Common Arguments So Bad I Couldn't Make Them Up

Flooding the zone

A weirdly large number of popular arguments are obviously ridiculous. They sound alright when a journalist is writing them in devastating prose, but when you stop to reflect on them for two seconds, you realize that they shouldn’t persuade anyone. I set out to catalogue some of them. These arguments are astonishingly bad—so much so that it’s shocking that anyone makes them. But weirdly, these arguments are quite common. In fact, one of them—despite being obvious nonsense—seems to be made in roughly 100% of posts about why AI isn’t an existential risk.