eli5 Whats a “Straw man fallacy”?
In: Other
There are several “good” responses here, but I haven’t seen a true “ELI5” answer, so I’ll attempt to simplify a little further:
**A “straw man” is what happens when two people have a debate and one side tries to publicly misrepresent their opponent’s argument and then easily defeat it.**
This is usually done by finding a related issue where people have a lot of emotions.
For example, a politician can say, “We need to to change how we handle immigration.” Their opponent might then respond with, “Why do you hate immigrants? You must be a racist!”
This forces the first person to defend a position or claim that isn’t theirs, and this makes them lose time and look foolish.
This happens on Reddit all the time.
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