“The Most Common Bad Argument In These Parts” by J Bostock

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

I've noticed an antipattern. It's definitely on the dark pareto-frontier of "bad argument" and "I see it all the time amongst smart people". I'm confident it's the worst, common argument I see amongst rationalists and EAs. I don't normally crosspost to the EA forum, but I'm doing it now. I call it Exhaustive Free Association.
Exhaustive Free Association is a step in a chain of reasoning where the logic goes "It's not A, it's not B, it's not C, it's not D, and I can't think of any more things it could be!"[1] Once you spot it, you notice it all the damn time.
Since I've most commonly encountered this amongst rat/EA types, I'm going to have to talk about people in our community as examples of this.
Examples
Here's a few examples. These are mostly for illustrative purposes, and my case does not rely on me having found [...]
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Outline:
(00:55) Examples
(01:08) Security Mindset
(01:25) Superforecasters and AI Doom
(02:14) With Apologies to Rethink Priorities
(02:45) The Fatima Sun Miracle
(03:14) Bad Reasoning is Almost Good Reasoning
(05:09) Arguments as Soldiers
(06:29) Conclusion
(07:04) The Counter-Counter Spell
The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
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First published:
October 11th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/arwATwCTscahYwTzD/the-most-common-bad-argument-in-these-parts
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.