Roger Kimball's Challenge

http://wmbriggs.com/blog/2008/08/19/roger-kimballs-challenge/ ^ | WM Briggs

[mattstat]

The famous writer Roger Kimball has issued a challenge:

Name the silliest argument to be offered by a serious academic in the last 25 years and to be taken up and be gravely masticated by the larger world of intellectual debate.

A leading contender is Global Warming. Kimball's own entry is Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis.

Kimball's rules of the contest:

"I'll collect proposals for the next week or two and then announce the winner. (The decision, from which there is no appeal, will be determined by a committee staffed, overseen, and operated entirely by me.)"

This tournament reminds me of the one issued by philosopher David Stove, who sought to find The World’s Worst Argument. The winning entry was entered by Stove himself:...

[steelyourfaith]

 

Beam me to Planet Gore !

[MrBambaLaMamba]

HOPE AND CHANGE!

[dinoparty]

May I suggest “The Living Constitution” ?

[wideawake]

Thanks for this, mattstat.

The article you linked to itself links to an excellent article at the following IP address:

http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/worst.html

Very well done.

[wideawake]

By “worst”, according to Jim Franklin, his literary executor (Stove is dead) and student, Stove “meant that it had to be extremely bad logically and also it had to be very widely believed.”

Here's one:

"America borrows a lot of money, therefore America is in extremely bad financial shape."

It's completely illogical, yet widely believed - even by many people on this forum.

[CPOSharky]

Here's one:

And another: Hot water freezes faster than cold water.

[Borges]

That comes from Literary Studies which work on the principle that the author is not in full control of his text and the latter can mean a whole range of things he didn’t intend.