Atypican's $10 Challenge
1. Look through my debate history and/or argument waterfall.
2. Find something you disagree with me about.
3. Check with me to confirm it's something I actually believe and not just something I was arguing for practice.
4. Ask a series of questions until you can expose a logical contradiction in my thinking.
5. I will paypal you 10 bucks.
BTW if anyone would like me to subject them to the kind of scrutiny I am looking to be subjected to, just ask. I do not expect payment. This offer stands so long as I have spare time.
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Check with me to confirm it's something I actually believe and not just something I was arguing for practice. Sounds like this would depend largely on a fair amount of honesty on your part, otherwise the game is rigged. Either you can effectively explain away a perceived logical inconsistency or you can claim “that was actually a thought experiment, I don’t really believe that.” A couple questions if I may: Do you suspect you are wrong or logically inconsistent about some things, or have been in the past? What, if anything, do you expect to gain from this challenge? Sounds like this would depend largely on a fair amount of honesty on your part, otherwise the game is rigged. Well I figure, if it is a sham, it will only reflect poorly on me. As anyone can read the dialog to see what's what. Either you can effectively explain away a perceived logical inconsistency or you can claim “that was actually a thought experiment, I don’t really believe that.” Again, I am going to assume people will be able to tell if that's indeed what I've done. Do you suspect you are wrong or logically inconsistent about some things, or have been in the past? Of course. Of course. What, if anything, do you expect to gain from this challenge? I'll be able to refine my thoughts and see how they hold up to scrutiny. I'll Learn to express myself more clearly, I'll have something to do at the end of the day besides watch tv. ”What, if anything, do you expect to gain from this challenge?” I'll be able to refine my thoughts and see how they hold up to scrutiny. I'll Learn to express myself more clearly, I'll have something to do at the end of the day besides watch tv. That’s commendable. I’ve somewhat sensed these were qualities of yours. You value growth in knowledge and understanding, I respect that. Perhaps why I’ve continually enjoyed reading what you have to say on various topics. Alrighty, lets play. Is the linked debate fair game? If so, I would like to start with making sure I use your definitions for my questions. I need the following words defined as you use them in your debate description. Worship Non-existent Being God(s) Appropriately Existence Truths Know Is the linked debate fair game? Yes Worship Regard as infallible and/or almighty Non-existent Not present in any location, or in any way shape or form. Being A conscious agent God(s) A worshiped being, (or beings) Appropriately In a fitting manner Existence Presence in some place Truths enlightening articles of information Know be aware of This is probably the best I can do for a logical contradiction, demonstrating a logical argument to not be sound is easy, but finding an example of a logical contradiction isn't. All cows can fly, Bessy is a cow, therefor Bessy can fly. There is no logical contradiction here, but it isn't sound. All the premises have to be true for the argument to be sound, and Bessy is in fact a turtle. Anyway, is the linked debate acceptable? It may be the one I am personally most interested in understanding how my thinking is flawed on. If you ask me to justify this belief all the way down to first principles, and you can't show a contradiction in the logic I present, then you won't meet the challenge. If there is an unjustified assumption, I think it's fair to ask me to justify it. If I can't, I will accept this "showing the unsoundness of my logic" as adequate, even though you haven't revealed a contradiction. Question One: If I believe in an entity with the necessary quality "X", and you believe in a being that does not have that necessary quality, would you agree that we do not believe in the same entity? Question Two: Is it possible for an entity to have quality that is necessary to the concept of that entity? I'm doing this in the form of questions, there is no need to defend you position until I state a conclusion, all that is required is answering the questions. I don't want to pollute your board with irrelevant chatter, but I do want to express my empathy for what I perceive as your motivation for starting this debate. I joined this website a few years ago and learned very quickly about the dismal quality of the intellectual discourse here. Since then I have only posted occasionally, and have found that perhaps 5% of posters are worth engaging in the sort of discussion you and I are/were looking for. I have learned that while this might be a decent place to practice argumentation, it is by and large a huge waste of my energy. I commend your for your amusing attempt to incentivize rational dialogue, and I am confident that you will receive very few worthy challengers. Rather than taking a vow of silence, I would advise channeling your mental talents towards some more meaningful pursuit. You are a big fish in a very shallow intellectual pond here. The real world needs you more than the internet does. 1
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The other day you created a debate, where you claimed we should shun businesses that underpay some of their employees and overpay some. This is, in my opinion, not a logical opinion to have. When you say this, you either mean only where you live, or around the world. If you mean only where you live, then you are contradicting yourself, because in order to pay every employee in your country a fair amount of money, you must take a lot of money from other countries, which results in them being underpaid. If you mean we should shun businesses all around the world that do this, That is also .. contradicting, if you think about it. There aren't enough money in the world to pay everyone a fair payment. Even if we stopped paying educated people like doctors, laywers and so on more than cleaning ladies and cashiers, that would still not be enough to pay every single person a fair amoun of money. You would only end up in the same place - A lot, maybe more people severely underpaid. This is a contradiction because no matter what you do to attempt paying everyone a fair amount of money, you'd end up taking from others, and a lot of currently underpaid people would be more underpaid. The second reason why this is a contradiction is that if you get a lot of people to shun a business that underpays it's employees, what do you think the result of that would be? They would more than likely fire lot's of employees, so instead of being underpaid they aren't underpaid at all. Since most businesses do this, you would of course shun most businesses, and therefore no business was looking to hire. So Congratulations! you just made thousands of people jobless. Wow! ok I will paypal you $10 if you can show me, by way of structured inquiry how my opinion that we should shun businesses that underpay some of their employees an overpay others depends on a logical inconsistency. As an example, I will pretend I am you asking the first question Me: (pretending to be shoutoutloud) Correct me if I'm wrong but you think that we should shun businesses who underpay some of their employees and overpay some others. Do you mean only where you live or across the entire planet? Me: (pretending like the above was really you) Correct. The whole planet Me: (pretending to be you again) Do you understand that there is not enough money on the planet for everyone who works to get paid fairly according to their productivity? Me: (!) No Hopefully that gives you an idea of what I am looking for. If all there is to debating is talking past each other and never reaching consensus, I think I am going to lose faith in language and begin to observe a vow of silence. I'm almost not kidding :) I hope you understand the reason for my insistence on a dialectical form. 2
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Hahaha! You made that pretend conversasion way more complicated than it needed to be. If I am understanding you correctly, you want people to be paid fairly according to their productivity. My first question - What is productivity? Is it the one's who work the hardest, longest or a third option? My second question, does the difficulty level of getting the job make your payment higher or the same? For example, a laywer needs to go to school for a long time before he can get a job as a laywer - Will this make his payment higher? As I am sure you are aware of, there is not unlimited money in the world. There are about 60 trillion us dollars circulating around the world. 60 trillion dollars is not enough to pay everyone fairly. Those 60t can't all go to paying employees. There is a lot of other things to pay for. I'm not sure anything I said made sense .. but, I'm not that determined to get those $10, haha :D http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ There is a good chance that the ten dollar reward might actually inhibit quality debate on the part of the Atypican's challengers. |
