EDIT: TL;DR: don’t do this if you’re trying to convince irrational people; pull their emotional strings instead. And for rational people, focus on logic reasoning and consistency with the observed results.
For rational people*, a better way to handle this would be:
Showing logical flaws in their reasoning;
Showing that their reasoning conflicts with the observed results;
Showing that your own reasoning is logically neater;
Showing that your reasoning fits the observed results.
Most [all?] things outside those four points are fallacious mush, making shit up, etc.
For points #1 and #3, it’s damn useful to know basic informal fallacies. Things like appeal to authority, false dichotomy, non sequitur, etc. You don’t even need to remember their names, as long as you can spot them in an argument (including yours, before you utter it) and say “wait a minute this is wrong”.
Now. When dealing with irrational people, you’re probably better off sticking to the middle of that pyramid, because even if you refute the central point… guess what, the moron will put it back in place using some insane [lack of] logic. In special, fallacies like appeal to emotion, appeal to consequences, ad hominem (more on that later), genetic fallacy (pretending that shit becomes truer/falser or more/less moral depending on who says it) is damn effective to convince those people, even if logically unsound.
Regarding ad hominem. A lot of people confuse it with insults, when both things are completely orthogonal. Ad hominem boils down to “this is false because of the person saying it”; you can do it in a non-insulting way, and you can insult without using ad hominem. (For example: “Alice, you think that the Sun is green? Goddammit you’re fucking stupid, here, LOOK AT THE FUCKING SUN! And here’s a spectrogram of the Sun’s radiation! The only green thing here is your green-stained arse, you fucking cattle” is not ad hominem, even if rather colourful with the insults.)
*“[ir]rational people” in this context should be seen as solely shorthands for “people behaving [ir]rationally towards the subject being discussed”. Those are not true categories of people, just a convenient abstraction.
The effective temperature of the Sun is 5778 Kelvin. Using Wien’s law, one finds a peak emission per nanometer (of wavelength) at a wavelength of about 500 nm, in the green portion of the spectrum near the peak sensitivity of the human eye.
The Sun does emit a lot of cyanish green light, but the overall colour from the space is white, as it emits comparable amounts of light in the rest of the visible spectrum:
And, if talking about the colour of the sun as seen from Earth, it should be a yellowish orange (as the atmospheres filters some higher frequency light).
Another detail: blackbody radiation is an approximation. A useful one, but as seen in the graph above, at least for wavelength it peaks around blue or violet. And if you plot it by frequency instead, it should peak the closest to red (counting only visible rad).
I could’ve used purple in the example too. Dunno why I decided for green.
so the sun is purple but our eyes are flawed and therefore we see it as white when directly watching it and yellow when we look at it through the atmosphere
EDIT: TL;DR: don’t do this if you’re trying to convince irrational people; pull their emotional strings instead. And for rational people, focus on logic reasoning and consistency with the observed results.
For rational people*, a better way to handle this would be:
Most [all?] things outside those four points are fallacious mush, making shit up, etc.
For points #1 and #3, it’s damn useful to know basic informal fallacies. Things like appeal to authority, false dichotomy, non sequitur, etc. You don’t even need to remember their names, as long as you can spot them in an argument (including yours, before you utter it) and say “wait a minute this is wrong”.
Now. When dealing with irrational people, you’re probably better off sticking to the middle of that pyramid, because even if you refute the central point… guess what, the moron will put it back in place using some insane [lack of] logic. In special, fallacies like appeal to emotion, appeal to consequences, ad hominem (more on that later), genetic fallacy (pretending that shit becomes truer/falser or more/less moral depending on who says it) is damn effective to convince those people, even if logically unsound.
Regarding ad hominem. A lot of people confuse it with insults, when both things are completely orthogonal. Ad hominem boils down to “this is false because of the person saying it”; you can do it in a non-insulting way, and you can insult without using ad hominem. (For example: “Alice, you think that the Sun is green? Goddammit you’re fucking stupid, here, LOOK AT THE FUCKING SUN! And here’s a spectrogram of the Sun’s radiation! The only green thing here is your green-stained arse, you fucking cattle” is not ad hominem, even if rather colourful with the insults.)
*“[ir]rational people” in this context should be seen as solely shorthands for “people behaving [ir]rationally towards the subject being discussed”. Those are not true categories of people, just a convenient abstraction.
Mind you, regarding the sun being green, it’s worth noting this observation from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wien’s_displacement_law
The effective temperature of the Sun is 5778 Kelvin. Using Wien’s law, one finds a peak emission per nanometer (of wavelength) at a wavelength of about 500 nm, in the green portion of the spectrum near the peak sensitivity of the human eye.
The Sun does emit a lot of cyanish green light, but the overall colour from the space is white, as it emits comparable amounts of light in the rest of the visible spectrum:
And, if talking about the colour of the sun as seen from Earth, it should be a yellowish orange (as the atmospheres filters some higher frequency light).
Another detail: blackbody radiation is an approximation. A useful one, but as seen in the graph above, at least for wavelength it peaks around blue or violet. And if you plot it by frequency instead, it should peak the closest to red (counting only visible rad).
I could’ve used purple in the example too. Dunno why I decided for green.
so the sun is purple but our eyes are flawed and therefore we see it as white when directly watching it and yellow when we look at it through the atmosphere
Mucho texto
Che, es verdad, pero ya ya resuelvo esto con un TL;DR. (edit: hecho)