Logic and Fallacies - FAQ links

One of the most clearly written and empowering articles ever to have surfaced from the Internet's dialectic communities on Usenet was the Logical Reasoning and Fallacies FAQ, which became the basis of a large number of evolving FAQs and websites which continues to grow today.

Since our Feature Suggestions forum hosts a very large amount of technically-oriented discussion which employs the same rules of reasoning, I thought it might be useful to list a few links to sites hosting the FAQ in one of its many derived forms. Enjoy, if you've not seen this before.

The last 3 links are to a trio of specific fallacies which unfortunately are particularly common, often used unintentionally but sometimes highly maliciously to derail an argument without addressing it. If your serious feature suggestion has been dismissed with a primevil grunt of illogic, just point them here!

1. English 101 Online - Logical Argument

1. VirtualSchool - Constructing a Logical Argument

1. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Fallacies

1. The Atheism Web - Logic & Fallacies

1. Fallacy: Attacking the Person (ad hominem)

1. Fallacy: Straw Man

1. Fallacy: Appeal To Authority

Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy.

And by creating this post and not actually addressing the issue here, you're avoiding the issue.

Would this also be a smokescreen, or would that be your enormously long posts you make in other threads?

Could you turn on your private messaging so we (and others) don't have to drag this out through the forums?

Also, could you classify these for me?

"Caching isn't working. When I go to a location I've been to before, things do load faster than the first time I visited the location, but I'm still getting lots of bandwidth usage. I know that bandwidth is used for other things besides caching, but since I get bandwidth usage when I'm loading area for the first time too, this must be related to my cache, and therefore my cache is not working."

"Because the SL client can quickly load various pre-defined meshes such as cubes, spheres, cylinders, and other such objects which potentially contain just as many polygons as a user-created mesh can, SL should easily be able to load user-created meshes of an equal number of polygons just as quickly."

Could you please take that to the appropriate thread, Moleculor? I'm merely the presenter of the details above, so attacking me here is attacking the messenger, not the subject matter.

99% of the time people mistake humour for a logic error. My advice, ignore the post, read on. Don't waste your time trying to flame some guy back when he was probably laughing when he wrote it anyways, laugh back. Post your own logical fallacy. It's fun.

That's a good point you make. And not just humour, but other verbal forms like sarcasm too, which can often be misinterpreted. Yes, that's good advice.

You are all WRONG! it's just a state of being, I don't hold it against you. I am always right + nobody ever agrees with me = EVERYBODY ELSE IS ALWAYS WRONG.

In addition, everybody else thinks I'm right too, so this should be a good indicator of the veracity of my statements.

Disclaimer:
This post was intended purely as humor. Taking this post seriously could lead to several significant problems such as: high blood pressure, flames and/or arguments which will look silly when/if you do realize this was not meant to be taken literally. This post has also been shown to cause cancer in white mice.

Are Mol and Morgaine married or something? They're always bickering.

Morgaine,

Were you suggesting that LL implement some means of logic validation, or is this merely an oblique attack on those with whom you disagree?

Though discussion is certainly important within the actual feature suggestion threads, I think that you should be careful not to dilute this forum with off-topic posts.

Gosh no, the Lindens have always wanted the community to do its own organizing, they don't want to get involved in any kind of regulation apart from enforcement of Community Standards.

And logic is without a shadow of doubt the fairest, least biased and most objective of all thought systems known to humanity so far, so nobody can claim that it is somehow benefitting one party over another.

Absolutely not. In order for logic to be of any use at all, you must first have everyone agree on all the axioms used by all the arguments. Without that 'logic' is still just a shouting match.

Well. Perhaps it might be the fairest. However it is just as useless, which ends up feeling like the same thing. It is rarely easy to even get people to agree on which axioms they are disagreeing about. I suspect we are about to run into just that problem.

While i have seen the threads where bickering takes place, i would just like to say that it need not happen in this thread, as to do so would go beyond the technical scope of this forum and staight into the grounds that cover the off-topic forum, as it would be debating topics that societies are based on and people do Doctorate work on.

I see no problem with LL stickeing a post with the links above. So.... i support this feature request.

Yannow I'm all about logic as much as the next nerd, but to put this in perspective ... these forums are SOOOOOO much tamer and civil compared to what I saw in EQ.

*to tired to think of witty saying*

what's the point in arguing we all know i'm write =^_^=

No, you're wong.

All those smilies help too.

Indeed. I put it down to the fact that EverQuest has an economy of scarcity, and your passage through life is one of suffering and hardship in all things, from grinding away at extremely long levels, to the pain of RSI after 10k - 100k of mouseclicks per tradeskill trained, the heartbreaking tradeskill combine failures after paying through the nose for the components, the difficulty of ever having enough money to buy your top-end spells even if they were to come on the market, the 5-month long camps for some key drops, and the near-zero drop rates even after a mob has finally appeared. Plus of course the fact that Sony hate their customers with a vengeance.

It all leads to an environment of extreme competition for the meagre resources in life, little friendship. The fact that EQ forums sometimes reflect that isn't too surprising. Maybe it's more surprising when one sees a high degree of helpfulness and cooperation there, and I do remember EQ having that too. If nothing else, periodically you'd try to forget the hardships you went through to get to 65 for a while, and descend on the newbie cities with gifts for the level 1's. That was a favourite pastime, so it wasn't all bad.

But in general, yes, a hard life can lead to hard, entrenched positions, and remove the fun.

mmmm

everybody just needs to relax

if you have lemons... smash them with sledgehammer making lemonade on the audience. Would have been hilarious if he was governor. I'm glad i don't live in california.

Life is good, in SL there is only as much stress as you want it to have, if you don't like your neighbors you can move, or stick it out and fight them tooth and nail. You can go to parties and meet people you would otherwise never meet, or not. You can be rich or poor, own land or not. It's a chance to be what ever you like. And if you screw up, for the price of 10$ US you can start your next life today (no more uncertainty with death or the mess it causes). So relax all is good.

oh darn i've started on the meaning of (second) life.

You miss the forest for the trees, Morgaine. EQs forums may be filled with vitriol as a result of certain features/flaws of the game, but I think the more likely explanation is that EQ itself is filled with one of the most vitriolic substances there is: teenage boys.

Hehehe. You're right there.

Interestingly, most of them didn't seem to make it all the way through the game. Somewhere around the end of Lake of Ill Omen levels (about level 25-30 for soloers I think, can't remember), that vitriol would combine with the frustration of the game getting a lot harder and pretty much explode. Really nasty, even for the hardened gamer.

Beyond the mid-level ranges though, nothing, total peace and quiet. Maybe it was the guilds shutting their doors to them, not for their mouths but because an idiot will get everyone in a raid killed in the high-end game, easily. Anyway, for whatever reason, they'd vanish. Perhaps all they had left would then get vented to the forums at that point, lol. Unpleasant.