Cobwebs were especially bad this morning as I pushed back the bed covers. In the time it took for my feet to touch the floor I floundered to remember my name. One of those, “This is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife” moments, when you are conscious but your recognition apparatus hasn’t finished bootstrapping.
Outside: oatmeal gray and drizzly. Fine. Life can’t be chocolate and roses all the time. Or, if you ask me, Ruffles and French onion dip. Both of which are once again contraindicated foods because my blood is (still) fat. Screw you Low Density Lipoprotein, screw you! So I bought a 7# bag of peanuts in the shell at Costco to sate my frequent salt & crunch crave. I pop my 40 mg statin and chase it with cabernet. Eating the enemy and the cavalry together like that makes me imagine a chemical war inside me, good versus bad molecules.
Are there ten reasons not to argue on the internet? How about this one: Your internet interlocutor, that means the person you’re talking to, that person makes a sweeping statement of the kind: “All X are Y”. You reply that no, not all X are Y, cite evidence of exception, and elaborate why the exception is important to the issue under discussion. This person then replies with a new claim “All new X are not Y”, and you reply how this contradicts the first claim — because the set of “All new X” is a subset of “All X”. Then a new person comes along, in defense of the first person, and says there is no contradiction, effectively arguing that I should’ve known a new X is not in the set of All X. This person goes on to repeat the second claim of the first person, saying it is obviously (!) true, To wit: All new X are not Y.
You pause at the keyboard, anxiously tapping your finger, wondering if this is worth it. You decide it is. You let this person down gently, reply that unfortunately the sweeping generalization — All new X are not Y — is also false. You provide evidence of exception. The first person then returns, evidently exasperated by now, and says, “Jazus man, there’s no contradiction, Most X are not new.”
Yet a new claim!
Ugh.
You feel bereft.
Worse, in this particular internet exchange, X and Y had little to do with the main point I thought my interlocutors and I were arguing, which, funny enough, was in part about the defense of the scientific enterprise, and the insidious danger posed by certain people and/or groups in society who are, several of my interlocutors feared, anti-science. I found it surprising, possibly even amusing, that people who defend the scientific enterprise should be so sloppy careless in fact checking the claims they make in the course of an argument defending science. Not that fact checking claims is in and of itself an example what “doing science” means; as somebody with experience actually “doing science” I know this. However, the ability to conduct a logical argument, citing evidence and counter evidence for claims, admitting when you haven’t, etc., you would think would be features of a person defending the virtues of the scientific enterprise.