One particular type of logical fallacy I see a lot in internet "debates"

[Aldaron]

I'm not really sure what the formal name for this is, but I'm referring to when people lambast a system / concept / idea based on examples of that system / concept / idea instead of lambasting that example.

They basically generalize faults of implementation / practice to faults of the overarching concept, which I find to be highly flawed and a main cause for many circular internet debates. I think the most obvious example of this is capitalism vs. socialism, on both sides of any debate either is injected into.

Essentially, criticism for an example leads to criticism for the concept. And vice versa, associated attributes of concepts tend to be attached to that concept and criticized as such. These can feed into each other as well; for example, if an example fails, and it's overarching concept has certain attributes, those attributes tend to be attached to the failure of the example.

I'm speaking abstractly atm so let me give some discreet examples (also, when I use some terms here, it is the general, masses accepted definition of the term, so spare me me the definitions lecture lol):

1.) Big corporations are evil. This is an example of "criticism for an example leads to criticism for the concept." The concept here would be big companies; examples are numerous, but can be any of Monsanto, JPMorganChase, Pepsi, etc. I frequently see some of my bigger activist friends hating on "big corporations," but they aren't even simply using "big corporation" as an easy catch-all phrase to mean "just all these examples of bad corporations", they're actually hating on the concept of big companies, but using examples, not conceptual reasons for why they are evil. The question here is, if there is a possibility for the overall concept to not be evil, should we hate the overall concept just because there are examples of that concept being evil? What is the answer to preventing future evil examples? More systematic controls?

2.) Universal healthcare is socialist. Higher taxes is socialist. Blah blah is socialist. This is an example of "associated attributes of concepts tend to be attached to that concept and criticized as such." Just because we have some examples of assumed communist / socialist regimes such as Russia / various Latin American countries failing, and just because these systems (should) have some concepts like universal healthcare, these attributes are seemingly painted red from the start. In the USA, instead of viewing the concept of universal healthcare on a practical "can we sustainably do this" level, the argument has far too frequently been "are we really socialist Europe" and nonsense like that. The point would be...who cares if Socialist Europe does it? Do we want to support poor people who can't take care of themselves, and can we feasibly do it? That should be the sole focuses of the conversation.

Those are just two basic (overly simplified) examples, but I've noticed this fallacy on numerous sides of almost every singe political / economic / social debate we have here on smogon. I've also noticed it SIGNIFICANTLY by the prime motivators of such debates.

The takeaway here is that I believe these debates should, optimally, be two-fold: first discussing the pros and cons of the concept, ignoring examples, and second, talking how to reduce the likelihood of future negative / evil examples. Namely, let's not go on some hyperbolic rant about big corporations and capitalism, let's discuss big corporations generally (they produce jobs (good), they corner markets (bad)) and then discuss how to prevent examples like Monsanto / JPMorgan (good luck lol). Let's also not go on some hyperbolic rant about universal healthcare being socialist or raising taxes being socialist, and instead talk about why would want to do either, ignoring whether or not they are part of something else.

I think we far too frequently get stuck on examples of things (and associating attributes) which leads us down circular debates which causes the overall conversation to die.

 

[chaos]

Aldaron, you will enjoy this: http://squid314.livejournal.com/323694.html

 

[Crux]

Using examples to make arguments is fine, it's not a logical fallacy. Examples often make for interesting case studies that allow you to elucidate more general problems with a concept. This is because arguments generally take place in the real world and are useless in an abstract sense. That is to say, the "abstract benefits" of the "abstract concept" of "big business", doesn't make for particularly interesting discussion or debate when we know from the real world that the application of that concept tends to lead towards certain outcomes. The question then becomes, what is the feature of the concept or of the real world that causes that disconnect. That isn't fallacious, it's interesting debate and discussion. If you think that's problematic and just want debate about abstract concepts, then it is unclear why you would ever engage in debate with another human being except for facile amusement - it will always just boil down to which arbitrary axioms you accept for no real reason.

What you are pointing to as a logical fallacy and calling the use of examples is, in fact, a number of other logical fallacies. In the case of the former it's strawmanning and in the case of the latter it's begging the question. These are just specific applications of those fallacies.

 

[Crux]

I think you misunderstood what I was saying. I am not saying using example to make an argument is not fine; I am saying using examples to claim general statements about the overarching concept is incorrect.

You can say "this example shows a tendency to" but you can't say "this examples means concept a does this"

Drawing general claims from a specific example is a separate fallacy, of induction, but often useful for argument's sake. I don't see a problem with it we do it all the time, science is based on it. Everything I said still applies.

To say that "because xyz company is bad, therefore big business is bad" is in fact a strawman because it mischaracterises the argument in favour of big business (is there one?????!?!?!?!) and jumps to conclusions about that argument, pretending they are responsive when they are, in fact, based on a mischaracterisation. Which, by the way, is how strawmen work.

Also, just because you have this tendency to name concepts without actually knowing what they are, let me tell you what the "begging the question" fallacy is: it where an attempted conclusion is made in the premises of an argument.

Note how I am first of all, not making a conclusion. I am talking about what I perceive as a fallacy and asking people about it.

2.) Universal healthcare is socialist. Higher taxes is socialist. Blah blah is socialist. This is an example of "associated attributes of concepts tend to be attached to that concept and criticized as such." Just because we have some examples of assumed communist / socialist regimes such as Russia / various Latin American countries failing, and just because these systems (should) have some concepts like universal healthcare, these attributes are seemingly painted red from the start. In the USA, instead of viewing the concept of universal healthcare on a practical "can we sustainably do this" level, the argument has far too frequently been "are we really socialist Europe" and nonsense like that. The point would be...who cares if Socialist Europe does it? Do we want to support poor people who can't take care of themselves, and can we feasibly do it? That should be the sole focuses of the conversation.

The argument you criticise here is begging the question of "why is socialism bad?" and "why should we care?", which you pointed out without realising that is what you were doing.

 

[Myzozoa]

how can you evaluate whether an 'abstract concept' is good or bad except by looking at the consequences of how it has been interpreted (materially). There is a difference between saying that "All corporations are bad because if you looked at every instance of corporations existing, they all do evil things or are only able to exist due to evil material circumstances' and saying 'the abstract concept of a corporation is evil'.


to debate an abstract concept is to debate a definition of a word. no seriously, that is 'literally' what is meant by 'debating an abstract concept', that debate will be over the definition of that concept. abstract concepts aren't good or bad, the consequences of their material/ real interpretations can be good or bad tho, imo.

 

[Aldaron]

Using examples to make arguments is fine, it's not a logical fallacy. Examples often make for interesting case studies that allow you to elucidate more general problems with a concept. This is because arguments generally take place in the real world and are useless in an abstract sense. That is to say, the "abstract benefits" of the "abstract concept" of "big business", doesn't make for particularly interesting discussion or debate when we know from the real world that the application of that concept tends to lead towards certain outcomes. The question then becomes, what is the feature of the concept or of the real world that causes that disconnect. That isn't fallacious, it's interesting debate and discussion. If you think that's problematic and just want debate about abstract concepts, then it is unclear why you would ever engage in debate with another human being except for facile amusement - it will always just boil down to which arbitrary axioms you accept for no real reason.

What you are pointing to as a logical fallacy and calling the use of examples is, in fact, a number of other logical fallacies. In the case of the former it's strawmanning and in the case of the latter it's begging the question. These are just specific applications of those fallacies.

OKAY, I misinterpreted the post the first time. I thought you were saying what I was doing was that, not what I was pointing to.

I don't particularly care about what the fallacies are or if they're separate. I noted in the first sentence they might be called something (whether or not they are actual fallacies is irrelevant to me).

What I am curious in pursuing is how people's obsessions with examples almost entirely derails debate. Sure, we can use examples to draw tendencies, but we should never use these examples to be determining factors. The tendencies should point in the direction of how to deal with these generally, and our conversations should be within that scope.

For example (lol), the marriage debate. Instead of being focused the fact that marriage was one only between a man and a woman, that marriage was used as a tool to trade women, or that marriage's enforced monogamy was suppressive to women, if we stated "yes, these are examples of how marriage was suppressive in the past" and moved past that to discussing how a new definition of marriage could be beneficial, we'd get somewhere.

However, as noted both in the topic and on irc, those topics never got anywhere cause people were obsessed with marriage's implementation throughout the years.

You did however acknowledge some definition of marriage that would work for you (on irc), and if people in general had been less obsessed with marriage's implementation throughout the years and instead on the definition that would be acceptable, we could ave discussed the major points of that acceptable definition.

And that is why I don't see it as "facile amusement," as you state it: simply because I am saying instead of being obsessed with the example, work on the next step. The conversation that would have resulted from discussing the points of the acceptable definition of marriage would have been a far more interesting debate than the largely circular debate we had where you kept on saying marriage didn't matter / was suppressive and a bunch of other people laughed it off.

 

[Crux]

Or, the historical implementations of concepts might be indicative of problems with those concepts and their applications? Which is why I don't actually support any form of marriage I just said that on IRC to appease you all. It is a general historical trend that marriage tends to be coercive, suppressive, exclusive, and abusive. The countless examples of that would inform my view of the application of that concept to the real world, because state sanctioning of love, and the limits of what love could be. is the unifying factor in the failure of those marriages. Or, examples are good and interesting ways of elucidating problems with arguments.

 

[Aldaron]

how can you evaluate whether an 'abstract concept' is good or bad except by looking at the consequences of how it has been interpreted (materially). There is a difference between saying that "All corporations are bad because if you looked at every instance of corporations existing, they all do evil things or are only able to exist due to evil material circumstances' and saying 'the abstract concept of a corporation is evil'.

I'm not really arguing that you can or cannot argue that. What I'm saying is that drawing determining conclusions on an concept based on some examples is extremely dangerous and that it also tends to completely derail debates. The best example I can think of is the horrible assumptions our government made about immigrants and minorities in the early 1900s; they tested a few with intelligence tests and made determinations about the particular set of people overall. This was based on "evidence" from a few examples.

"There is a difference between saying that "All corporations are bad because if you looked at every instance of corporations existing, they all do evil things or are only able to exist due to evil material circumstances' and saying 'the abstract concept of a corporation is evil'"

I don't really want to talk about this specifically because I know you probably ardently believe the former, but I was using a basic, simplified example. Sure, if EVERY example of a concept is bad / whatever, then you can probably draw pretty strong tendency for that lol. My problem is when there isn't a case of every example and people jump directly to that latter statement.

to debate an abstract concept is to debate a definition of a word. no seriously, that is 'literally' what is meant by 'debating an abstract concept', that debate will be over the definition of that concept. abstract concepts aren't good or bad, the consequences of their material/ real interpretations can be good or bad tho, imo.

OKAY, I agree that, on purely philosophical terms lol, that abstract concepts aren't good or bad. I suppose the level I am speaking of is one after the abstract concept and 1 before real life examples; namely, the entire set of assumed possibilities for a concept in practice.

 

[Aldaron]

Or, the historical implementations of concepts might be indicative of problems with those concepts and their applications? Which is why I don't actually support any form of marriage I just said that on IRC to appease you all. It is a general historical trend that marriage tends to be coercive, suppressive, exclusive, and abusive. The countless examples of that would inform my view of the application of that concept to the real world, because state sanctioning of love, and the limits of what love could be. is the unifying factor in the failure of those marriages. Or, examples are good and interesting ways of elucidating problems with arguments.

The marriage example was just an example. Assume any example that might not have 100% example of doing something bad.

Again, examples are merely one tool to come to a conclusion: we shouldn't use them as the sole arbiter however, which is what I see people do all the time. I'm not saying examples are bad or that they shouldn't be used in arguments...just that some examples shouldn't be honed in on specifically and these examples shouldn't be used to make determining statements on concepts.

EDIT:

Just out of curiosity, are you actually saying that examples are enough to make strong, generalizing conclusions about the overall concept? I am aware of induction (I mean, for all I care, we can re-topic this to "the dangers of applying induction to human concepts and organizations"), but what I'm asking is that do you exactly believe it is enough to make strong claims?

Because that is a very scary proposition, particularly with the knowledge of what various people / corporations / governments have done to large groups of people based on examples.

 

[Crux]

If you phrase it like that then it is uncontentious and I don't know why this thread is interesting or necessary. The fallacy is merely one of induction, I don't have a problem with it. Just point out why a specific example might not be as relevant as its user seems to think and appeal to some other means of argument to do so. This is pretty basic discussion technique.

 

[Aldaron]

If you phrase it like that then it is uncontentious and I don't know why this thread is interesting or necessary. The fallacy is merely one of induction, I don't have a problem with it. Just point out why a specific example might not be as relevant as its user seems to think and appeal to some other means of argument to do so. This is pretty basic discussion technique.

Well, it is necessary because I am seeing people hone in on specific examples to make these everlasting generalizations, and this tends to absolutely destroy conversations we have whenever we have them.

Ignoring that apparently you just said you agreed with one definition of marriage on irc to appease us, let's assume you had agreed. The point was, instead of being focused on these examples, we would have redirected the conversation to discussing the points of the proposed definition...as opposed to whatever that conversation turned into.

What I am trying to emphasize is that people frequently destroy any potential positive results from a debate by getting caught up in implementation details and forget about the larger picture.

I mean, you can disagree that this happens but I don't know what to say if you do :X

EDIT:

Just to clarify, I wanted the thread to go in a different direction, but I'm fine with this. If you think my initial concerns aren't interesting, you don't have to discuss them.

We can instead discuss the benefits of recognizing when examples shouldn't be the sole determining factor and using this recognition to re-direct conversations / debate towards a direction that is more favorable (again, using the marriage example, we could have discussed the merits of the agreeable definition, as opposed to going back and forth needlessly)

 

[Crux]

Ignoring that apparently you just said you agreed with one definition of marriage on irc to appease us, let's assume you had agreed. The point was, instead of being focused on these examples, we would have redirected the conversation to discussing the points of the proposed definition...as opposed to whatever that conversation turned into.

What I am trying to emphasize is that people frequently destroy any potential positive results from a debate by getting caught up in implementation details and forget about the larger picture.

But the one example you can give me of where this has happened is one where we could supposedly have been focussing on implementation details aka a new definition of marriage?

This seems to just be "I disagree about one thing and would have preferred marriage be changed instead of abolished". Which btw is just you committing the "no true scotsman" fallacy. As are largely the examples in your OP.

 

[Aldaron]

But the one example you can give me of where this has happened is one where we could supposedly have been focussing on implementation details aka a new definition of marriage?

Yea, that was in my clarification to myzozoa. I mentioned that I'm actually speaking within the set of all assumed possibilities, and the distinction I am making isn't necessary "examples," but examples that have occurred vs. examples that could occur.

Namely, instead of being caught up in examples that have occurred, we should seek to find a better example to occur. If there truly are 100% examples that occurred that are something, then sure, maybe it isn't worth it then to discuss a better example to occur.

This seems to just be "I disagree about one thing and would have preferred marriage be changed instead of abolished". Which btw is just you committing the "no true scotsman" fallacy. As are largely the examples in your OP.

Nah, I'm just using that one example. We can pretty much use any example on this forum lol. I'm also just clarifying what I meant, not attempting to do a no true scotsman.

 

[KM]

I imagine the overuse and misuse of examples comes from the fact that examples are just far more easy to use than constructing a foolproof "general idea". What I mean by this is that examples usually either serve to oversimplify ones own point of view or to poke a hole in the opposing point of view - with the underlying message being that that hole makes the entire viewpoint fall apart, or that that one oversimplification is a worthy synopsis of the entire viewpoint.

Let's take the example of speciesism, just because it's been on my mind recently and lends itself well to this.

"Speciesism on the basis of intelligence is irrelevant because of this marginal case where a human had lower metrics of intelligence than this chimpanzee" (or whatever)

This example purports to invalidate intelligence-justified speciesism purely because of this marginal case, and insinuates that because the viewpoint fails to address that case on a surface-level it is wholly irrelevant. On the other hand, however...

"Strict anti-speciesism to the point where all species are 'worth' the same would disallow you to eat anything because eating 5 plants worth of food to subsist one human is not worth it on an objective level. In fact, anti-speciesists shouldn't even be typing a response to this argument because they're killing microbes on their keyboard kek"

Perhaps an even stupider argument, but quite similar. It takes a complex, varied viewpoint and attempts to boil it down into one marginal case where the person making the argument can effectively state "Aha! Generally ascribing to x viewpoint MUST mean that you follow it to its "logical" conclusion, which necessarily invalidates your entire viewpoint and therefore MUST mean that mine is right!"

In essence, it's never impossible to find a "fatal" flaw with a viewpoint, and it's very easy to just write things off as arbitrary or non-universal, and this is present in pretty much every debate. Perhaps the most glaringly obvious is the creationism vs evolution debate, where creationists have famously pointed to the "gaps" in evolution while pseudosciencing or blatantly ignoring the far bigger gaps in their own beliefs.

oh p.s. aldaron change my fucking sig back pls ty xoxo

 

[Crux]

Let's take the example of speciesism, just because it's been on my mind recently and lends itself well to this.

"Speciesism on the basis of intelligence is irrelevant because of this marginal case where a human had lower metrics of intelligence than this chimpanzee" (or whatever)

This example purports to invalidate intelligence-justified speciesism purely because of this marginal case, and insinuates that because the viewpoint fails to address that case on a surface-level it is wholly irrelevant. On the other hand, however...

"Strict anti-speciesism to the point where all species are 'worth' the same would disallow you to eat anything because eating 5 plants worth of food to subsist one human is not worth it on an objective level. In fact, anti-speciesists shouldn't even be typing a response to this argument because they're killing microbes on their keyboard kek"

Neither of these are "stupid" or invalid arguments. The marginal case clearly shows the flaw in the argument, in this case the flaw of using intelligence as a metric for judging the worth of species, demonstrating that the usefulness of examples and thought experiments to constructing arguments and pursuing philosophical thought. I am entirely unclear as to what you're attempting to show here, as these are examples of the opposite of what you seem to be wanting to argue.

 

[Trax]

Outliers do not disprove a general assessment, and a general assessment is all you can make if you're looking at an entire species as a whole. The question then becomes if it's valid to look at the entire species for whatever purpose you are discussing.

I would argue that large corporations are inherently evil on some level, their sole purpose for being is to essentially consolidate the already considerable negotiating power of the wealthy over those who make them wealthier still.

 

[Jorgen]

So what's really the issue here? It's not using examples in itself. That's just silly, I mean unless you're making particularly restrictive definitions from the get-go, your argument is going to be inductive by nature, so examples only serve to bolster an argument. And a counter-example will falsify a claim even when exercisingformal deductive reasoning.

If anything I'd say it's more about confirmation bias among internet argumenteurs than fixation on evidence in general. This would explain willingness to jump to conclusions based on small samples of information, and also explain the tendency of parties to become fixated on "their" examples while talking past each other.

 

[Bughouse]

I believe the general sentiment Aldaron is getting at is the oft quoted "the plural of anecdote is not data," or, more accurately phrased, that it's not necessarily data.

If you're looking for an answer to a question, unless you are going to use a purely philosophical argument (which will rarely convince someone who has an opposing viewpoint), you need to collect observations to some extent. The problems all come from what observations people collect. People will often have sampling bias, meaning the sample they collect is systematically not representative of the general pool of observations.

Shocker shocker, when you form an opinion based on a sample that is not representative of the general population, you will mischaracterize the general population.

A second common issue is comparing to the wrong baseline. You cannot simply examine the efficacy of a program compared to how the prior program was functioning in the previous time period. You should compare the new program to how the old program would be working right now. Otherwise, it's quite likely that the previous time period was somehow systematically different from what's going on in the current time period.

For example, let's look at the question of whether a soccer team should fire its coach after a bad stretch of games. The most naive person would simply point to examples of individual coaches to make their case. A slightly more sophisticated person would set up a list of requirements to filter down observations to find a good sample and see how much teams changed when they fired the coach. But even this is not enough because you are comparing observations with a sampling bias. Teams are more likely to fire a coach when they have had a bad stretch and are likely to regress to the mean in the subsequent games. You can't just compare the team pre-firing to the team post-firing. You need to find a better comparison.

Someone actually did this in the EPL, looking at the effectiveness of changing coaches over more than 20 seasons. In the six games before a firing, the expected value from a game was .37, while in the six games after it was .44. This makes it seem like firing a coach improves your teams average performance by .07. However, if you compare to the teams who had a .37 expected value for six games but DIDN'T fire their coach, their expected value in the six subsequent games was .48, for a benefit of .11. This means that the ACTUAL effect of firing a coach on performance was not +.07, but rather -.04. If anyone wants to look this up btw it's Audas, Dobson, and Goddard (1997).

effects over other time scales for the dubious

Anyway, I'm rambling now, but the point is using examples to make an argument is fine when they're used correctly. People are just rather bad at doing so. Humans are very good at getting blinded by their own biases.

 

[Aldaron]

So what's really the issue here? It's not using examples in itself. That's just silly, I mean unless you're making particularly restrictive definitions from the get-go, your argument is going to be inductive by nature, so examples only serve to bolster an argument. And a counter-example will falsify a claim even when exercisingformal deductive reasoning.

If anything I'd say it's more about confirmation bias among internet argumenteurs than fixation on evidence in general. This would explain willingness to jump to conclusions based on small samples of information, and also explain the tendency of parties to become fixated on "their" examples while talking past each other.

Yea, I agree. I'm not saying examples are bad (lol); examples are great and are probably the primary forms of justification / evidence to use to point towards certain tendencies.

What I am saying, or rather what I've have had to clarify, is that the misuse of examples tends to derail arguments. And what I mean specifically is all of what you, srk, and I have mentioned, namely:

1.) fixation on examples that have occurred, where fixation is steadfastly demanding the examples that have occurred are the only examples that can occur

2.) confirmation bias causing people to over-emphasize examples that have occurred, which leads to an unwillingness to talk about examples than can occur

3.) what srk mentions (he explains it more detail than a 1 or two sentence summary could give justice to :P)

Using examples that have occurred is a great way to establish tendencies for a concept, but "tendencies" itself is a fascinating concept because tendencies is so strongly coupled with the actual implementation detail of that concept, which again leads me to want to be careful with making strong, definitive statements of that concept even based on those "established" tendencies.

And the part of this conversation I find especially interesting is precisely that: how should we use examples that have occurred to draw these tendencies, and how strictly should we apply these tendencies to the overall concept? What is the slack we should give the overall concept should there be examples that could occur but haven't occurred? How can we drive overall concepts towards more beneficial / preferred examples that could occur?

 

[Bughouse]

From a statistical perspective, a lot of the concerns you raise can be answered by bootstrapping.

In a more real-life argument with someone who says "corporations are bad and I can prove it bc Monsanto," I'd fall back on the arguments made in chaos's link.

 

[tehy]

So i do have some strong feelings about this stuff, specifically one kind of it.

So, if i'm arguing, let's say my argument is "All corporations are bad", (i would prefer to argue that 'nearly all corporations are bad' but whatever). If I use the example of, let's say Monsanto, i'm using it like this:

We know corporations CAN be bad or even evil/terrible/horrible. Monsanto proves this.

Now, a lot of the time, the counter argument comes in the form of this

"But monsanto is not evil at all! In fact i know many very nice people that work there :D and their just nice and misunderstood". (not literally in this form, probably in some other one)

Okay, good for you, you took down my example. I have a dozen others, so did this really advance the argument at all?

Now, there is some merit to doing this with a specific end goal. If you believe that no example exists at all, thereby proving the wrongness of my argument (or damaging it in some way), then it's not a big deal to do this. However, in the case of this argument, it's pretty clear that I can just pull another example out of my hat, so all this did was pick a meaningless fight and derail the argument a bit. Amusingly, the main reason i mentioned said corporations was to provide solid evidence, so the argument couldn't be derailed by denying that there are any evil corporations at all, or something similar.

(Edit: So there is a structure that makes this post more coherent, and that's what i had in mind when i wrote it, but i lost it midway due to extreme tiredness and felt i had to get some stuff down on the ground level. Maybe tomorrow this will be polished)

So another thing i see, kind of similar, is when people poke holes in examples.

Let's say i said "Some corporations are actually evil because of the products they sell. For example, Monsanto is just evil because the medicines they make produce radio waves that alter people's brains to be evil if you stay around them long enough".

So a lot of people would say, "no they dont (make radio waves). But that's not the point, i don't have time to think up perfect arguments. (To be clear, i have time to think up a better argument than that ridiculous shit, or at least i hope so. But ultimately, many examples will have some flaws.)

The main point is to establish that some corporations might be evil not because of the overall "corporations are evil" but just because they sell certain products; the specific parts of that example are interchangeable (See below)

Some corporations are actually evil because of the products they sell. For example, companies that exclusively make assault rifles or bombs or hollow point bullets are evil because they produce things meant almost exclusively to kill people, and often not even by police or the army. (I think most people can agree with this, right? Yea, i know some people hunt with hollow points, fuck those people)

Again, unless you disagree with the overarching 'some corporations are actually evil because of the products they sell', and believe there are no such examples because it's an incorrect argument, there's no reason to poke holes in my specific example, no matter how ridiculous it is.

Now, by proving this argument, i'm actually attempting to poke holes in other arguments, but in a good way; I really believe that the concept is flawed, because specific types of examples have other root reasons; hopefully by doing this in many ways, i can kill enough examples that none or almost none remain, showing that not all corporations are evil. Ultimately in this case though, i don't think i'd succeed because there aren't enough of this kind of holes to poke, most corporations don't have some external or other reason to be evil besides generally being a corporation (or maybe they do, and i'm just not seeing it.)


Anyhow, my overall point being...many of the examples here are not perfect, especially with the corporations; but what you should take away from examples is the overall point being conveyed, and not the minutiae of the specific examples. Unless you really think the example is flawed as a result of the overall concept being flawed, and think you can defeat every example as a result of this, it's just a waste of time.

Oh yeah, and examples are meant to prove and support overall concepts, don't just provide the example and mic drop p much.