Argumentation
7 cards from across every topic, each citing a source. Tap one to open it in the feed.
- Facts don’t actually make people dig in.
For years it was said that corrections strengthen false beliefs (the “backfire effect”). Wood and Porter tested this in …
- Read every statement in its most reasonable interpretation first.
The principle of charity from philosophy says: when a statement is ambiguous, choose the reading under which it is most …
- Refuting nonsense costs ten times more than producing it.
Brandolini’s law, coined in 2013 by programmer Alberto Brandolini: the energy needed to refute nonsense is an order of …
- The argument you never actually made.
A straw man appears when someone restates your position in a distorted form and then refutes the distortion. You say …
- The opposite of a straw man – and why it makes you smarter.
Steelmanning means stating the opposing view in its strongest form – so well that the other side says “yes, that’s …
- What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Hitchens’s razor, named after writer Christopher Hitchens, sums up the burden of proof: whoever makes a claim has to …
- “But what about…?” – the answer that isn’t one.
Whataboutism is a form of the tu quoque fallacy: instead of rebutting an accusation, you point at someone else’s …