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"I hate slippery slope arguments, but...." Slippery slope is vastly oversold as a logical fallacy. It is only a fallacy in the absence of evidence that there i

by jerf 5y ago

"I hate slippery slope arguments, but...." Slippery slope is vastly oversold as a logical fallacy. It is only a fallacy in the absence of evidence that there is a slope. If there's a multi-decade trend of which this is only a single step, and there's no visible mechanism for making it stop here and go no farther, then the logical fallacy is in believing with no reason that the trend line will stop here. It is not a fallacy to speak as if this is only the beginning of a huge push into intrusive monitoring. It is a fallacy to pretend otherwise. Slippery slope is also a fallacy if you take one instance of a trend and then logically project it to an absurd extreme, but this is not what we're doing here. We're simply looking at the next obvious, logical, well-evidenced step, with plenty of people who obviously want this even if they are a bit too discreet to come right out and say it in public. But it's not a hard leap to see that our rulers today would like to be in full control of everything bit of data we receive and every bit of data we produce and the only things stopping them are technical possibilities and whether or not we'd put up with it. I see nothing else stopping them; not scruples, not morality, no existential awareness of the sheer staggering amount of responsibility they would be pushing on to themselves, no concerns about how it may hurt anyone, nothing.

ShrigmaMale 5y ago
Ahh yes, the slippery slope fallacy fallacy: assuming that all slippery slope arguments are fallacious. https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/987274961659232256?lang=en https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/987274961659232256...
- godelski 5y ago
  > assuming that all slippery slope arguments are fallacious. They literally stated when it is and isn't a fallacy with differentiating conditions...
  - voltaireodactyl 5y ago
    > Slippery slope fallacy fallacy I believe the poster you’re responding to is making a joke.
    - godelski 5y ago
      Ops. Sometimes those things don't come across as well over text. My mistake.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
mikepurvis 5y ago
As in all things, it's important to seek out evidence elsewhere that it might exist. For example, the US is already significantly "behind" many other developed nations in terms of not just how much surveillance and censorship is tolerated, but also in other freedom-oriented areas like choice to own firearms, choice of whether to have medical insurance, etc. So it shouldn't really be necessary to have any of these arguments based on speculated future scenarios when you can look to Canada, the UK, Australia, etc, and see that slight increases in surveillance, censorship, gun regulation, health care availability, etc might actually have some benefits and certainly don't necessarily put you in the instant quicksand toward fascism/communism/scary scenario X.
- JadeNB 5y ago
  > So it shouldn't really be necessary to have any of these arguments based on speculated future scenarios when you can look to Canada, the UK, Australia, etc, and see that slight increases in surveillance, censorship, gun regulation, health care availability, etc might actually have some benefits and certainly don't necessarily put you in the instant quicksand toward fascism/communism/scary scenario X. There are a lot of benefits to living in countries with different governance approaches from the in many ways ultra-laissez faire approach taken in the US, but I don't think you'll find many takers here for the idea that the physical and internet surveillance of the UK and Australia are a model to which to look forward.
  - mikepurvis 5y ago
    Oh I know. I'm being downvoted to oblivion already— that's the reality of HN being US-centric (I'm Canadian). But my point is less about taking a stand on any of one of those issues and more just that US-based advocates making slippery-slope arguments often resort to wide-eyed speculation about the future rather than evidence because they're unaware of or unwilling to acknowledge what the realities are elsewhere in the world.
  - namdnay 5y ago
    To play devils advocate for a bit, London is an incredibly safe city at night compared to say Paris or Rome or Madrid or Amsterdam. I’m pretty sure part of that is down to the staggering amount of cameras
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
"Slippery slope" is so overused that we forget the original analogy. It needs to have a pressure in one direction and very little to resist that pressure. That is, it has to have a slope and that slope has to be slippery. In this particular case, it's a slipper slope on which we already have a ton of momentum.
wyager 5y ago
It’s not a fallacy at all under Bayesian reasoning; it’s a very powerful heuristic.
- jerf 5y ago
  One of the blog posts I'd like to write but probably never will is an examination of the logical fallacies that are fallacies under an Aristotelian, true/false view of the world, but are valid under a Bayesian point of view. A simple one is that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. It's a "fallacy" because absence of evidence is correctly not proof of absence, so in an Aristotelian framework where something is either true or false, it is indeed a fallacy to claim that absence of evidence proves absence. However, from a Bayesian perspective it is indeed evidence, though one must be careful in how ones works the math to determine how strong that evidence is. Sometimes it's so weak as to be irrelevant, but sometimes it can be overwhelming.
kordlessagain 5y ago
Political leaders feel compelled to provide a “service” in which they “solve” societal problems. Not all problems can be solved across the board, however, so what happens is a sideways motion into violations of privacy in exchange for a visible “difference” in handling illegal behavior which was previously beyond the reach of law enforcement. This fallacy is a direct result of the technologies developed and discussed here, so we’re all culpable for what has been already laid down. Maybe keeping this in mind with AI will help, but given corporate stakeholders, probably not.
- visualradio 5y ago
  Getting rid of patents would probably help. With stuff like phones there's probably plenty of options for mass production of open source hardware modules purchasable from electronic hobbyist stores anonymously with cash which would allow anyone to build their own personal communicator with radio, SIM, wifi, quantum, etc modules. The issue is that competitive mass production of many independent compatible modules would required a public description of an applied system that everyone can debate and discuss and agree to on technical merits, but people self-censor and don't want to share ideas for such applied systems online because they think some monopolist is going to patent everything in order to arbitrarily halt development for 20 years. In order to achieve such a cultural shift it might be necessary to reform the religions.
- pydry 5y ago
  There's no reason to assume that political actors pushing for this are acting in honest, mistaken good faith.
unbalancedevh 5y ago
> Slippery slope is also a fallacy if you take one instance of a trend and then logically project it to an absurd extreme, but this is not what we're doing here. We're simply looking at the next obvious, logical, well-evidenced step, with plenty of people who obviously want this even if they are a bit too discreet to come right out and say it in public. What makes it easy to oversell as a fallacy is that everything you described that defines it is subjective, and easily argued about. People disagree a lot on what's "absurd" or "obvious" or "well-evidenced."
joek1301 5y ago
I think Scott Alexander’s piece on slippery slopes and Schelling fences [1] does a nice job delineating between good- and bad-faith slippery slope arguments. “Slippery slopes legitimately exist wherever a policy not only affects the world directly, but affects people's willingness or ability to oppose future policies.” [1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-...
- cataphract 5y ago
  Another good reference is Eugene Volokh's "The Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope": https://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/slippery.pdf https://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/slippery.pdf
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
SLWW 5y ago
Thank you; this was catharsis. The amount of times someone decries any argument as a slippery slope fallacy based only on the merit that we are trying to figure out a trend is... far too common and it just really upsets you, yah know?
SerLava 5y ago
Great post. Connecting motive and opportunity is not a fallacy
stjohnswarts 5y ago
It's not a fallacy as we have the whole human history of governance to point at and show how similar overreaches for power have always happened with governments and why the bill of rights should present in spirit even in day to to day goings on where privacy is a concern. Apple acting as a proxy for government is just as bad as the government doing it. Slipery slope indeed.
Valakas_ 5y ago
Agree. People, especially from what I see, less socially savy people who need a fool-proof way of trying to win by force any discussion, nowadays have been using logical fallacies and logical soundness of an argument as the ultimate way to win an argument which is BS. There is a reason why our brain evolved to use probability and make logical fallacies to form judgements. Granted, it doesn't work all the time, but it does work A LOT. Example: Ad hominem - true, often people start attacking the person in order to escape the argument altogether, and because they have no good counterpoint. But again, this just shows lack of social intelligence. Maybe, we cannot counter-argument that person, but we show that they have ulterior motives, that they are a bad person, and whatever they're cooking, even if it seems ok by their current words, and I can't refute their well thought out position and explain my intuition, he's going to do something bad really soon. So, don't listen to him. Logical fallacies are useful to be known, but they lately tend to be overused as the end all of "you're making a logical fallacy therefore you fail."
yung_steezy 5y ago
Any logical argument which is inductive is technically fallacy. The way people use the phrase "fallacy" as a checkmate in online discussions, but this ignores the fact that all empirical study is fallacious strictly.

by jerf 5y ago

ShrigmaMale 5y ago

Ahh yes, the slippery slope fallacy fallacy: assuming that all slippery slope arguments are fallacious. https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/987274961659232256?lang=en https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/987274961659232256...

godelski 5y ago
> assuming that all slippery slope arguments are fallacious. They literally stated when it is and isn't a fallacy with differentiating conditions...
- voltaireodactyl 5y ago
  > Slippery slope fallacy fallacy I believe the poster you’re responding to is making a joke.
  - godelski 5y ago
    Ops. Sometimes those things don't come across as well over text. My mistake.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

mikepurvis 5y ago

As in all things, it's important to seek out evidence elsewhere that it might exist. For example, the US is already significantly "behind" many other developed nations in terms of not just how much surveillance and censorship is tolerated, but also in other freedom-oriented areas like choice to own firearms, choice of whether to have medical insurance, etc. So it shouldn't really be necessary to have any of these arguments based on speculated future scenarios when you can look to Canada, the UK, Australia, etc, and see that slight increases in surveillance, censorship, gun regulation, health care availability, etc might actually have some benefits and certainly don't necessarily put you in the instant quicksand toward fascism/communism/scary scenario X.

JadeNB 5y ago
> So it shouldn't really be necessary to have any of these arguments based on speculated future scenarios when you can look to Canada, the UK, Australia, etc, and see that slight increases in surveillance, censorship, gun regulation, health care availability, etc might actually have some benefits and certainly don't necessarily put you in the instant quicksand toward fascism/communism/scary scenario X. There are a lot of benefits to living in countries with different governance approaches from the in many ways ultra-laissez faire approach taken in the US, but I don't think you'll find many takers here for the idea that the physical and internet surveillance of the UK and Australia are a model to which to look forward.
- mikepurvis 5y ago
  Oh I know. I'm being downvoted to oblivion already— that's the reality of HN being US-centric (I'm Canadian). But my point is less about taking a stand on any of one of those issues and more just that US-based advocates making slippery-slope arguments often resort to wide-eyed speculation about the future rather than evidence because they're unaware of or unwilling to acknowledge what the realities are elsewhere in the world.
- namdnay 5y ago
  To play devils advocate for a bit, London is an incredibly safe city at night compared to say Paris or Rome or Madrid or Amsterdam. I’m pretty sure part of that is down to the staggering amount of cameras

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago

"Slippery slope" is so overused that we forget the original analogy. It needs to have a pressure in one direction and very little to resist that pressure. That is, it has to have a slope and that slope has to be slippery. In this particular case, it's a slipper slope on which we already have a ton of momentum.

wyager 5y ago

It’s not a fallacy at all under Bayesian reasoning; it’s a very powerful heuristic.

jerf 5y ago
One of the blog posts I'd like to write but probably never will is an examination of the logical fallacies that are fallacies under an Aristotelian, true/false view of the world, but are valid under a Bayesian point of view. A simple one is that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. It's a "fallacy" because absence of evidence is correctly not proof of absence, so in an Aristotelian framework where something is either true or false, it is indeed a fallacy to claim that absence of evidence proves absence. However, from a Bayesian perspective it is indeed evidence, though one must be careful in how ones works the math to determine how strong that evidence is. Sometimes it's so weak as to be irrelevant, but sometimes it can be overwhelming.

kordlessagain 5y ago

Political leaders feel compelled to provide a “service” in which they “solve” societal problems. Not all problems can be solved across the board, however, so what happens is a sideways motion into violations of privacy in exchange for a visible “difference” in handling illegal behavior which was previously beyond the reach of law enforcement. This fallacy is a direct result of the technologies developed and discussed here, so we’re all culpable for what has been already laid down. Maybe keeping this in mind with AI will help, but given corporate stakeholders, probably not.

visualradio 5y ago
Getting rid of patents would probably help. With stuff like phones there's probably plenty of options for mass production of open source hardware modules purchasable from electronic hobbyist stores anonymously with cash which would allow anyone to build their own personal communicator with radio, SIM, wifi, quantum, etc modules. The issue is that competitive mass production of many independent compatible modules would required a public description of an applied system that everyone can debate and discuss and agree to on technical merits, but people self-censor and don't want to share ideas for such applied systems online because they think some monopolist is going to patent everything in order to arbitrarily halt development for 20 years. In order to achieve such a cultural shift it might be necessary to reform the religions.
pydry 5y ago
There's no reason to assume that political actors pushing for this are acting in honest, mistaken good faith.

unbalancedevh 5y ago

> Slippery slope is also a fallacy if you take one instance of a trend and then logically project it to an absurd extreme, but this is not what we're doing here. We're simply looking at the next obvious, logical, well-evidenced step, with plenty of people who obviously want this even if they are a bit too discreet to come right out and say it in public. What makes it easy to oversell as a fallacy is that everything you described that defines it is subjective, and easily argued about. People disagree a lot on what's "absurd" or "obvious" or "well-evidenced."

joek1301 5y ago

I think Scott Alexander’s piece on slippery slopes and Schelling fences [1] does a nice job delineating between good- and bad-faith slippery slope arguments. “Slippery slopes legitimately exist wherever a policy not only affects the world directly, but affects people's willingness or ability to oppose future policies.” [1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-...

cataphract 5y ago
Another good reference is Eugene Volokh's "The Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope": https://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/slippery.pdf https://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/slippery.pdf
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

SLWW 5y ago

Thank you; this was catharsis. The amount of times someone decries any argument as a slippery slope fallacy based only on the merit that we are trying to figure out a trend is... far too common and it just really upsets you, yah know?

SerLava 5y ago

Great post. Connecting motive and opportunity is not a fallacy

stjohnswarts 5y ago

It's not a fallacy as we have the whole human history of governance to point at and show how similar overreaches for power have always happened with governments and why the bill of rights should present in spirit even in day to to day goings on where privacy is a concern. Apple acting as a proxy for government is just as bad as the government doing it. Slipery slope indeed.

Valakas_ 5y ago

Agree. People, especially from what I see, less socially savy people who need a fool-proof way of trying to win by force any discussion, nowadays have been using logical fallacies and logical soundness of an argument as the ultimate way to win an argument which is BS. There is a reason why our brain evolved to use probability and make logical fallacies to form judgements. Granted, it doesn't work all the time, but it does work A LOT. Example: Ad hominem - true, often people start attacking the person in order to escape the argument altogether, and because they have no good counterpoint. But again, this just shows lack of social intelligence. Maybe, we cannot counter-argument that person, but we show that they have ulterior motives, that they are a bad person, and whatever they're cooking, even if it seems ok by their current words, and I can't refute their well thought out position and explain my intuition, he's going to do something bad really soon. So, don't listen to him. Logical fallacies are useful to be known, but they lately tend to be overused as the end all of "you're making a logical fallacy therefore you fail."

yung_steezy 5y ago

Any logical argument which is inductive is technically fallacy. The way people use the phrase "fallacy" as a checkmate in online discussions, but this ignores the fact that all empirical study is fallacious strictly.