I’m not sure whether to start with Burns or Steinbeck, but perhaps Steinbeck’s exhortation to “Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other” is a good place to start. The essence of a straw man argument is a refusal to understand the other. A refusal to listen to the other. A refusal to accept the basics of civilised debate. An insistence on putting words into the other’s mouth, a mansplaining of some-one else’s argument.
Straw man arguments are used constantly by the establishment against anything they perceive as dangerous. I won’t even go into the political dimension, where you can see hundreds of examples every day. I’ll stick to physics and astronomy, where I have followed Stacy McGaugh’s blog tritonstation.com for some years, and read his debunking of large numbers of straw man arguments against MOND from the LCDM establishment.
And then I will discuss my own models/theories/ideas about mathematical foundations of fundamental physics. All of these have suffered hugely from straw man arguments, as people spend 10 seconds reading something it has taken me 10 years to write, and think they know far more about it than I do. Possibly they do, but I have seen no evidence for it. Usually they take one sentence out of context, completely misunderstand it, pretend it means something completely different from what it says, extrapolate it by billions of miles and/or billions of years to a place where experiment cannot touch it, and pretend it predicts something completely different from what it actually predicts.
Of course, if you spend ten seconds reading a theory, you will not have the faintest idea what it actually predicts or does not predict. That doesn’t stop these know-it-alls from pretending they understand everything about it in ten seconds.
Let me give you an example: I pointed out that the neutron/proton mass ratio is very close to 1 + 1/2*365, and that 365 is the number of days in a year. These know-it-alls assumed that I predict this mass ratio was different in the Jurassic, when there were more days in a year. Did I say that? No, I didn’t. What I said was, this is a coincidence that needs explaining or debunking. What I said was, one possible explanation is that inertial mass and gravitational mass are not the same thing. What I said was, we don’t understand what mass is anyway, so maybe this is a clue? What I did not say was, the mass ratio of neutron to proton was different in the Jurassic, or is different on Mars. Yet that is the straw man I was depicted as.
What prompts me to write on this subject today is that some – oh, never mind, it doesn’t matter. I just wish that people wouldn’t treat me like a straw man. I’m not a straw man, I’m a mouse.