antonim

This famous passage from the opening of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville is rich in literary style but not necessarily constructed as an argument, which makes identifying formal logical fallacies a nuanced task. That said, we can identify a few rhetorical or informal fallacies—not because the text is poorly reasoned, but because it makes some sweeping or questionable assumptions in a stylistically persuasive way. Here's a breakdown:

1. Hasty Generalization

"Almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me."

• Fallacy: The narrator generalizes his deeply personal and specific emotional reaction to the sea as something nearly all men experience.
• Why it’s fallacious: No evidence is presented to support this broad claim. It is based purely on the narrator’s subjective experience and intuition.

2. False Cause (Post Hoc)

"It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation."

• Fallacy: Implies a causal relationship between going to sea and improved physical/emotional health.
• Why it’s fallacious: While sailing may coincidentally improve his mood or circulation, the text offers no medical or psychological basis to prove a direct causal link.

3. Appeal to Emotion

"...especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off..."

• Fallacy: Uses vivid emotional language to justify behavior or state of mind rather than logical reasoning.
• Why it’s fallacious: It appeals to the reader’s empathy or amusement to legitimize the narrator’s melancholy and coping strategy, rather than offering a rational justification.

4. False Analogy

"With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship."

• Fallacy: Compares going to sea with committing suicide as if they are equivalent responses to despair.
• Why it’s fallacious: The analogy is emotionally compelling, but equating self-harm with a change in setting (boarding a ship) overlooks major differences in motive and consequence.

Summary:

Would you like me to rewrite the passage without the fallacies, or is this for literary analysis?

Logic requires abstracting the argumentative form from the literal linguistic content and then generalising it, just how like math is done properly when you work with numbers and not just with sentences such as "two apples and three apples is five apples" (such abstraction in practice allows far more powerful and widely applicable operations than dealing with individual linguistic expressions; if you've ever solved very complex truth trees you'll know how they allow streamlining and solutions that would be practically impossible to do if you had only the ordinary linguistic expression of the same problem). Logic doesn't operate with textual tokens but with logical propositions and operators. "Difficulty" is not a meaningful term here, a tool is either technically capable of doing something (more or less successfully) or it isn't.

That LLMs aren't capable of this sort of precision and abstraction is shown by the OP link as well as the simple fact that chatbots used to be extremely bad at math (which is now probably patched up by adding a proper math module, rather than relying on the base LLM - my assumption, at least).

As for trying more examples of looking for logical fallacies, I tried out three different types of text. Since you say context is important, it's best to take only the beginning of a text. One text I tried is the opening of the Wikipedia article on "history", which ChatGPT described like this: "The passage you've provided is an informative and largely neutral overview of the academic discipline of history. It doesn't make any strong arguments or persuasive claims, which are typically where logical fallacies appear." It then went on to nitpick about some details "for the sake of thorough analysis", but basically had no real complaints. Then I tried out the opening paragraph of Moby-Dick. That's a fictional text so it would be reasonable to reject analysing its logical solidity, as GPT already did with the WP article, but it still tried to wring out some "criticism" that occasionally shows how it misunderstands the text (just as it misunderstood a part of my comment above). Finally, I asked it to find the fallacies in the first four paragraphs of Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy, which resulted in a criticism that was based on less logically rigid principles than the original text (accusing Descartes of the "slippery slope fallacy").

I'll post the full replies below.

That was a roundabout way of admitting you have no idea what logic is or how LLMs work. Logic works with propositions regardless of their literal meaning, LLMs operate with textual tokens irrespective of their formal logical relations. The chatbot doesn't actually do the logical operations behind the scenes, it only produces the text output that looks like the operations were done (because it was trained on a lot of existing text that reflects logical operations in its content).

Right now the hype from most is finding issues with chatgpt

hype noun (1)

publicity

especially : promotional publicity of an extravagant or contrived kind

You're abusing the meaning of "hype" in order to make the two sides appear the same, because you do understand that "hype" really describes the pro-AI discourse much better.

It did find the fallacies based on what it was asked to do.

It didn't. Put the text of your comment back into GPT and tell it to argue why the fallacies are misidentified.

You act like this is fire and forget.

But you did fire and forget it. I don't even think you read the output yourself.

First I wanted to be honest with the output and not modify it.

Or maybe you were just lazy?

Personally I'm starting to find these copy-pasted AI responses to be insulting. It has the "let me Google that for you" sort of smugness around it. I can put in the text in ChatGPT myself and get the same shitty output, you know. If you can't be bothered to improve it, then there's absolutely no point in pasting it.

Given what this output gave me, I can easily keep working this to get better and better arguments.

That doesn't sound terribly efficient. Polishing a turd, as they say. These great successes of AI are never actually visible or demonstrated, they're always put off - the tech isn't quite there yet, but it's just around the corner, just you wait, just one more round of asking the AI to elaborate, just one more round of polishing the turd, just a bit more faith on the unbelievers' part...

I just feel like you can’t honestly tell me that within 10 seconds having that summary is not beneficial.

Oh sure I can tell you that, assuming that your argumentative goals are remotely honest and you're not just posting stupid AI-generated criticism to waste my time. You didn't even notice one banal way in which AI misinterpreted my comment (I didn't say SMBC is bad), and you'd probably just accept that misreading in your own supposed rewrite of the text. Misleading summaries that you have to spend additional time and effort double checking for these subtle or not so subtle failures are NOT beneficial.

Excellent, these "fallacies" are exactly as I expected - made up, misunderstanding my comment (I did not call SMBC "bad"), and overall just trying to look like criticism instead of being one. Completely worthless - but I sure can see why right wingers are embracing it!

It's funny how you think AI will help refine people's ideas, but you actually just delegated your thinking to it and let it do it worse than you could (if you cared). That's why I don't feel like getting any deeper into explaining why the AI response is garbage, I could just as well fire up GPT on my own and paste its answer, but it would be equally meaningless and useless as yours.

Saying it’ll be boring comics missed the entire point.

So what was the point exactly? I re-read that part of your comment and you're talking about "strong ideas", whatever that's supposed to be without any actual context?

Saying it is the same as google is pure ignorance of what it can do.

I did not say it's the same as Google, in fact I said it's worse than Google because it can add a hallucinated summary or reinterpretation of the source. I've tested a solid number of LLMs over time, I've seen what they produce. You can either provide examples that show that they do not hallucinate, that they have access to sources that are more reliable than what shows up on Google, or you can again avoid any specific examples, just expecting people to submit to the revolutionary tech without any questions, accuse me of complete ignorance and, no less, compare me with anti-immigrant crowds (I honestly have no idea what's supposed to be similar between these two viewpoints? I don't live in a country with particularly developed anti-immigrant stances so maybe I'm missing something here?).

The people who buy into it will get into these type of ignorant and short sighted statements just to prove things that just are not true. But they’ve bought into the hype and need to justify it.

"They’ve bought into the hype and need to justify it"? Are you sure you're talking about the anti-AI crowd here? Because that's exactly how one would describe a lot of the pro-AI discourse. Like, many pro-AI people literally BUY into the hype by buying access to better AI models or invest in AI companies, the very real hype is stoked by these highly valued companies and some of the richest people in the world, and the hype leads the stock market and the objectively massive investments into this field.

But actually those who "buy into the hype" are the average people who just don't want to use this tech? Huh? What does that have to do with the concept of "hype"? Do you think hype is simply any trend that doesn't agree with your viewpoints?

I have no idea what sort of AI you've used that could do any of this stuff you've listed. A program that doesn't reason won't expose logical fallacies with any rigour or refine anyone's ideas. It will link to credible research that you could already find on Google but will also add some hallucinations to the summary. And so on, it's completely divorced from how the stuff as it is currently works.

Someone with a brilliant comic concept but no drawing ability? AI can help build a framework to bring it to life.

That's a misguided view of how art is created. Supposed "brilliant ideas" are dime a dozen, it takes brilliant writers and artists to make them real. Someone with no understanding of how good art works just having an image generator produce the images will result in a boring comic no matter the initial concept. If you are not competent in a visual medium, then don't make it visual, write a story or an essay.

Besides, most of the popular and widely shared webcomics out there are visually extremely simple or just bad (look at SMBC or xkcd or - for a right-wing example - Stonetoss).

For now I see no particular benefits that the right-wing has obtained by using AI either. They either make it feed back into their delusions, or they whine about the evil leftists censoring the models (by e.g. blocking its usage of slurs).

Wow, I would deeply apologise on the behalf of all of us uneducated proles having opinions on stuff that we're bombarded with daily through the media.

That depends on your assumption that the left would have anything relevant to gain by embracing AI (whatever that's actually supposed to mean).

But 90% of "reasoning humans" would answer just the same. Your questions are based on some non-trivial knowledge of physics, chemistry and medicine that most people do not possess.

En vino, veritas.

In, not en, and it is written without the comma.

(Finally the two years of suffering through Latin classes have paid off!)

Some apps that guide you through home workout.

Fair enough, got any FOSS alternatives?