In my more ambitious moments I like to fancy myself a weekend/amateur logician (nyuk), and love arguing - I particularly relish arguing with lawyers, because they’e generally the best arguers around and have learned through their trade and training to employ the tools of logic (or, sometimes, illogic) in pursuit of convincing others of a position. Tangential rant aside, the crux of argument is logic - and on that note, I quite enjoyed stumbling across RationalWiki, whose stated mission as a public knowledgebase is
- Analyzing and refuting the anti-science movement.
- Analyzing and refuting crank ideas.
- Explorations of authoritarianism and fundamentalism.
I’ll just highlight a few entries out of their section on logical fallacies that made me smirk in reminiscence of arugments past. The No True Scotsman fallacy is to avoid being associated with an unpleasant act by asserting that no true member of the group they belong to would do such a thing . The equivocation fallacy is a particularly “good” one in that it’s subtle and goes hand-in-hand with moving the goalposts (albeit over a longer time frame, generally), redifining the groundwork by which an argument is assessed by changing the lexicon via the connotation of words.
RationalWiki is generally geared towards refutation of poor logic applied by specific “crank” movements, e.g. creationists, various spectra of historical denialists, the myriad anti-science movements (vaccinations, etc.) and so on - identifying the logical groundwork for such refutation is a necessary precursor in addition to being fun and useful material to have on its own.
(Sidenote of geekiness: I note they use MediaWiki as their main wiki/kb engine, which might be overkill for the sites purposes - I spent quite some time setting up a now-defunct kb using this system at my employer, but it was basically multiple answers to questions no one asked. I will add though that MediaWiki has a neat extension called Semantic that adds something resembling Semantic Web/Web 2.0 capability - from the end user standpoint, think Wolfram|Alpha-style intuitive querying capabilities, except with a conceptually much more powerful back end of data being based on a dynamic and infinite “web” of pages tagged with properties and units, rather than the structured mega-database-of-fixed-knowledge as in W|A. Such semantic knowledgebases could actually be the Google-killer that W|A is hyping itself to be. Wow, I went way off-topic here.)
