Clickbait title: Being Wrong Twice is more effective than being Wrong Once.

So here’s a pattern in bad-faith discussions I’ve seen several times.

  • A: I believe that bananas are fruits.
  • B: No, bananas are not fruits.
  • A: Why not?
  • B: All fruits come from a tree and bananas don’t come from trees.

B is obviously wrong here and we can even explain two different ways in which they are wrong:

  • Bananas are fruits, the conclusion is wrong
  • “Not all fruits come from a tree” AND “bananas do come from trees”, the stultification is wrong

Now this is an argument where even by-standers can smell the bullshit. But there are very complex issues where these facts aren’t well-known by everyone. And can we just all agree to stop pretending like audience members of a discussion somehow have the magical ability to fact-check things? They will just believe whatever they want when people clash on facts.

Naive

So, why is this so frustrating to me?

At first thought, it may seem that B’s argument is “double-weak” considering its justification is two separate logical jumps, neither of which are explained and indeed cannot be explained because they are wrong.

But now, how would you on a public forum try to prove them wrong? There’s several angles of attack, let’s start at the one closest to the source:

“All fruits come from a tree” is a wrong statement. Consider berries which come from bushes, not trees. Notice how you have implicitly conceded the point that “bananas don’t grow on trees”. Even further, it sounds like if your opponent can somehow convince you that berries don’t grow in bushes, their argument is sensible.

Okay, let’s try the other jump:

“Bananas don’t grow on trees” is a wrong statement. Here’s a picture of bananas on what is on a tree. Same problem, the other person in the debate has just gotten you to accept that all fruits come from trees. Also they may have an AI timelapse of a banana growing out of a ground ready.

Zooming out

Right, so let’s get a baseline of why B’s rhetorical strategy effective.

  • The audience is uninformed and accepts logical jumps if someone brings them up.
  • B does not care about the truth, they care about the conclusion.

One of the best ways to argue in a discussion like that is to heap just facts upon facts faster than your opponent can ever debunk them. This is well-known, this is the equivalent of adding so many legs to a chair so that it will certainly stand.

But why then chain several different jumps together? I think one good reason is that just follows the form of an argument that is actually correct. A -> B, B -> C, C -> D that seems sensible to on-lookers. And it allows you to reach more outlandish conclusions.

Although, I find the actual reason may be even more frustrating. It is a way to just ruin an entire discussion that may be based on evidence. Whereas we were previously standing on solid-ground, you just created 10 different things to argue about. And you don’t care about evidence, you mostly care about making it seem like the discussion is still up in the air. Or, in topics where you can scare a mainstream audience easily, for people to turn off their brains and follow their emotions.

Moral Statement and Fact

One final remix of this strategy. If your two wrong arguments are of these two categories: A moral statement (something deserves something) and a fact to justify it.

It’s a bit harder to come up with an example that isn’t tangent to actual political issues, let’s keep it absurd.

  • A: I believe we should all eat more bananas
  • B: No, bananas are horrible.
  • A: Why not?
  • B: Bananas contain acid and acid is bad for your body.

Not to actually touch health trends here. We can see the two wrong (or dubious statements). Here’s the trick to this one: One of the two statements is much easier to argue against than the other.

“Bananas contain acid” is a statement of fact that you can look up with some nutritional info or can run a chemical test. So this is the obvious target to argue against.

Well, we left on the table that “acid is bad for your body”. And if we think about it, this statement is so much more terrible if mainstreamed, because it is so widely applicable.

The debate opponent just implicitly made us agree with their moral principles, effectively laundering an outlandish idea.

Conclusion

Don’t engage in public debates with bad faith actors on topics where falsehoods can seem intuitive to the uninformed audience.

Debating someone always gives them and their issue some credibility.