Strong approval of the overall goal of the post, but here’s a semantic criticism:
In accordance with the Rationalist tradition that requires everything to have a nerdy sci-fi or fantasy name
I parse this as an in-joke (and appreciate it as such), but I do think that regularly minting new jargon that’s likely to carry substantial, conflicting(!) contextual baggage (not all of it appropriate[1]) is...a bad norm for an epistemic community to have.
I also think that the deeper tradition of jargon-forging (as Eliezer practiced it) involved names that sounded nerdy, but _not_ sci-fi or fantasy -- _cf._ Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People, which uses “Fully General Counterargument” in much the same way(?) as you’re using “Counterspell”. “Fully General Counterargument” is slightly more unwieldy, but apart from that is a better piece of jargon—it’s less loaded and by leaning even harder into the implicit snark that winks at the fact that the purported counter- isn’t working at all, makes it even more clear that no, this is not a useful thing.
[1] To belabor this point, MtG counterspells are fully general (edit: okay, not **fully** general, and see Slider below), and a reasonable fit for the term as you’re using it, but D&D (3.5e, at least) counterspells are based on negating a spell by casting a copy of it, which is not what you mean at all. I don’t actually know what “counterspells” are in WoD/Mage, but the risk that they’re even further afield from your intention should be another strike against using the already-loaded handle.
You’re right to read it as an in-joke, and I’m glad that you saw it that way. I think your comment actually goes on to capture the rest of what I was trying to say with that quip. The deeper level of the joke is that this community regularly mints new jargon which can get pretty weird — if we’re not careful, someone will go off the deep end and try to call a new idea something stupid like, I dunno, “Counterspells”. (I was thinking of this comment when I wrote the joke.)
On a more textual level, I came up with the term as a personal joke, but the name stuck, and now I can’t think of them as anything else. Feel free to call this idea whatever you want.
I don’t think “Fully General Counterargument” describes what I’ve done here, though. Eliezer points out on that page that ‘you are a sophisticated arguer; you have used your intelligence to trick yourself’ is an argument that you can use “when you encounter a seemingly intelligent person who says something you don’t like”. (So technically his example is not FULLY general.) But each of the Counterspells I present here are coherent arguments only when someone has made an argument based on a specific logical fallacy. If someone makes an ad hominem against you, it doesn’t make sense to pull out a Counterspell designed for Straw Men.
cf. my comment cousin to this one; I misunderstood what the term was pointing at at first, though I stand by my complaint that that’s a problem with the term.
Ok, actually I was just going back through one of Alexander’s posts from 2014 and found a case of him using the term “counterspell” in exactly the way I use it here:
The proper counterspell to such nonsense is Reverse Causal Arrows – could it not be that states with more marijuana users are more likely to pass proposals liberalizing marijuana laws? Yes it could.
I wasn’t aware of this when I wrote the post, but apparently there is some precedent for my usage.
MtG counterspell is a card but it’s also a spell category. Spell in that category usually cost less the more specific their target restrictions are. They also all accomplish the same thing in that ultimately nothing happens (ie a cancellation).
Using magic here as a metaphor might be fitting as the point of such a move is to reveal that the machinery supposed to be employed actually doesn’t do anything ie that magic doesn’t work and is just wishful thinking. The worry would be that by acknowledging the attempted methods you “steep down to their level” ie employ magic yourself despite not believing in it.
Thanks; I legitimately misunderstood at first read whether “counterspell” was intended to apply to the invocations thrown out by bad arguers or the concise and specific distillations the OP is presenting for use. On re-read, I agree that it’s supposed to be a set of useful tools.
I remain convinced of the specific claim that “counterspell” is bad jargon (though I don’t think it’s good practice to cite my own confusion too strongly; the incentives there aren’t great). I agree that MtG″s paradigm where more general counterspells are more expensive seems like a good fit for thinking about rhetorical (and perhaps epistemic) tactics, though I reiterate that that’s not how they work in many other settings, and that ambiguous baggage is worse than no baggage for this sort of thing. The question of whether identifying counterspells with magic is supposed to be a positive or negative association is additional gratuitous confusion—I think your claim that the magic metaphor implies they don’t work is wrong, but I’m not 85% sure.
I actually thought the term was apt. If someone is “under the spell” of bad ideas, you need to “break the spell” somehow before they can think clearly again. This usage is not without precedent. A particular kind of spell needs a particular kind of Counterspell to break it. It’s an antidote, not a panacea, so the D&D conception fits the concept better than the MtG version.
Strong approval of the overall goal of the post, but here’s a semantic criticism:
I parse this as an in-joke (and appreciate it as such), but I do think that regularly minting new jargon that’s likely to carry substantial, conflicting(!) contextual baggage (not all of it appropriate[1]) is...a bad norm for an epistemic community to have.
I also think that the deeper tradition of jargon-forging (as Eliezer practiced it) involved names that sounded nerdy, but _not_ sci-fi or fantasy -- _cf._ Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People, which uses “Fully General Counterargument” in much the same way(?) as you’re using “Counterspell”. “Fully General Counterargument” is slightly more unwieldy, but apart from that is a better piece of jargon—it’s less loaded and by leaning even harder into the implicit snark that winks at the fact that the purported counter- isn’t working at all, makes it even more clear that no, this is not a useful thing.
[1] To belabor this point, MtG counterspells are fully general (edit: okay, not **fully** general, and see Slider below), and a reasonable fit for the term as you’re using it, but D&D (3.5e, at least) counterspells are based on negating a spell by casting a copy of it, which is not what you mean at all. I don’t actually know what “counterspells” are in WoD/Mage, but the risk that they’re even further afield from your intention should be another strike against using the already-loaded handle.
You’re right to read it as an in-joke, and I’m glad that you saw it that way. I think your comment actually goes on to capture the rest of what I was trying to say with that quip. The deeper level of the joke is that this community regularly mints new jargon which can get pretty weird — if we’re not careful, someone will go off the deep end and try to call a new idea something stupid like, I dunno, “Counterspells”. (I was thinking of this comment when I wrote the joke.)
On a more textual level, I came up with the term as a personal joke, but the name stuck, and now I can’t think of them as anything else. Feel free to call this idea whatever you want.
I don’t think “Fully General Counterargument” describes what I’ve done here, though. Eliezer points out on that page that ‘you are a sophisticated arguer; you have used your intelligence to trick yourself’ is an argument that you can use “when you encounter a seemingly intelligent person who says something you don’t like”. (So technically his example is not FULLY general.) But each of the Counterspells I present here are coherent arguments only when someone has made an argument based on a specific logical fallacy. If someone makes an ad hominem against you, it doesn’t make sense to pull out a Counterspell designed for Straw Men.
cf. my comment cousin to this one; I misunderstood what the term was pointing at at first, though I stand by my complaint that that’s a problem with the term.
Ah, understood! Yeah, the term is imperfect. Call them whatever you like.
Ok, actually I was just going back through one of Alexander’s posts from 2014 and found a case of him using the term “counterspell” in exactly the way I use it here:
I wasn’t aware of this when I wrote the post, but apparently there is some precedent for my usage.
“Counterspells” are supposed to be useful.
MtG counterspell is a card but it’s also a spell category. Spell in that category usually cost less the more specific their target restrictions are. They also all accomplish the same thing in that ultimately nothing happens (ie a cancellation).
Using magic here as a metaphor might be fitting as the point of such a move is to reveal that the machinery supposed to be employed actually doesn’t do anything ie that magic doesn’t work and is just wishful thinking. The worry would be that by acknowledging the attempted methods you “steep down to their level” ie employ magic yourself despite not believing in it.
Thanks; I legitimately misunderstood at first read whether “counterspell” was intended to apply to the invocations thrown out by bad arguers or the concise and specific distillations the OP is presenting for use. On re-read, I agree that it’s supposed to be a set of useful tools.
I remain convinced of the specific claim that “counterspell” is bad jargon (though I don’t think it’s good practice to cite my own confusion too strongly; the incentives there aren’t great). I agree that MtG″s paradigm where more general counterspells are more expensive seems like a good fit for thinking about rhetorical (and perhaps epistemic) tactics, though I reiterate that that’s not how they work in many other settings, and that ambiguous baggage is worse than no baggage for this sort of thing. The question of whether identifying counterspells with magic is supposed to be a positive or negative association is additional gratuitous confusion—I think your claim that the magic metaphor implies they don’t work is wrong, but I’m not 85% sure.
I actually thought the term was apt. If someone is “under the spell” of bad ideas, you need to “break the spell” somehow before they can think clearly again. This usage is not without precedent. A particular kind of spell needs a particular kind of Counterspell to break it. It’s an antidote, not a panacea, so the D&D conception fits the concept better than the MtG version.