Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard

We know that sometimes the only winning move is not to play, and that in a debate it is easy to get brought down to the level of your opponent in a desire to protect your wounded pride. Even in much milder cases, the obvious response is not the right one, and we can find ourselves constructing elaborate rebuttals in order to overcome the most basic of arguments put forwards by our interlocutor. If someone is acting ignorantly, we can think that we have to counter this with ever greater degrees of sophistication. It is with great relief, therefore, that I have found myself able to apply a growing knowledge of logical fallacies to debates I have with people. I now find that where I would once have got bogged down trying to attack some indefensible point, I can now counter it with just a couple of words — that is, the name of the fallacy which they are presenting.

Everyone has certain tolerances for how information is presented to them. This could be modelled as a set of two-dimensional graphs with some attribute of the communication along the X axis and annoyance on the Y axis. For instance, take volume in spoken conversation: the X axis would be the range of volume levels at which speech can occur, and you could imagine an upside-down bell curve such that high values on the annoyance axis are present at the two extremes of inaudible and deafening. From experience, one might notice that in online communication people’s tolerances are tighter, or their annoyance levels greater.