It's Easy To Write A Persuasive Sounding Article Arguing For Anything

Be dubious when someone writes a convincing piece arguing for things

You should not believe anything I say.

No, really. I’m a random college student who opines on a litany of topics that I’m uninformed about, often where experts who are smarter than me, more experienced, and more knowledgeable about the specific topic disagree with me fervently. For example, I wrote a 5,000-word piece arguing against arms sales to Saudi Arabia. There are people much smarter than me who disagree with me on that topic—professors of international relations, for instance, who could probably run circles around me in a debate, and write a very convincing reply to my article.

I’ve written various articles laying out the case against interventionist foreign policy. This has often involved rattling off one-sentence descriptions of U.S. interventions that sound horrible—such as when we killed 10% of the people in Laos through heavy bombing. But it wouldn’t be hard to produce a similar paragraph making U.S. interventions sound wonderful. For instance:

Critics of U.S. intervention like to harp on the bad things done by the U.S.. Yes, we mess up sometimes. We sometimes invade Iraq or Afghanistan when we shouldn’t. But on the whole, U.S. hegemony has been accompanied by an unprecedented decrease in violence and increase in global prosperity—just look at the improvement since world war 2. Critics of foreign policy do it by ignoring the wins. They ignore how we ended a genocide in Kosovo, how we stopped the Nazis, how we prevented North Korea from taking over South Korea and subjecting tens of millions of extra people to the horrifying dictatorship of the North Korean government that involves mass starvation, torture, brainwashing, and brutality. We also won the cold war, and stopped the spread of global communism—one of the most pernicious forces in history that killed north of a hundred million people. I’ll take a few Iraqs to stop the spread of global communism.

Of course, one could dispute these points—I know I would. But the point is that it’s not hard to write an article like this that involves rattling off a bunch of ill-explained examples. Most people don’t know much about most topics, so it’s not hard to write something that sounds convincing arguing for any topic. One example I was recently reminded of was this article from Holly Math Nerd. The article claims that there is a growing push to destigmatize pedophilia, and that that is disastrous. I’ve argued against both claims here—those who have sex with children should be heavily stigmatized, those who merely have an uncontrollable attraction should not be. They should instead be encouraged to get help, rather than vilified.

Holly’s article was probably read more than anything I’ve ever written in my life. And yet the article is mostly false. It claimed that pedophilia is being destigmatized at “warp speed.” The evidence for this is that one random obscure document by the Scottish police used the term minor-attracted persons, as well as a few very obscure, fringe organizations and people. When you think about it, the evidence is obviously unconvincing—it seems like well above 99% of people who use the term minor-attracted people use it to condemn the term, and virtually no one on earth has ever heard the term, much less used it. There are about as many genuine Nazis as there are people who unironically use the term minor-attracted persons.

But most people don’t know the background. When Holly is just propagandizing—rattling off a list of organizations and citing official-sounding things like reports by the EU—the evidence sounds convincing. Because if the facts you provide are one-sided, it’s easy to argue for any conclusion. And when you write a Substack article, you pick the facts. You decide whether to mention that no politician has ever used the term MAP, and virtually everyone seems to hate the term, except for a small number of people, most of whom are fringe academic researchers who do research into child sex abuse. And then, when Holly turns to arguing for her position, it mostly involves just straw-manning the other side—people like Cantor and Prostasia, who she cites as two examples of the worrying trend, support stigmatizing sex between adults and minors. They just suggest that if a person has an uncontrollable attraction to minors, they should not be treated as if they’re terrible people—you can control what you do, not what you’re attracted to. And yet despite this, the headline of the section where she argues against such people is “Even those pedophiles who experience the delusion that they are courting a partner must be stigmatized.” But none of the people who she’s arguing against dispute that.

Part of what makes Holly’s article sound convincing is that it is supremely well-written. Good writing can hypnotize us into believing implausible conclusions. But presenting a skewed version of information can make things more convincing. The world is filled with so many facts that it’s very easy to marshal lots of them in support of your view. That’s why it’s easy for conspiracy theorists to convince us of things—very few of us have sufficiently detailed knowledge of the moon landing to provide the natural explanation of various odd pictures that make it look fake.

I think Noam Chomsky is a pretty convincing writer. He provides an impressive wall of facts, footnotes, and evidence whenever he makes a controversial claim. But the best Chomsky critics also sound persuasive when you read them. I recently came across this reply to Chomsky that seemed like a pretty devastating takedown. Then I came across a devastating takedown of that. No doubt the reply by James MacDonald would seem convincing too.

I came away from this experience pretty puzzled. I need to read at least the 5 or so books referenced that discuss death counts of the Pol Pot regime in order to have an opinion. Even then, it would be very difficult to sort through the claims. There is just so much information surrounding most difficult issues that it takes months or years to know the evidence well enough to have a convincing-sounding article arguing for something. In contrast, it’s super easy to write an article where you make a simple case for some position that sounds convincing. Sam Atis—whose Substack is very worth reading—has a nice article that demonstrates the point. He shows how even if you’re statistically illiterate, you can write an article arguing for the death penalty requiring only about 5 minutes of research.

People tell you not to believe everything you read. Really, really don’t. When you come across a convincing-sounding article arguing for any view on a topic about which you’re not informed, that communicates little more than that the author has an opinion on that topic. Just as you shouldn’t be the man of one study, you shouldn’t be the man of one article—even if it came from your favorite writer.