The Greatest Fallacy Perpetuated By Recent Generations

[TWRule]

By recent generations, I'm talking about Y and Z, particularly Y - those born in the 80's and early 90's, constructing their own worldviews around this time. By "greatest fallacy", I mean the most popular mis-steps in reasoning which have caused the greatest destruction and stagnation upon the philosophical fabric of the generation.

There are several I can think of, but probably the two greatest in my mind are those that tend to lead to the widespread waves of nihilism and cynicism that have become so prevalent in recent decades.

1) There is no such thing as intrinsic value; all value is anthropogenic. Therefore, at worst, everything is meaningless, and at best, there are as many potential meanings of a thing as there are people.

This is fallacious because even if you accept the presupposition that values only exist because humans ascribe them, that alone does not necessarily remove the gravity of those values being placed. Perhaps many things we find meaningful are that way because of an absolute reality that we have difficulty describing, but even the infinite and eternal isn't necessarily meaningful unless we deem it such. That does not remove it's meaning, nor allow infinite interpretation.

The fallacy leads to both nihilism, and to extreme subjectivism (usually manifested in radical cultural relativism or radical individuality). People need to question their lines of thought here.

As for the second:
2) Humans are (x) by nature.

Any such broad statements about human nature are hasty generalizations and logically indefensible. These are usually used in the negative connotations to fuel cynicism, but the positive sense can be just as intellectually destructive. Statements like these are usually the terminal points of any intellectual inquiry by those that use them - providing an excuse for them to not draw out the logical conclusions of their beliefs. Q: "Why do people do such and such?" A: "People are stupid/evil/beastial/selfish." These statements show you have not thought your philosophical position through properly, just like the above.

Anyway, does anyone agree/disagree? Anything to add or contest? Additional major fallacies to add (they ought to notably affect the popular philosophies of recent generations)?

 

[Sikachu]

You've not proven or even really argued your case on the first point. You've just raised a doubt that you have that is arguably susceptible to being refuted. I'd like to see more analysis and less "perhaps". Commendable commitment to reasoning though, I'm looking forward to a more substantial defence of the first point (I find the second boring for discussion - the people who end conversations that way are rarely intelligent enough to be worth talking with in the first place).

 

[Booze Zombie]

Meaning is personal by nature, but that never removes gravity by its self; if gravity is removed by learning that others have different choices and they're just as valid as yours, it's a further development of personal meaning (ironically).

I also fervently disagree with people who think that we end up born this way or that; we are products of our environments.
For example, you could come from a long line of musicians and from being born in a violent area, become a gun runner.
We adapt to environs and try to function at 100% in that situation.

 

[TWRule]

You've not proven or even really argued your case on the first point. You've just raised a doubt that you have that is arguably susceptible to being refuted. I'd like to see more analysis and less "perhaps". Commendable commitment to reasoning though, I'm looking forward to a more substantial defence of the first point (I find the second boring for discussion - the people who end conversations that way are rarely intelligent enough to be worth talking with in the first place).

My intention with the OP wasn't to give fully fleshed out arguments for alternative ways of thinking, but to point out that there are other logical options, thus making them invalid arguments.

Edit: I won't give a detailed argument right now but I can start off a discussion. Why does the meaning of something being anthropogenic necessarily make that meaning unacceptable? By what criteria are we deciding what does and does not count as "acceptable" meaning? If you say that something is meaningless if it is such in a universe where every sentient creature that could ascribe meaning to it is gone, then by that definition - everything is indeed meaningless. However, that's ascribing a characteristic to something that it could potentially have. It's about the same as calling every living thing dead, because it may one day be that way (which would actually be a much more certain hypothesis than all sentient life being gone for eternity). So why can't meaning be momentously in that state of being recognized as meaningful?

As far as two points of view - I'd pose a similar question. By what criteria are two viewpoints found equally valid? It seems to me that meaning arises from distinctions, and we can communicate by perceiving and conceptualizing these distinctions. If you and I are talking about two completely different things, there can be no communication, no mutual understanding. So how is communication of concepts and experience possible if we cannot, to some degree, share intuitive experiences?

If two viewpoints are equally acceptable - by what criteria are we making that judgement?

I disagree with both your ascertations and find your "evidence" to be lacklustre. Just because you don't like them doesn't make them fallacies.

Especially the second one. We are greedy by nature, just as we are giving. They're called generalisations, and can be evidenced by mankind's continuous behaviour en mass.

I did not call them fallacies because I disliked them - I called them fallacies because they are logically flawed arguments.

When you make a statement about human nature, the logical equivalent is "All humans are (x)". That is different from saying that "humans tend to be (x) in situation" because that can be revealed by statistical data. Human nature statements cannot. If there is even one human that is not of that specific nature, then the argument is shown unsound. Furthermore, human nature statements carry the presupposition that humans even have one unified "nature" in the first place - which is essentially impossible to prove logically.

 

[viranimus]

I disagree with you. Everything is subjective. Even our knowledge and things we hold true are subjective because everything we know to be true exists in a state of infinite potential to be disproven at any given time. It boils down to this. One mans trash is another mans treasure. What one values and considers correct another may not. Its been shown to be true repeatedly. We look at a guy who shoots a legislator and because we place value on life we view his ideology evil. Obviously he didnt view life as valuable. So we disregard what he values and call him mentally unstable for thinking the way he does simply because theres more of us than there is more of him. To disregard this behavior as abnormal behavior is again another example of what we value. The mob rules. Whatever the mob subscribes to is our morallity. If these things were fundamentally true they would not exist. We would not see them present in basically every species on the planet.

As for your second point, its the whole argument of Nature vs nurture. I will use myself as an example. I have not physically seen my biological father since I was 3 years old. I have no clue what this guy looks like and have no such memories of him. However I scare my mother sometimes by just how much I behave like he does. How I have a similar sense of humor. How I approach certain situations, personal proclivities etc. How can that be if I have basically never had first hand exposure to his behavior and mannerisms? Traits passed on. That is the fundamental root of the argument of Nature in nature vs nurture. If these sort of traits can be passed from one individual to another on a hereditary level it stands to reason that its a working mechanism of the human mind. You can pass collective traits to the species.

Honestly, who is to say that these things that we value such as respect for life and a desire not to be oppressed are nothing more than hereditary traits. Also consider that through much of early human history the powerful would often look at the meek as at their disposal. To torture and kill in any means they saw fit. Our self appointed class of royalty made up only a small portion of the population and most average people are the desendents of the meeker classes who lived in fear of death and torture. It stands to reason that sort of desire to be allowed to live life in freedom is a genetically passed on trait that given the large scale of the populus that bore us has become a genetic predisposition for the species?

I think you certainly make a good argument that is fundamentally sound. However I do not share that opinion.

 

[Johanthemonster666]

The only fallacy that my generation seems to purport is that what goes in the world is not connected to our comfortable, immediate lives, and any major historical or social shifts in the fabric of culture/ human civilization are none of our concern since they're unavoidable.

At the same time in middle-upper class America we (generation Y) were a privileged generation that benefited from the globalization/technology/DOTCOM boom that boasted a happy and prosperous future for us.


So I am surprised that all my friends are glued to their iPhones, MP3 players, and virtual social networks, uncaring about what goes on beyond their immediate, day-to-day lives?
No.

Do I think my generation is inherent stupid or selfish? No, but it certainly seems so to someone like myself at times.


EDIT: I'm rather tired of people my age quoting philosophical texts like they're the words of the divine, saying things likes "everything is subjective". This isn't a metaphysics or philosophy of mind discussion, and doesn't really fit well with other comments I've read (by the same posters) who claim to have scientific world views and maintain that they're beliefs about the world are supported by objective facts.

 

[Krantos]

I agree with viranimus about your first argument. Unless you can bring up specific examples of when things are not subjective, I don't believe you can support that claim. Philosophy has been described as the search for universal truths. The fact that no one has found any should tell you something. A large part of the problem is that a person is restricted in their world-view by what they know. This is why you never hear of someone randomly switching religions to something they've never heard of or know nothing about. It's also why children in religious homes are so devout. They've never been told what they're being taught might be wrong, so they never consider it.

I prefer to think of philosophy as the search for your own truths.

As to your second point, it really isn't a conflict of ideas you have, but rather a pet peeve. People don't always want to form a radically complex world view when asked that question. "Why did that person rob a bank?" "Because people are greedy." That's the type of conversation most people would have. They don't necessarily believe it's true, they just don't see the point of speculating further.
If you want to develop an in depth psychological analysis to every event, more power to you. Just understand that most people don't care to.

There are some generalizations that can be supported, however. People are, by nature, selfish. Take a baby. An infant is the most egocentric entity. They know and care nothing about those around them. All that matters is they are hungry/tired/fussy/poopy. Growing up, children don't naturally know how to share or care about others' feelings. They have to learn that. Most of it is done subconsciously by watching those around them. Without actually being told what to think, children begin to mimic their parents'/caregivers' actions and motivations, much the same way they mimic their speech to learn to talk.

Conversely (on the positive side) children are naturally inclusive. Place toddlers from different ethnic and racial backgrounds together and they will interact the same way they would with less diverse playmates. They don't begin to develop biases to their own race or ethnicity until they begin to learn what "different" is.

This is also the reason that "experience breeds understanding." The more time a person spends with people different from themselves, the more accepting and comfortable they become. This is why racism is significantly higher in areas that are predominantly white. It's also why the Separate but Equal ideology was so damaging.

 

[Erana]

I think one of the worst fallacies people perpetuate these days is that if you're skinny, you're healthy. This typically applies more for women than men, but teenagers are getting stress fractures due to malnourishment. I bet if more people treated their bodies better, they'd be more sensible and less likely to perpetuate the fallacies that the rest of you are talking about.

 

[TWRule]

I disagree with you. Everything is subjective. Even our knowledge and things we hold true are subjective because everything we know to be true exists in a state of infinite potential to be disproven at any given time. It boils down to this. One mans trash is another mans treasure. What one values and considers correct another may not. Its been shown to be true repeatedly. We look at a guy who shoots a legislator and because we place value on life we view his ideology evil. Obviously he didnt view life as valuable. So we disregard what he values and call him mentally unstable for thinking the way he does simply because theres more of us than there is more of him. To disregard this behavior as abnormal behavior is again another example of what we value. The mob rules. Whatever the mob subscribes to is our morallity. If these things were fundamentally true they would not exist. We would not see them present in basically every species on the planet.

I did not mean to insinuate that individual values ought to be identical. Each individual has his own scale of values, and society can construct a popular morality that people can choose to follow or not to follow (not everyone follows the socially constructed norm morality or we wouldn't have people like that shooter - though if he was deemed unstable, I would think it could be because of his irrational thought processes, not necessarily his actions).

Also, I didn't say that the popular morality determined fundamental truth - only that people often have reasons for valuing the things that they do, and the fact that someone values something and someone else doesn't, doesn't necessarily make their stances equally valid (or invalid) on it's own.

As for your second point, its the whole argument of Nature vs nurture. I will use myself as an example. I have not physically seen my biological father since I was 3 years old. I have no clue what this guy looks like and have no such memories of him. However I scare my mother sometimes by just how much I behave like he does. How I have a similar sense of humor. How I approach certain situations, personal proclivities etc. How can that be if I have basically never had first hand exposure to his behavior and mannerisms? Traits passed on. That is the fundamental root of the argument of Nature in nature vs nurture. If these sort of traits can be passed from one individual to another on a hereditary level it stands to reason that its a working mechanism of the human mind. You can pass collective traits to the species.

Honestly, who is to say that these things that we value such as respect for life and a desire not to be oppressed are nothing more than hereditary traits. Also consider that through much of early human history the powerful would often look at the meek as at their disposal. To torture and kill in any means they saw fit. Our self appointed class of royalty made up only a small portion of the population and most average people are the desendents of the meeker classes who lived in fear of death and torture. It stands to reason that sort of desire to be allowed to live life in freedom is a genetically passed on trait that given the large scale of the populus that bore us has become a genetic predisposition for the species?

I think you certainly make a good argument that is fundamentally sound. However I do not share that opinion.

I am not sure how you can make the pure hereditary argument without mountains of evidence that I've never seen, but I'm not going to argue that at the moment. This isn't even necessarily the nature vs nurture debate. It's more like nature vs nurture vs free will. The problem is that we cannot necessarily ascribe something to a single cause conclusively. For example, how do you know that other factors didn't coincidentally lead you to have a similar sense of humor to your fathers? It's possible that it wasn't genetic at all. I won't claim to know more than the next about how things actually are, but I do know that we have to careful to trace out the logical conclusions of our worldviews and determine if we really have enough evidence to shoulder all the ramifications. Your hereditary argument for example, has dire consequences for how we hold people morally responsible for actions.

 

[Thaluikhain]

The idea that anything said by scientists will be discredited within the next 100 years anyway, so we can't say with any semblance of certainty whatsoever anything about the universe we live in.

Also, the idea that because we cannot prove a concept, when stripped of all connection to the real world, to definately be untrue, that we should accept it in its entirety.

 

[Amethyst Wind]

You've not proven or even really argued your case on the first point. You've just raised a doubt that you have that is arguably susceptible to being refuted. I'd like to see more analysis and less "perhaps". Commendable commitment to reasoning though, I'm looking forward to a more substantial defence of the first point (I find the second boring for discussion - the people who end conversations that way are rarely intelligent enough to be worth talking with in the first place).

My intention with the OP wasn't to give fully fleshed out arguments for alternative ways of thinking, but to point out that there are other logical options, thus making them invalid arguments. I'm willing to flesh out my reasoning on the first a bit more in a moment.

I fail to see how having other options available suddenly equates to being invalid. If you have a mountain path, a forest path and a river path that all reach the next town, I'm not gonna say the mountain is invalid because the other two exist. I do very much hope you flesh out your reasoning here.

I disagree with both your ascertations and find your "evidence" to be lacklustre. Just because you don't like them doesn't make them fallacies.

Especially the second one. We are greedy by nature, just as we are giving. They're called generalisations, and can be evidenced by mankind's continuous behaviour en mass.

I did not call them fallacies because I disliked them - I called them fallacies because they are logically flawed arguments.

When you make a statement about human nature, the logical equivalent is "All humans are (x)". That is different from saying that "humans tend to be (x) in situation" because that can be revealed by statistical data. Human nature statements cannot. If there is even one human that is not of that specific nature, then the argument is shown unsound. Furthermore, human nature statements carry the presupposition that humans even have one unified "nature" in the first place - which is essentially impossible to prove logically.

Given enough variables, everything can be shown with statistical data. Saying that human nature statements are different from (x) in situations seems a little short-sighted. How different is it from human nature if written like this:

All humans are generous (an example).


x = generous

y = [a collection of variables that encompass our time between birth and death, for convenience's sake, let's call it 'life']

Humans tend to be generous in life.

All humans are generous.

Logically, they're both as valid as each other, functionally they're identical and the second can be apparently shown through statistical data, o' course the spreadsheet would be longer than my...moving on.

It's clear that you subscribe to the idea of one objective truth, which is fine, 's not my view but it can be defended, however a worrying theme in your posts seems to be that there's only one correct path for anything, which is unnecessarily restrictive even within metaphysical objectivism.

 

[Break]

This is fallacious because even if you accept the presupposition that values only exist because humans ascribe them, that alone does not necessarily remove the-

Wait, what? Remove? Where'd that even come from? Why would the idea that humans give things their value mean that those values are worthless to humans? You've been talking to some strange nihilists. I mean, there's considering value to be a psychological attribute, and then there's outright ignoring the fact that people have emotions.

The fallacy leads to both nihilism, and to extreme subjectivism (usually manifested in radical cultural relativism or radical individuality). People need to question their lines of thought here.

And what are these supposed to be? Undesirable? You just listed some stances. You neglected to do anything with them. What relevance do those four terms have to people "needing to question their lines of thought"? Seems like non-sequitur.

When you make a statement about human nature, the logical equivalent is "All humans are (x)".

Wait, what? Why would it be... I've only heard people talking about "nature" as a tendency. No idea who's been feeding you this binary nonsense. I'll be honest with you, they don't seem to know what they're talking about.

Frankly, I don't know where to begin with this. What exactly are you trying to say? You've taken two concepts, shown two ways by which it's possible to wildly misinterpret them, and then it seems like you're suggesting that, because it's possible for bad conclusions to be drawn, that the whole line of thinking is false. Which... Would be a logical fallacy, amusingly enough.

Now, I'd be happy to have some kind of discussion, here, but first I've got to understand what you're even trying to say: are you arguing against moral relativism and evolutionary psychology? Or are you arguing against these two little strawmen you've built up, which happen to hold a vague similarity to the aforementioned concepts? Please clarify this for me. I am entirely befuddled.

 

[TWRule]

I agree with viranimus about your first argument. Unless you can bring up specific examples of when things are not subjective, I don't believe you can support that claim. Philosophy has been described as the search for universal truths. The fact that no one has found any should tell you something. A large part of the problem is that a person is restricted in their world-view by what they know. This is why you never hear of someone randomly switching religions to something they've never heard of or know nothing about. It's also why children in religious homes are so devout. They've never been told what they're being taught might be wrong, so they never consider it.

I prefer to think of philosophy as the search for your own truths.

I was never trying to argue that there aren't aspects of subjectivity to human experience. Let me point out the distinction between subjectivity between human beings and subjectivity in the sense of an idea being common among all humans but not necessarily beyond that. Of course not all things may be perceived the same way, or we'd never have science, art, philosophy, invention, etc. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that there aren't things that all human beings can perceive similarly, even though they might intellectualize the same phenomena differently.
For example, intuitions. We all seem to (as far as can be discerned) the intuition that we have free will. We know we can make choices and control ourselves. However, a lot of people interpret this feeling differently. They like to think that it's the will of God acting through them, or their biology, or the circumstance of their environment. Even with all these interpretations, they are still looking at the same intuition.

For a more physical example, astronomers have looked up to watch the movements of the heavenly bodies over the centuries, and there have been many different interpretations for how and why they move as they do. In this sense, there is indeed a human contribution to global understanding of the phenomena, but what we are trying to describe is still the same. The best model is the one that most distinctly identifies with our intuitions.

I see philosophy as the unraveling of our intuitions to intellectualize them in the most distinct way possible. In this sense, there has been a notable progression over time. But that is something we can argue separately.

As to your second point, it really isn't a conflict of ideas you have, but rather a pet peeve. People don't always want to form a radically complex world view when asked that question. "Why did that person rob a bank?" "Because people are greedy." That's the type of conversation most people would have. They don't necessarily believe it's true, they just don't see the point of speculating further.
If you want to develop an in depth psychological analysis to every event, more power to you. Just understand that most people don't care to.

I just used that as an example - I didn't mean to say that in depth analysis was always warranted. When the underlying presumptions match the words though, there is a real problem. Few people seem to ever seriously consider their ideas beyond that point.

There are some generalizations that can be supported, however. People are, by nature, selfish. Take a baby. An infant is the most egocentric entity. They know and care nothing about those around them. All that matters is they are hungry/tired/fussy/poopy. Growing up, children don't naturally know how to share or care about others' feelings. They have to learn that. Most of it is done subconsciously by watching those around them. Without actually being told what to think, children begin to mimic their parents'/caregivers' actions and motivations, much the same way they mimic their speech to learn to talk.

Conversely (on the positive side) children are naturally inclusive. Place toddlers from different ethnic and racial backgrounds together and they will interact the same way they would with less diverse playmates. They don't begin to develop biases to their own race or ethnicity until they begin to learn what "different" is.

This is also the reason that "experience breeds understanding." The more time a person spends with people different from themselves, the more accepting and comfortable they become. This is why racism is significantly higher in areas that are predominantly white. It's also why the Separate but Equal ideology was so damaging.

Sure, I won't argue those points - but when you say "human nature" you generally mean all humans regardless of age and background, irrevocably. If a human can will himself to not follow that nature, as anyone can by adulthood unless they are severely developmentally impaired, then it is no longer a "human" nature. That would make as many natures as humans. When people invoke human nature statements, they are essentially saying that you can't will yourself to be otherwise (whether they realize the content of their statement or not).

 

[TWRule]

My intention with the OP wasn't to give fully fleshed out arguments for alternative ways of thinking, but to point out that there are other logical options, thus making them invalid arguments. I'm willing to flesh out my reasoning on the first a bit more in a moment.

I fail to see how having other options available suddenly equates to being invalid. If you have a mountain path, a forest path and a river path that all reach the next town, I'm not gonna say the mountain is invalid because the other two exist. I do very much hope you flesh out your reasoning here.

I meant logically invalid as in "does not necessarily follow". Single statements cannot be show valid or invalid. The first fallacy I shard is such because they jump from "humans make things meaningful" to "everything a particular human makes is meaningful or nothing is", which is clearly excluding premises.

Given enough variables, everything can be shown with statistical data. Saying that human nature statements are different from (x) in situations seems a little short-sighted. How different is it from human nature if written like this:

All humans are generous (an example).

x = generous

y = [a collection of variables that encompass our time between birth and death, for convenience's sake, let's call it 'life']

Humans tend to be generous in life.

All humans are generous.

Logically, they're both as valid as each other, functionally they're identical and the second can be apparently shown through statistical data, o' course the spreadsheet would be longer than my...moving on.

Actually, those are not logically equivalent statements (and again, single statements can't be show valid or invalid, only sound or unsound). In proper logical form, they are:

All humans are generous.

All times that humans are living are times when humans are generous. (this perhaps allows some humans to be generous at a given time and some not to be)

You have no way of accurately measuring either of those really, but a human nature statement is usually argued thusly: Some humans are (x), therefore All humans are (x). Which is a hasty generalization fallacy. That is specifically what I'm talking about.[/quote]

It's clear that you subscribe to the idea of one objective truth, which is fine, 's not my view but it can be defended, however a worrying theme in your posts seems to be that there's only one correct path for anything, which is unnecessarily restrictive even within metaphysical objectivism.

If you got this from my posts them I apologize for expressing myself unclearly. I was arguing only that it is fallacious to say that because humans have different views, none of those views is correct. Personally, I believe in limited subjectivism - where there is one thing to see but multiple angles to view it from. This is different from a wider subjectivism because those people will look at something totally different and claim that they are looking at the same thing you are. My personal view is not what's important here though - it's the fact that popular reasoning does not logically follow.

 

[TheGreatCoolEnergy]

I think our greatest fallacy is the thought process along these lines: "Why should I donate 10$? It won't cure cancer!", "Why should I do an hour at a soup kitchen? People will still be hungry!"

This thinking is toxic for two reasons:
1) It prevents real progress. One hour wont elimanate world hunger. If everybody gave one hour a week however, it would sure as hell help

2) It's contagious. It only takes one person to start this, and before you know it, everybody is sitting around with a stupid look on their face.

 

[TWRule]

Wait, what? Remove? Where'd that even come from? Why would the idea that humans give things their value mean that those values are worthless to humans? You've been talking to some strange nihilists. I mean, there's considering value to be a psychological attribute, and then there's outright ignoring the fact that people have emotions.

That's exactly my point - it doesn't follow, but I see people using this exact argument all the time without realizing that it is illogical.

And what are these supposed to be? Undesirable? You just listed some stances. You neglected to do anything with them. What relevance do those four terms have to people "needing to question their lines of thought"? Seems like non-sequitur.

I say they need to question them because usually they (the people that throw them around) can't defend those views with a reasoned argument. I wasn't necessarily saying that those views are inherently bad, but what I can hold people responsible for is drawing out the logical conclusions for their own positions, which few seem to do. People tend to throw out blanket statements like "life is meaningless" without actually thinking about what it means to be a true nihilist, for example. Their views are usually inconsistent.

Wait, what? Why would it be... I've only heard people talking about "nature" as a tendency. No idea who's been feeding you this binary nonsense. I'll be honest with you, they don't seem to know what they're talking about.

Even a tendency argument doesn't hold much water. If you look at statistics, you are showing what people did, not why they did it or whether they could have "tended" differently. If you say "people are stupid" - even if you really mean "people tend to be stupid" - that doesn't necessarily make a statement that they -must- be that way by nature, and therefore it makes no sense to make any statement about "human nature".

Frankly, I don't know where to begin with this. What exactly are you trying to say? You've taken two concepts, shown two ways by which it's possible to wildly misinterpret them, and then it seems like you're suggesting that, because it's possible for bad conclusions to be drawn, that the whole line of thinking is false. Which... Would be a logical fallacy, amusingly enough.

Now, I'd be happy to have some kind of discussion, here, but first I've got to understand what you're even trying to say: are you arguing against moral relativism and evolutionary psychology? Or are you arguing against these two little strawmen you've built up, which happen to hold a vague similarity to the aforementioned concepts? Please clarify this for me. I am entirely befuddled.

No, you've misinterpreted what I'm saying. People use these fallacies all the time to justify views that they have not thought through. I was merely showing them invalid. I was not trying to claim that it's impossible to be nihilistic or cynical for logical reasons. The people I'm talking about aren't that. They haven't thought through what their own statements even mean.

 

[SimuLord]

The biggest mistake every generation of young people makes, and young people have been doing this since at least the Baby Boomers, is valuing the individual over the broader goals of a group. A sense of belonging to something greater than oneself is one of the last stages of development, right at the end of extended adolescence. Some find it in religion, some find it when they join the army to get direction in their aimless lives, but for others, it takes a monumental event like a heart attack at a young age, a cancer scare, the birth of a child (most of the time---young parents these days legitimately scare me with their lack of maturity when faced with another human life completely dependent on them).

You know the speech Pacino gives in Any Given Sunday about the value of "team"? Watch it. Learn from it. And remember that what today is called an "individualist" was for years known simply as a "self-absorbed douchebag."

 

[Berethond]

I think one of the worst fallacies people perpetuate these days is that if you're skinny, you're healthy. This typically applies more for women than men, but teenagers are getting stress fractures due to malnourishment. I bet if more people treated their bodies better, they'd be more sensible and less likely to perpetuate the fallacies that the rest of you are talking about.

I've got to agree with you about this. I cry on the inside when I see people starving themselves to try and lose weight when they're plenty healthy already.

This is especially true of wrestlers, who literally starve and dehydrate themselves to try to get a lower weight class.

 

[Bara_no_Hime]

1) There is no such thing as intrinsic value; all value is anthropogenic. Therefore, at worst, everything is meaningless, and at best, there are as many potential meanings of a thing as there are people.

This is fallacious because even if you accept the presupposition that values only exist because humans ascribe them, that alone does not necessarily remove the gravity of those values being placed. Perhaps many things we find meaningful are that way because of an absolute reality that we have difficulty describing, but even the infinite and eternal isn't necessarily meaningful unless we deem it such. That does not remove it's meaning, nor allow infinite interpretation.

The fallacy leads to both nihilism, and to extreme subjectivism (usually manifested in radical cultural relativism or radical individuality). People need to question their lines of thought here.

I disagree - this isn't a fallacy - it's a perfectly legitimate philosophy. Value being subjective to the perciever is a perfectly valid belief. If you don't feel that way, that's fine, but it doesn't make it a logical fallacy.