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 [...]

---

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.

---

First published:
October 11th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/arwATwCTscahYwTzD/the-most-common-bad-argument-in-these-parts

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Voice

Why Theory

Voice and Falling in Love

The AI-powered Podcast Player