and incentives are often misaligned.
Arguments are like boats. Very few ways of making shapes out of metal and wood will sail and won’t sink. Likewise, very few arguments have predictive power and survive scrutiny.
The difference is that it’s expensive and physically tiring to build boats, and there’s no benefit to building a useless boat, so most people don’t do it unless they plan to do it right. By contrast, it’s fun and easy and selfishly beneficial to craft and publish arguments, even if they’re sloppy. So people do it all the time.
You want to know how to build seaworthy arguments, and avoid climbing into leaky ones.This is difficult, because the overwhelming majority of the arguments you’re going to find docked in people’s blogs are of the leaky variety.
Unfortunately, checking the facts is often a thankless task. The author almost certainly won’t thank you, and the audience has usually moved on by the time you get to it. “A lie can travel halfway around the worldwhile the truth is still putting on its boots.” It’s fun to disprove arguments, though. On this level, I think it’s usually best to just assume in your gut that most things you’re reading are somewhere on the spectrum of wrong, mostly in inverse proportion to adjacency to math and the hard sciences, the author’s specific expertise, and the page count of the document and especially its bibliography.
Once you have a read on those factors, decide which ones it would be the most fun or useful to try and disprove. Occasionally, you’ll be pleasantly surprised. You might even find authors who consistently surprise you by being frequently accurate.
A second option is to patch up the argument, which I’ve attempted to do in another comment here. If the original argument is flawed, is there a piece of it that can be salvaged, reinterpreted, cut away?
A third option is to just focus on making your own arguments sturdy and true. This is difficult, for the same reasons that engineering any useful new product is difficult. You have competition, reality is surprisingly detailed, your customers don’t always know what they want, communication and cooperation is hard, and incentives are often misaligned.