Discourse dysfunction

[bnhpct]

First, a PSA about quote tags. Your embedded quotes, after the first, include no author information.

Thus you begin with

@bnhpct

…I will sketch my impression of the form of the argument ….

The initial quote tag looks like this:

[quote=“bnhpct, post:63, topic:15960, full:true”]

The attribute ‘full:true’ indicates that you selected the entirety of the post and pressed the Quote widget, then inserted your rejoinders into the entire quotation. The result is that after your rejoinder to the first part, the quotation continues without author information, like this

They added, however, the caveat ….

There are no attributes after the [quote] tag.

This makes it difficult for readers to reconstruct who said what. To prevent this, use the Quote widget to quote each part that you want to reply to just before your reply.

I have gone through and pasted =“bnhpct, post:63, topic:15960” where it was missing, to keep it clear who said what even after someone perhaps quotes parts of this topic in another topic.

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@rsmarken

Clearly what you mean by a non-dysfunctional discussion is one where everyone ends up in agreement.

It is true that a fundamental aim of any field of science is to reach agreements about the subject-matter of the science. It’s also true that historically these agreements (‘scientific consensus’) are challenged by new findings and then superseded by new agreements. Consequently, it is perfectly possible for a substantive disagreement to persist in a science, sometimes for years, without the parties resorting to fallacious argument forms such as

• contradiction with little or no supporting evidence
• criticism of the tone without addressing the substance of the disagreement
• attack upon the characteristics or authority of the other without addressing the substance of the disagreement
• name-calling

All of these are ‘dysfunctional’ in scientific discourse. A ‘non-dysfunctional discussion’ is avoiding dysfunctional (logically invalid) argument forms, including but not limited to this list from Graham’s hierarchy.

For all but the last there are limited circumstances in which they may actually be functional. For example:

• Supporting evidence may be included by reference to prior discussion, and sometimes that reference is not explicit. It may happen especially among people familiar with the terms of argument, and the missing ‘taken for granted’ references can always be made explicit. This can easily degrade into a gray area.
• Criticism of the tone of discourse is functional for those who feel unsafe asking a question or making a proposal, and therefore (for just one example) functional for all who want to invite newcomers.
• Questioning whether someone has got familiar with the basic terminology, methodology, and literature of the field is perfectly appropriate. However, to be functional this should not be an attack, it should direct them in a friendly and supportive way to what they need to learn. This can be tricky with folks who are already invested in being experts in what they perceive as the same or intersecting field.

@rsmarken

Clearly what you mean by a non-dysfunctional discussion is [… that] they should all agree on what you think is the correct argument.

It’s not a personal matter of what I think. There is universal agreement that some forms of argument are logically invalid, and that they should be excluded from scientific discourse. Fallacious argument forms assuredly do occur in scientific discourse, scientists are human, but nobody claims they’re proper.

@rsmarken

@bnhpct

As I recall, you assume that the power law is a side effect of control, since as a prima faciae matter of principle what else could it be. The others accepted your assumption.

No, I did not assume that it was a side effect; I demonstrated that it was an irrelevant side effect with models that accounted for data from many different movement studies.

See ambiguity of ‘irrelevant’, below.

@rsmarken

my modeling and testing against real movement data showed that the observed relationship between speed and curvature is a side effect of control.

I don’t think there was any disagreement about it being a side effect of control and not a cause of behavior. For example, Martin said “I finished my critique with the statement that perhaps the power law is indeed a behavioural illusion, though M&S sheds no light on that issue”.

@rsmarken

The mathematical argument demonstrated why that relationship is typically close to a 1/3 power relationship. Again, either through ignorance or mendacity those opposing my arguments did not seem to be seeking agreement.

Yes, they said there was a fundamental error in your mathematical argument and you said there was not. (More on that below.)

Attributing this to flaws in their education or qualifications (ignorance) or attributing it to a character defect (mendacity) is an ad hominem argument.

Mathematics is not subject to a lot of ambiguity, and conflicts in math are not resolved by exerting greater force until one or both reaches maximum output capacity.

I freely submit that I am not qualified to weigh in on the mathematical argument. The rustic but proud school system that I attended in central Florida offered no pre-calculus and but limited algebra, and it is not at all to my credit that I failed to remedy those deficiencies when I got into college. I have learned some since, but I claim no strength there.

@rsmarken

@bnhpct

They asserted that your formulation is mathematically incorrect.

Yes, they did. Not very agreeable, were they?

@bnhpct

You denied that your math is flawed.

Yes, and I demonstrated how I (and others, e.g. Moab et al) had derived that mathematical result. So I guess I wasn’t being very agreeable either.

Equivocation is one of the logical fallacies that Graham does not mention.

Equivocation depends upon or exploits ambiguity. “Disagreeable” (“not agreeable”) has two meanings. Disagreeing about the substance of the argument need not be ‘disagreeable’ in the sense of dysfunctional discourse. As I said above (and I believe that you and I have previously both remarked, maybe even agreed), scientists disagree fairly often about how to interpret findings, etc. Whether they do so ‘disagreeably’ or collegially is a different matter.

@rsmarken

I tried to address their specific assertions about the math by showing how I and others arrived at the rather elementary algebraic solution to the relationship between the equations that power law researchers use to measure velocity and curvature. I don’t know what more I could have done.

Here’s one place where it seems to me that you could have done more:

Martin:

since the formula for D was velocity (V)
times a constant in spatial variables, the equation is not an
equation from which one can determine V. The M&S claim that it
is an equation from which one can determine V is the core of my
critique.

Rick:

We said that what you said about it not being an equation that can be used to >predict V using linear regression is wrong. Which it is.

This sounds like “You’re wrong because we said so.” Note that I’m not taking sides as to who is correct. I’m pointing out that you contradicted without evidence. The very least “more” that you could have done could have been a reference to where you “said so”, i.e. the location of the specific refutation with evidence.

For other readers, a protracted portion of the exchange can be found in the CSGnet archive for 2018 by searching for “Bogus mathematics, (was Re: L’état de PCT, c’e st moi (was …))”, and selecting More… at the bottom of the initial list.

@rsmarken

@bnhpct

A covering non-sequitur is that you emphasized that the power law is a side effect of control, as though that were the matter in dispute. Like the one above, this changes the subject.

Actually, what I was asserting was that the power law is an irrelevant side effect of producing curved movement. It’s irrelevant to the control process that produces the movement and, therefore, is irrelevant to the goal of research on the power law, which is to learn how organisms produce movement. So it was actually my opponents in the power law discussion who were being less than agreeable by attributing an argument to me that I wasn’t making.

Here again I was trying to disclose the form of the argument. I identified this as a non-sequitur, changing the subject from the mathematical argument to the status of the power law as a side effect. I think the response was kinda like “Who cares, that’s probably true, but it’s not what we’re talking about. The math is wrong.”

But you emphasize that it’s not only a side effect, it’s irrelevant.

I think we’re running into equivocation over the word ‘irrelevant’. It is ambiguous as to its reference and scope.

1. For the control system, the power law is irrelevant. I think everyone agrees that control systems do not carry out power-law calculations, and that the observed speed-curvature relation (which is not all that precise) is a side effect of control.
2. For researchers building and testing generative models of behavior when organisms create or follow (trace) curved paths, behavioral data from research on the power law is deeply relevant.

Saying it’s irrelevant in sense (2) dismisses and trivializes any lab work on these lines that they are doing.

@rsmarken

Does this work for all parties or just for the one you like?

You asked for examples of your usage, that’s why yours are more in focus. You’ve called attention to their name-calling, so they’re not left out. They haven’t invited me to identify less severe fallacies in their argument. You’ve said that their mathematics is “bogus”, which looks like a claim that it is incorrect, but then you retracted that to say you just meant that it didn’t apply in the context of experiment. You’re welcome to identify other logical fallacies in their argument.

@rsmarken

@bnhpct

I could be wrong. This could be demonstrated if

• The other parties had agreed with you that you directly addressed their specific statements about the math.

So my arguments would not have been dysfunctional if the other parties judged them to “directly address their specific statements about the math”?

I said “I could be wrong”. What did I say I could be wrong about? I said I could be wrong about my entire attempt to summarize the form of the argument. I could be mistaken in various ways, including the ways that I listed. If any of those things is true, then the corresponding part of my attempt to summarize would be wrong.

For you to paraphrase this as you have done is a non sequitur. The non sequitur was created by taking a quotation out of context and changing its meaning. The full quotation means that if any of the items in the list is true, then my attempted summary is wrong in that respect. You took an excerpt from it to mean that these were tests whether or not your arguments were dysfunctional (i.e. fallacies).

@rsmarken

So my arguments would not have been dysfunctional if the other parties judged them to “directly address their specific statements about the math”?

No, it would just mean that I was mistaken about that.

@rsmarken

• The other parties had agreed with you that it was their math and not yours that was incorrect. (Seems unlikely.)

I think this “test” makes it pretty clear that what you see as dysfunction in the power law discussion (and probably all other discussions on Discourse involving me) is simply my continuing to disagree with everyone else. You are saying that my arguments were dysfunctional because opponents disagreed with them. If they had agreed with me (which you deem, correctly, to have been unlikely) then I wouldn’t have been making dysfunctional arguments. But, again, doesn’t that count for them too. I disagreed with their arguments so it must be that their arguments were also dysfunctional.

This is not a test of who is at fault. It is a ‘test’ of the accuracy of my summary. If true, then I was mistaken in my perception that they still disagree with you.

@rsmarken

@bnhpct

• You had agreed with them that the side-effect status of the power law could be taken for granted and needed no further discussion.

And more evidence that the dysfunction is my failure to agree with my opponents’ arguments. All I had to do to not be dysfunctional was to agree with my opponents.

Again, this only means that I was mistaken to think that there had been disagreement about this.

@rsmarken

my recommended approach to reducing the dysfunctionality of discussions on Discourse is to just hold people accountable when they make impolite, ad hominem comments in their posts.

That’s a good start, but it’s even more necessary to identify the less extreme fallacies and hold people accountable for them before annoyance at them escalates to the point of name-calling (the extreme form of ad hominem argument).