fenc.es — be wrong on the internet, productively

Double Crux — A Strategy for Resolving Disagreement

(Cross posted to LessWrong)

Beginner's Guide to Arguing Constructively

How to turn arguments from vicious battles into productive dialogues.

Argumentation theory | Communication and Mass Media | Research Starters | EBSCO Research

<p>Argumentation theory explores the processes and methods of reasoning and debate used by individuals in both formal and informal contexts. The theory has roots in ancient philosophical discourse, particularly from figures like Aristotle, and has evolved through the contributions of modern philosophers such as Chaïm Perelman and Stephen Toulmin. It highlights how arguments are structured, identifying key components such as claims, grounds (or data), and warrants, which collectively help participants make their case. </p> <p>Additionally, arguments can be categorized into three main types: factual claims, which are verifiable; judgment or value claims, which are subjective; and policy claims, which pertain to proposed courses of action. This framework acknowledges the influence of personal biases, often shaping the reasoning process, and emphasizes the importance of logical support, backing, qualifiers, and rebuttals in strengthening arguments. In academic contexts, the theory suggests that creating valid topics should focus on policy arguments, while also addressing counterarguments to foster a comprehensive debate. Overall, argumentation theory serves as a critical tool for understanding how reasoning and persuasive communication function in various scenarios.</p>

How To Think Real Good | Meta-rationality

Practical epistemology: heuristics for how to think about difficult things, particularly using formal methods.

Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics - E. Wigner

Reprinted from Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics, Vol. 13, No. I (February 1960). New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Copyright © 1960 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Argument from authority

Some consider it a practical and sound way of obtaining knowledge that is generally likely to be correct when the authority is real, pertinent, and universally accepted,[1][4][5][6][7][8][9] while others consider it to be a very weak defeasible argument or an outright fallacy.[10][11][12][13][14]

Debate Maps — The Society Library

While The Society Library is dedicated to enabling access to information through our libraries, we recognize the difficult and tricky work of organizing that content into formal deliberation. There are hundreds of cognitive biases and logical pitfalls that can get in our way as human beings. Therefore, as a part of our service, The Society Library endeavors to map the knowledge we collect into “debate maps,” which essentially means we are organizing the arguments, claims, evidence, and opinions from all points of view into a formal debate - and effectively enabling “societal-scale debate.” A feat which may be otherwise impossible to organize in comparable levels of comprehensiveness with the existing limits of media, language, and human bandwidth to which we are confined.

Back-to-basics: on poor conceptualizations in AI work - (Un)rigorous AI

TL;DR — Poor conceptual foundations can severely undermine the credibility and reliability of knowledge claims. (And, no, your metric is not your construct.)

It’s Not Enough to Be Right. You Also Have to Be Kind.

Takedowns and clever quips are easy, but empathy and persuasion are better

Operadic consistency: a label-free signal for compositional...

Detecting LLM reasoning failures at inference time without ground-truth labels has motivated a wide range of confidence baselines, including self-consistency, semantic entropy, and P(True), built...

A Meta-Analytic Examination of the Continued Influence of Misinformation in the Face of Correction: How Powerful Is It, Why Does It Happen, and How to Stop It?

A meta-analysis was conducted to examine the extent of continued influence of misinformation in the face of correction and the theoretical explanations of this phenomenon. Aggregation of results from 32 studies ( N = 6,527) revealed that, on average, correction does not entirely eliminate the effect of misinformation ( r = –.05, p = .045). Corrective messages were found to be more successful when they are coherent, consistent with the audience’s worldview, and delivered by the source of the misinformation itself. Corrections are less effective if the misinformation was attributed to a credible source, the misinformation has been repeated multiple times prior to correction, or when there was a time lag between the delivery of the misinformation and the correction. These findings are consistent with predictions based on theories of mental models and offer concrete recommendations for practitioners.

We argue badly, and nothing accumulates. How could we do better? | Reason Commons — Issue Trees & Logical Thinking Process

Millions of people argue every day about the things that matter most — climate change, what to do about AI, how we might build a better world. Some of it is sharp, even insightful. And almost none of it accumulates.

People Spend Too Much Time On Decisions with Equally Satisfying Outcomes

The pitfalls of analysis paralysis

Most arguments scatter across papers, posts, and threads — and evaporate. A claim tree gives them a stable structure to gather against, the way a cathedral gathers centuries of work into a single, standing thing.

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