It's Hard To Figure Out Why Complicated Arguments Are Wrong

Good philosophy is opaque to the average person

One of the more irritating features of the new atheists is their near-universal belief that they can hear any argument—however complicated—and immediately identify what’s wrong with it.

Even in the embarrassing days when I was something resembling a new atheist, I didn’t think this. When I heard the McGrews’ maximal data argument for the resurrection—an argument relying on highly complex, specific, and confusingly intricate historical facts—I did not think I could immediately spot what was wrong with it. I was pretty confident that something was wrong with it, because I was confident the conclusion was false. But I certainly would never have declared it obvious idiocy, or thought that I was in a position to debunk it.

Most new atheists, however, are not this way. I’ve presented the anthropic argument in front of a great many new atheist crowds. Without fail, they seem to think it’s easily debunkable nonsense—though, of course, they can never agree on what’s wrong with it. It would be rather surprising if a highly complicated argument that has convinced many competent philosophers, and is regarded as formidable even by those it doesn’t convince, could be debunked by a YouTube viewer with no philosophy background in five minutes.

When I called into The Line—a new atheist show—to present the anthropic argument, all the commenters agreed the argument was total bullshit. Few seemed to understand the argument, but despite that, they all agreed that it contained some obvious fallacy that I had been too stupid to realize. Things got off to a rocky start when the person labeling the callers described my argument as “dark matter and speculations about it ‘point to a god.’”

It’s true that I at one point used an analogy involving dark matter. However, I did not say that speculations about dark matter point to God. Not every analogy used to explain an argument is what the argument is about. Others commenters (plural!) seemed to think that somehow my raising the anthropic argument meant I did not believe in science and that I was very stupid!

This is another irritating feature of the new atheists. They often think that one who believes in God must be a moron, for if they were smart, they’d know God doesn’t exist. But often the people who think themselves too intelligent to believe in God are, ironically, too unintelligent to understand the reasons why others believe in God. They simply can’t follow arguments and as a result don’t realize the force of arguments for God. This is a rather ironic situation, a bit like a Flat Earther declaring other people too stupid to understand the true shape of the Earth. Other commenters seemed just as sure of my error.

No, I was not trying to “reason” reality into existence. Rather, I was using reasoning to figure out what reality is like. This is, in fact, what all reasoning is! The comments are filled with people who could not explain the anthropic argument or—to quote Feser—tell metaphysics from Metamucil, but nonetheless are nearly certain that the argument is terrible and I am an idiot.

That this is irrational should go without saying. In general, to know if an argument is idiotic, one must know what the argument is (unless they have powerful higher-order evidence which, of course, in this case they do not). The standard formula seems to be:

1. Hear an argument.

2. Not think carefully about what it’s saying.

3. Think of an objection—usually involving claiming the argument commits some fallacy found on yourlogicalfallacyis.com.

4. Assume the objection is fatal and the argument thus fails completely.

5. Declare the person making the argument a moron.

Even if an argument is in support of a false position, it might nevertheless have considerable force. I don’t think Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote the Gospels, but the argument that the early Church fathers all said they did does have a decent amount of force. An argument can be clever—persuasive even—while being in support of a false conclusion.

No matter how smart you are, there are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. There are arguments that you could not understand but that are very persuasive. Likely there are many devastating arguments much too complicated for a human to understand. One’s immediate reaction to an argument, shortly after hearing it, is not a remotely reliable gauge of the argument’s success.

So if you hear the McGrews talking, for instance, about maximal data, undesigned coincidences, onomastic congruence, and half a dozen other things that you haven’t studied at all, if you declare the argument terrible and them idiots, it is you who are reasoning terribly and being an idiot. If you hear the anthropic argument and immediately think of an objection—before hearing what its proponents say in response to such objections—then you should not assume that the argument is falsified by the objection. If you hear a complicated proof of SIA, utilitarianism, deontology, God, B-theory, dualism, or any other view, even if the view seems ridiculous to you, you shouldn’t dismiss it out of hand. Humans are often quite wrong and biased.

Eliezer Yudkowsky—a man who I’ve said only nice things about—wrote an essay many years ago called The Level Above Mine. In it, he wrote:

I once lent Xiaoguang "Mike" Li my copy of "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science". Mike Li read some of it, and then came back and said:

"Wow... it's like Jaynes is a thousand-year-old vampire."

Then Mike said, "No, wait, let me explain that—" and I said, "No, I know exactly what you mean." It's a convention in fantasy literature that the older a vampire gets, the more powerful they become.

…

For whatever reason, the sense I get of Jaynes is one of terrifying swift perfection—something that would arrive at the correct answer by the shortest possible route, tearing all surrounding mistakes to shreds in the same motion. Of course, when you write a book, you get a chance to show only your best side. But still.

It spoke well of Mike Li that he was able to sense the aura of formidability surrounding Jaynes. It's a general rule, I've observed, that you can't discriminate between levels too far above your own. E.g., someone once earnestly told me that I was really bright, and "ought to go to college". Maybe anything more than around one standard deviation above you starts to blur together, though that's just a cool-sounding wild guess.

The entire essay is well done but the above paragraph is perhaps the most interesting insight. One can’t neatly distinguish between people too far above them in some domain. I couldn’t tell, just by reading, a Terrence Tao math paper from a paper written by a random math professor at a community college. Just from watching the first 20 moves of a chess game, I couldn’t tell if the person playing was Magnus Carlsen or someone rated 2,000. Too far above you and people start to blur together.

Yesterday I was at the pub with some friends arguing about philosophy. It was a fun night! Over the course of it, I convinced one friend that we should have credences in our possessing particular locations within centered worlds (gripping stuff, I know), as well as national treasure Charles Amos that one of his arguments against giving to charity didn’t work.

Both Charles and the other friend I convinced were much better at philosophy than the typical YouTube commenter. Yet I could never have convinced the standard YouTube commenter that they were wrong. Terrence Tao could probably not convince me—using anything other than higher order evidence—of any particular mathematical conclusion. When people are sufficiently outmatched, communication breaks down.

This is one reason YouTube debates are often frustrating. A while ago, I watched a debate between Robin Collins, one of the world’s leading experts on fine-tuning, and Tom Jump, an internet clown with the philosophical competence of a small bird. Collins is extremely sharp—to use Eliezer’s analogy, he is like a thousand-year-old vampire. When I argue with Collins, I very frequently find myself outmatched. A debate between Collins and TJump is a bit like a fight between Mike Tyson and a baby.

Collins did about as well as was expected. On every point, TJump was outmatched. TJump couldn’t score a single point, and kept going around in circles, because he couldn’t see how the stuff Collins had already said refuted the points he made. Any philosopher watching the conversation would know that Collins completely dominated Tom.

The commenters, however, were not aware of this fact. They seemed to think that Tom was victorious in the debate—that it was Collins, in fact, who was outmatched. They were too incompetent to understand what Collins was saying, and so couldn’t grasp how it refuted what Tom said.

This is a tragic state of affairs. It’s a bit like watching an overconfident freshman argue with the professor. But it’s worse than that, because in this case, lots of people seemed to think the overconfident freshman won. In a second conversation between Tom and Robin, where Tom quite literally admitted midway through the conversation that his argument didn’t work in light of one of Robin’s replies, many of the commenters still thought Tom had the upper hand.

Now in part this has to do with selection effects. The people watching the debate were fans of Tom, and as a result, had a tendency to overestimate him. But the general phenomenon is much more common. The average YouTube commenter simply cannot grasp how arguments work—or follow who is winning a debate.

I have a friend who is really good at philosophy. He’s pretty soft-spoken and laid back in argument. Whenever he and I argue about philosophy, it’s a slog—even if I end up convincing him by the end, I always feel as if I’ve played a long and difficult chess match over the course of hours. However, given that he’s not rhetorically dominating, I think people without a philosophy background would have no idea that he too is like a thousand-year-old vampire. Certainly most people couldn’t realize that he was infinitely better at philosophy than, say, Christopher Hitchens.

The world is a complicated place. It is the height of foolishness to think you can decisively judge a topic without knowing about it. Sadly, this seems to be the view of all too many people. In general, to know an argument is wrong, one must understand the argument in depth. If you think that you can judge a dispute that you’re ignorant of, you’re probably making embarrassing errors that will make you look back and cringe if you ever get to the bottom of the dispute.