I wonder if anyone has ever said, sincerely, "sir, I believe you are committing an Argumentum ad Baculum," let alone had this produce a useful result.
Discussion is subject to an information problem when we're trying to strike a balance between underexplaining and overexplaining.
I have a mental catalog of things A, B, C, D, E. You have a mental catalog of things C, D, E, F, G. Neither of us is aware of the other's catalog.
So we have to guess. Say I argue X -> B -> Y, but I assumed you already knew B and glossed over it. That's going to look like X -> ?? -> Y, and you'll likely percieve that as a non sequitur because you can't follow how I got from X to Y.
Your best recourse is to say, "hold on, I don't follow how you get from X to Y," whereupon I can guess you don't know B and explain it.
Even if you're sure someone is committing a fallacy, it's not reliable to cite the name of the fallacy. As fallacies have entered general usage, they've taken on a much broader meaning than what references cite.
A useful (intuitive even!) reference would include plain English explanations. Instead of saying something is a strawman, "I think you're exaggerating my position here because I don't believe X, Y or Z," makes clear what the problem is.
> I wonder if anyone has ever said, sincerely, "sir, I believe you are committing an Argumentum ad Baculum," let alone had this produce a useful result.
Formal debate structures go all the way back to the time of Aristotle and there certainly have existed places where bringing up a fallacy directly was meant to encourage an interlocutor to explain how the fallacy doesn't apply or take the time to restructure their argument to not rely on a fallacy.
Most formal debate has fallen out of fashion. About the last place you may see it is "Debate Clubs" and (sometimes) Law practice.
Certainly the internet has pushed things almost extremely informal with respect to debate. Indeed a reference to a formal fallacy can derail an internet discussion because few internet interlocutors understand or care if they make a fallacy in their arguments, and sometimes things like cognitive dissonance seems to implore them to hold fast and tight to their fallacies rather engage in eliminating them. But that's not necessarily an argument against bringing up fallacies when you see them. Illiteracy of formal debate logic [1] might be a problem on the modern internet.
(Arguably it's a large part of why the modern US "Presidential Candidate Debates" are similarly so terrible, because they aren't formal debates, fallacies are never challenged, nor allowed to be challenged, and the average amount of debate literacy has just been tossed out the window for extremely informal dog and pony shows that fail to be useful debates in terms of what debates were intended to do: debate.)
> A useful (intuitive even!) reference would include plain English explanations.
The [I] button in the corner of this particular reference site shows the English explanations in the "periodic table" directly. (The site also shows the English explanations for them in details popups.) That this is not the default or that most of buttons are not well explained (and there's no differentiation between buttons, text, and links in the stylesheet) certainly does leave the reference site a long ways from intuitive (or accessible for that matter), but it does have the useful tools even if they are hard to find at least.
[1] Which is not far from Logic/Programming, as indeed a lot of Boolean Logic isn't far removed. It's almost a wonder there aren't more Programmers extremely passionate about Debate Fallacies.
Discussion is subject to an information problem when we're trying to strike a balance between underexplaining and overexplaining.
I have a mental catalog of things A, B, C, D, E. You have a mental catalog of things C, D, E, F, G. Neither of us is aware of the other's catalog.
So we have to guess. Say I argue X -> B -> Y, but I assumed you already knew B and glossed over it. That's going to look like X -> ?? -> Y, and you'll likely percieve that as a non sequitur because you can't follow how I got from X to Y.
Your best recourse is to say, "hold on, I don't follow how you get from X to Y," whereupon I can guess you don't know B and explain it.
Even if you're sure someone is committing a fallacy, it's not reliable to cite the name of the fallacy. As fallacies have entered general usage, they've taken on a much broader meaning than what references cite.
A useful (intuitive even!) reference would include plain English explanations. Instead of saying something is a strawman, "I think you're exaggerating my position here because I don't believe X, Y or Z," makes clear what the problem is.