I found this enlightening, and disheartening at the same time. Is there any further discussion on how we can evolve past this, as individuals and as a society?
Individually, by being aware of it you can recognize it in your own statements more readily (though probably requiring deliberate attention). Then you can choose to use the form of argument or rewrite to avoid it.
When seeing it in others you may be able to present better responses, especially if you're aware of how your response might be perceived.
(Not disagreeing with your post, just discussing a complication.)
Looking at this thread and how people are (respectfully) pointing fingers at each others (and their own) arguments, it seems clear to me that avoiding such arguments is generally hard.
When you want to support or illustrate an assertion you make with an example, the example will virtually never apply to everything the assertion covers. Often it might not even be possible to find an example that covers the majority of some group/trend/phenomenon (or know what constitutes a majority in the first place).
Maybe this means to be more judicious in making general statements (probably not a bad idea). But in some respects, for example a trend among recent occurrences of something, you have nothing but isolated events to discuss in the first place. Even if there is some objective quality behind it, requiring yourself to never refer to individual data points (as that could be construed as weak-manning) might make it impossible to get at the core of it. And that's before going into how your arguments are perceived.
And yes, the above is intentionally (overly) general. Examples would help illustrating the argument, but are immediately subject to weak-manning. I wonder what others think on this.
