Two steps to freeing yourself from operating system zealotry

First, repeat the following mantra to yourself until you really, really believe it:

Other people's needs, habits, and experiences with software differ dramatically from mine, and are just as legitimate.

Your platform of choice may seem to satisfy your needs exactly. It may ring every single chime in the halls of your heart. But if you sincerely believe that every user who wants something different is simply mistaken, then you're presuming to a knowledge that you do not possess: namely, the knowledge of how every other user behaves.

Second, pay close attention when you're using your preferred computing device, and make a mental note every time you end up staring, slack-jawed or pissed-off or confused, while your computer does something other than what you just asked it to do. (This includes while you're waiting for some indicator to stop spinning, or when you need to stab the "Cancel" or "Back" button.) If you believe that this never happens to you, then you are not paying close enough attention, and in fact you should be frightened, because you have become so habituated to your platform of choice that you've learned to automatically edit these moments out of your consciousness. The inescapable truth is that all computing platforms suck in different ways, including yours. And until you realize this, you will not have achieved enlightenment.

Once these two conclusions sink in, you will shortly see that all OS zealotry is the futile worship of invented gods — cruel, greedy, capricious, and temporary gods to boot. Arguing with people on the Internet about the superiority of your computing bauble will seem to you like a species of insanity.

But who am I kidding. Most OS zealots are fractally wrong and it's a fool's errand to dissuade them. But maybe you, dear reader, can be saved...

The story of "fractal wrongness"

Once upon a time, there was this annoying, pretentious, insufferable, know-it-all egotist who got really angry about arguments people had on the Internet. Sometimes, he would get involved in those arguments, and he observed that they basically never changed anybody's mind. This was frustrating. Why couldn't people see the plain truth, viz., that they were wrong, and he was right?

One day he read a Neal Stephenson novel called Cryptonomicon, wherein there appears the following passage (p. 61 of the 1st hardcover edition):

[Randy] had now, he realized, blundered into some serious domestic weirdness involving Andrew's family. It turned out that Andrew's parents were divorced and, long ago, had fought savagely over custody of him, their only child. Mom had turned into a hippie and joined a religious cult in Oregon and taken Andrew with her. It was rumored that this cult engaged in sexual abuse of children. Dad had hired private dicks to kidnap Andrew and then showered him with material possessions to demonstrate his superior love. There had followed an interminable legal battle in which Dad had hired some rather fringey psychotherapists to hypnotize Andrew and get him to dredge up repressed memories of unspeakable and improbable horrors.

This was just the executive summary of a weird life that Randy only learned about in bits and pieces as the years went on. Later, he was to decide that Andrew's life had been fractally weird. That is, you could take any small piece of it and examine it in detail and it, in and of itself, would turn out to be just as complicated and weird as the whole thing in its entirety.

This turn of phrase bounced around his skull for about a year, whereupon a number of bits were flipped and the spelling transmogrified into a slightly different phrase. This altered phrase happened to resonate in particular with certain strains of the guy's character, and he was compelled to make up a definition for it:

fractal wrongness

The state of being wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution. That is, from a distance, a fractally wrong person's worldview is incorrect; and furthermore, if you zoom in on any small part of that person's worldview, that part is just as wrong as the whole worldview.

Debating with a person who is fractally wrong leads to infinite regress, as every refutation you make of that person's opinions will lead to a rejoinder, full of half-truths, leaps of logic, and outright lies, that requires just as much refutation to debunk as the first one. It is as impossible to convince a fractally wrong person of anything as it is to walk around the edge of the Mandelbrot set in finite time.

If you ever get embroiled in a discussion with a fractally wrong person on the Internet--in mailing lists, newsgroups, or website forums--your best bet is to say your piece once and ignore any replies, thus saving yourself time.

For years, this phrase lay dormant, propagated very occasionally to other fora by random visitors who had come across his site looking for something else. But on the Internet, an excuse to dismiss people who disagree with you as morons cannot go ignored for long. There are simply too many uses for such a device. And lo, the word spread.

There is some merit to the idea. There really do exist arguments that do not make observable progress no matter how long they run. There really do exist people so stupid or clueless or fundamentally broken in the head that one can point out an obvious faulty syllogism, and be greeted with nothing more than another ten faulty syllogisms in reply.

But at the same time, it's incredibly dangerous to have this phrase in your mental vocabulary. How can you be so certain that you aren't simply misunderstanding the argument? How can you be so certain that you are right and they are wrong, especially given the practically endless human capacity for thickheadedness and confirmation bias? It's nearly impossible. Giving people on the Internet a reason to dismiss the arguments of their opponents is like giving free lifetime supplies of Nyquil to a bunch of narcoleptics. Truthfully, if the aforementioned egotist had an ounce of sense, he would have hesitated before releasing this term into the wild.

And yet, I have to admit, the advice to "say your piece once and ignore any replies" is probably a fine strategy in most cases for arguing on the Internet. And then, too, the rare person who habitually errs on the side of being too charitable to his/her opponents may benefit from cultivating the ability to recognize fractal wrongness.

So maybe it's not all bad — that is, the phrase is not itself fractally wrong, but is more like a rather dangerously pointy tool of standard Euclidean dimensionality, demanding careful handling but well-suited for some uses.

Two intellectually bankrupt argumentative tactics

As follows:

1. "You're getting angry. Thererefore, there must be some merits to the argument you are attacking."

Ridiculous for transparently obvious reasons. The emotional tenor of a debater has no bearing on the correctness or incorrectness of his or her argument. Yet, this tactic is frequently employed in all seriousness, usually by people who have no better counterargument to put forward.

Now, for any particular person, there may be some statistical correlation between one's emotional tenor and one's beliefs about the merits of the argument under discussion. For example, when a position with which I disagree has some merits or subtlety, then I can take some intellectual pleasure in figuring out why it's still wrong. In such cases, my prose tends to remain fairly neutral in tone --- see, for example, my discussion of the death penalty versus war.

However, when an argument strikes me as having no redeeming features whatsoever, then I transmogrify into a volcanic fountain of vitriol and contempt. See, for example, my post about Jonah Goldberg.

In such situations, there are several possibilities. Either the person making the argument knows that it's ridiculous, or he does not. In the former case, he's trying to deceive his audience by making the argument. In the latter case, either he hasn't thought very hard about the argument he's making, which means he's consciously wasting his audience's time, or he's too stupid to see how flimsy his argument is. Now, if he's deceiving his audience, or wasting his audience's time, then I claim that anger (or at least contempt) is, in fact, the proper response to his behavior. He's inflicting harm on his audience, and some altruistic punishment is in order. Only in the last case --- i.e., he's too stupid to see the flaws in his argument --- does he deserve any sympathy. And frankly, when that stupidity is paired with arrogance, as it so frequently is, it's really hard to muster sympathy even in that case.

Now, once again, none of this really demonstrates anything about the merits of the argument under discussion. I could be furious, but mistaken. I just thought it might be worth explaining when and why I, personally, tend to display anger in my own writing when an argument's absolute nonsense.

2. "You just claimed that I possess [bad trait X]. Therefore, you are engaging in ad hominem and your argument is wrong."

Also ridiculous for transparently obvious reasons. People who use this argument unadorned do not understand what ad hominem means --- it denotes an argument wherein one makes the following (invalid) chain of inference:

• Person P has the property X.
• X is bad.
• Therefore, the argument A advanced by P is invalid.

Notice that ad hominem is not a synonym for "insult". If you make a charge of ad hominem, then it does not suffice to show that someone has been insulted. It is necessary to show that the insult was used as evidence that the argument is unsound.

However, I often see the above argument confused with the following one:

• Person P advanced argument A.
• Argument A is so ridiculous that it could only be advanced by someone having property X.
• Therefore, P has the property X.

Now, this chain of argument is perfectly valid. In most cases, it does not take a terribly discerning eye to distinguish this argument from the prior one. If you attack the person first, and use that attack to back up a conclusion about the argument, you probably have argumentum ad hominem. If you attack the argument first, and use it to back up a conclusion about the person's character, then you probably have the latter argument. Nevertheless, many people fail to distinguish the two, and thereby reveal themselves to be idiots.

Exercise for the reader: Which one is the last sentence of the previous paragraph?

A final note: Use of either of the above argumentative tactics demonstrates mere intellectual bankruptcy. To use both of them at once requires a special, additional helping of argumentative incompetence --- because, of course, the first argument is actually a form of genuine ad hominem.

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p.s. In case you're curious as to what prompted this, all of the above has been a way of mining some usefulness from this random babbling (which came up on Technorati links here) by extracting general rules from a specific instance of intellectual bankruptcy. You can, perhaps, amuse yourself by counting how many times this writer (who claims to have some training in philosophy) makes the above errors, but you're probably better off not clicking the link.