top | item 30020197

(no title)

yuretz | 4 years ago

Appeal to nature might be a logical fallacy in arguments, but in practice is a useful heuristic anyway.

discuss

order

kaba0|4 years ago

Given the amount of alternative “medicines” building on that heuristic, I fail to see where it is useful other than for scam artists.

Sure, there are biological inventions we can copy and refine for possibly even better inventions - but those are useful not because they originated from nature but because evolution found a locally optimal solution to a problem.

yuretz|4 years ago

Well, being able to identify potentially locally optimal solutions without having to go through an entire optimization process yourself is a pretty powerful heuristic in my book.

eivarv|4 years ago

Out of curiosity: How does any argument become more or less logical depending on its context?

Your comment reads to me as if the concept of logical fallacies is only useful or valid within the framework of rhetorical competitions – or alternatively that logically invalid reasoning is useful if you're only interested in making a decision, rather than making a correct or well-informed one.