Argument Resources

"An argument is not the same thing as a quarrel. The goal of an argument is not to attack your opponent, or to impress your audience. The goal of an argument is to offer good reasons in support of your conclusion." – Jim Pryor

CIA: Psychology of Intelligence Analysis

Farnam St Blog: An Introduction to Decision Making 

Austhink on Critical Thinking - http://austhink.com/critical/

ChangingMinds.org on Types of Reasoning

Philosophy Professor Jim Pryor:

• Good and Bad Forms of Argument
• What is an Argument? http://www.jimpryor.net/teaching/vocab/argument.html

 

Style Suggestions

Try to use declarative sentances, not questions, even rhetorical questions you might use in other discussions.  On Clarimap, just make declarative statements.

• Good: Every time in the past when we have purchased an appartment complex in Hayward, we made our money back in 5 years.
• Bad: Is there any reason to think this investment would play out differently from similar investment in the past?
• Bad: Why would anyone oppose this purchase?

Be as precise as possible.  That means not hedging your language more than necessary and not making overly confident, unhedged statements that you don’t have backup for.

• Good Our previous investments in Hayward apartment complexes have resulted in payback times of 4.2, 3.9, and 4.8 years.
• Bad: Similar investments in the past have been good ones.
• Bad: The last few properties we bought had breakeven times of less than 5 years.

Statements that include verifiable facts are better than those that do not.

• Good: Brazil's GPD is 130% larger than Mexico's. We should expand into Brazil next.
• Bad: There is more money in Brazil than Mexico. We should expend into Brazil next.

Specific statements are better than generalities.

• Good: Finance projects a Q4 revenue profit of $620K based on Sales' projection of $2,12M in revenues.
• Bad: We continue to be profitable.

 

• Good: The dozer has been going down 2 times a month on average with a mean outage time of 2.3 days.
• Bad: Some of the critical factory equipment is aging.

Short statements are preferable to long statements.  If you can get your point across in a short statement, do so.  You may need to break longer thoughts into multiple Clairmap statements.  Clarimap is designed so each statement contains one thought or idea.  See the page on discussions [LINK] for more.

Use “I” or “in my opinion” only if necessary. "In my opinion" makes it look like you are hedging and not convinved of your statement. That might be true, but such hedging is better handled by a pyramic of statements. Make your main statement unambiguously. Then add opposing statements raising objections. This is a more robust way of constructing a detailed argument.   Avoid first person because the readers can't tell who made the statement (in general, Clarimap statements are not presented with author attribution), and because the whole idea is to create a rigorous discussion with argument without appeal to individual personalities.

Jargon and industry-specific references

You have to use your judgment about how much inside language you should employ in your Clarimap discussions.

Jargon can be great as a way of shortening discussions and getting to the meat of things.  It is not bad in itself.  If you feel the participants and readers of your discussion will understand your language, go ahead and use it.  The same is true for facts, events, people, etc. that the readers may be aware of. 

 

We borrow the following advice from The Economist Style Guide

• Use the language of everyday speech, not that of spokesmen, lawyers or bureaucrats
• Do not be hectoring or arrogant.
• Do not be too pleased with yourself
• Do not be too chatty