Today's post, Empty Labels was originally published on 14 February 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

You use complex renamings to create the illusion of inference. Is a "human" defined as a "mortal featherless biped"? Then write: "All [mortal featherless bipeds] are mortal; Socrates is a [mortal featherless biped]; therefore, Socrates is mortal." Looks less impressive that way, doesn't it?

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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The Argument from Common Usage, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

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