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.
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.