Comments on: Why ’slippery slope’ is not a fallacy

By: dave

dave — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:22:08 +0000

Well, for the record, for eight (seemingly interminal) years I made an effort not to casually slur Bush, and publicly chastised people for calling him stupidI’m not the usage police or anything and as I’ve said, ad hominem arguments can at times be somewhat compelling, but simple name-calling is something that turns me off whether I agree that Nixon is a tricky Dick or not.I believe, and I could well be totally wrong about this (hopefully not) name calling, attacking strawmen and the like is something that is applauded by true believers but doesn’t, on whole, advance ones position with undecideds or soften the fervor of the opposition
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Like ad hominem arguments, guilt by association can be quite compelling. As you note, it dpends on things like the strength of the association, its relevance to the topic at hand, etc.. Like generalizations from extremely small samples (two ouot of two freon smugglers were Arabs) they can, at the very least, cause the night watchman to wake up. When it goes to 4 out of 4, he should even open his eyes. When five out of six are arabs and friends of Bill W, you might even ask for some funding to run an investigation.
IOW, they’re fallacious in that the premise could be true and the conclusion false, they can be very suggestive.
Years ago I served on a jury of six, deciding whether this guy was drunk when he drove from KC to Lawrence. No individual piece of evidence was conclusive (actually, the breathylizer was, there was an admitted screw up in the administration, but the prosecutor didn’t make at all clear that it was simply a matter of turning the machine on before reading him his rights, which was item one on the checklist. That was a question of admissibility, which the Judge had already ruled on. It had no bearing on the relilability of the test). So I, at least, thought we should seriously discuss it (every single piece of evidence having some flaw). Whoa! Turned out I was unable to persuade my peers that the totality of the evidence could be conclusive without one single piece of infallible proofWe’d have hung had I not finally rationalized that we had to find, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he was so drunk that he could not safely operate a car. No one disputed that he drove from Independence MO, through KC and to Lawrence without incident until he was arrested while parking at home. So persuading me that it was impossible to drive safely required at least some argument as to why he appeared to have done so. If I had it to do over again, I’d have stayed the couorse.(One thing the prosecutor was foiled on in voir dire was finding out if any of us sometimes drank and drive. I was at the peak of my alcoholism at the time, and thus I was actually the DAs best friend on the jury: I knew he was pieeyed;I heard in his testimony the speech of a fellow traveller
Anyway, how you present your views is your own deal, I just feel it would reflect better on you and your opinions if you left out the name calling, guilt by association, etc.. It’s not as if you don’t have enough material to work with otherwise. It was easy not to call Bush a moron when I could say “look, he’s not an idiot, but he did say “x”, where x was some idiotic thing While my impression of Mr. Obama (where “Mr.” just implies that he’s an adult male, which I’m certain he is) is very different from mine, I thought he shared one important trait with Senator McCain: he was not only a professional politician, he aspired to the presidency. I haven’t voted for a major-party presidential nominee since Mondale I was young and foolish then. Being a weasel, and a self-important one at that, is axiomatic. The intent of my vote is almost always primarily to stand against the two-party duopoly we have. I at least want Root Beer on the menu (even if it’s bad rootbeer) rather than just Coke and Pepsi. What I’d really like, though, is a good chocolate malt.

By: bbbeard

bbbeard — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:46:07 +0000

Well, I admit I get tired of referring to Mr. Obama as “Mr. Obama”, because I feel he has done nothing to earn this respect, and has in turn made every effort to demonize and to alienate “bitter-clinger” people like me. My co-blogger Luke has asked me to stop capitalizing pronouns referring to Mr. Obama, to stop referring to his Godhood, and to stop using his initials, so I have tried to expunge these tics from my writing. However, I would feel more motivated if critics of Mr. Bush showed anything like a similar restraint. Instead we got eight years of “selected, not elected” and “Bushitler” and “village idiot” and “war criminal” — I still get email and read blog posts along these lines (see, e.g., Roger Ebert’s recent blog post about Bill O’Reilly). For that matter, mainstream media admirers of Mr. Obama continue to refer to his Godhood (try googling “Evan Thomas Obama God”). Naturally the left would like to silence criticism of this adulation, while saying nothing about the inappropriateness of this sin. Given that the left likes to conflate Mr. Obama’s personal popularity with endorsement of his disastrous policies, it seems fair game to me to deflate this adulation at the same time we are arguing about his policies.
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So I don’t think you’re analyzing my statements correctly. This is not “ad hominem”. That is, I am not implying Mr. Obama’s policies are disastrous because he’s a bad man, I am saying that one should disregard the adulation he receives from some quarters when evaluating his policies.
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And, like “slippery slope”, the “association fallacy” is only fallacious if the association is immaterial. Mr. Obama himself has specifically named Jeremiah Wright, Saul Alinsky, and Frank Marshall Davis as intellectual heroes. Mr. Obama himself has said that he sought out Marxists professors at Columbia. This is not “guilt by association”. This is an analysis of Mr. Obama’s intellectual roots. And it explains his approach to economics and foreign policy.
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And no doubt you are aware of the most flagrant abuse of the term “guilt by association” — by leftists defending the Stalinist infiltration of the United States government during the ’30’s and ’40’s. It is simply a fact that Stalin managed to place hundreds of agents in government, industry, and cultural positions, including positions close to the President (try googling ‘Harry Dexter White’). It is simply a fact that the Hollywood Ten were guilty as hell. I admit, chagrined as ever, that the left has been fabulously successful in deflecting criticism of this treason by the tendentious use of terms like “guilt by association” — but is this really the precedent you want to use in deflecting criticism of Mr. Obama?
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Best regards, BBB

By: dave

dave — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 13:51:51 +0000

BTW, I was just thinking of ad hominem arguments and I was reminded of your penchant for refering to the only president we have as ‘dear leader’. For that matter the guilt-by-association involved in pointing to his ties to Ayers,Wright etal is an ad hominem argument, but as I’ve already said, being an informal fallacy doesn’t mean ‘without evidentiary value’, just that it doesn’t establish the conclusion. Simple name-calling, thoughy, is (I think) an egregiously bad form of argumnentation, and it pains me to see it from you. Not that I’ve never done it myself, but I avoid it if I’m seriously presenting an opinion (as opposed to drinking beer with my pinko pals, when I just feel a bit dirty for doing it).

By: dave

dave — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:50:56 +0000

Yeah, as I mentioned M Moore later I thought, hmmm-another MM. Still, your writing reminds me so much of the other one it scares me-could intelligent and informed people possibly believe that ?
Suffice it to say I disagree with your estimation of our president. Seems to me that to the extent his actions have varied from his words its been to act more conservative He also seems like a bright guy to me. Not as smart as you or Marijke (who comforts me with the knowledge that people far smarter than I can be way more liberal), but bright compared to GWB, who I for one never accused of being stupid. Not smart, but not stupid.
I think we pretty much agree on sllippery slope arguments. You need to at least give reason to believe that the slope will be slipped, as I said something akin to a math.induction argument. I guess the strength of the argument varies, as ad hominem arguments do (and they can be fairly powerful: showing that on your principles your argument can’t be stated is ad hominem for instance, something Wittgenstein in the Tractatus knew of himnself and tried to dance around- ‘It’s like a ladder you throw away after reaching the top’)
The idea of medical privacy actually stems from the earlier Griswold v Ct. case, where a substantive due process right to privacy was found. (The decision yesteday in the DNA case indicated pretty clearly that Roberts and probably all of the more conservative justices simply don’t believe in substantive due process). A KC Star columnist last week, btw, wrote the first article I eveer read that actually understood the basis of the Roe decision. It was fundamentally based-at least per Blackmun- on a doctors right to provide best care according to the cannons of medicine free from unwarranted state intrusion, much more than a ‘womens right to choose’. Subsequent rulings have probably shifted the legal bvasis more that way- I don’t follow the law that closely (but more than econ or science/math, both of which I do try to keep up with.
Digressing a bit, Kruugman has been at times very critical of Obama, although he thinks he’s a very intelligent man, and in his most recent column gave a mixed review of the new financial oerhaul plan, concluding with a remark that it doesn’t do enough to regulate bankers compensation (which is the first step on your slope). PK , I’m sure, endorse DeLongs view that bankers should be paid as people in Silicon Valley are- with large amounts of restricted stock that has to be held ten years. So they work hard and smart to make the company strong ten years from now, instead of how bankers are paid now, by claiming a large profit this year on a mark to market basis, even though you couldn’t sell it at that price if you actually tried.
Incedentally, do you know about this: http://market-ticker.denninger.net/archives/1119-The-Saga-Of-The-Bearer-Bonds.html ?Very strange, and scary actually. If they turn out to be real it would likely destroy the dollar.
And then there http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2009/06/15/heres-how-messed-up-our-financial-system-is.aspx . My favorite story of the year.

By: bbbeard

bbbeard — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 01:02:13 +0000

I think Debbie means MM=Michael Moore. She’s just pulling my chain (we used to date in high school). She’s smart, competent, pretty, and has a highly developed sense of what makes me tick. Which explains a lot.
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Rather than being a starting point, I came to a highly nuanced view of Obama being a lying, Stalinist moron by studying his background, influences, friends, and in particular how he handled his friends in various political crises. I don’t know that it’s “ingrained’, but it would take a lot to persuade me that he doesn’t lie, that he’s actually smart, and that he’s not… well, okay, “Stalinist” is probably hyperbole. Maybe “Trotskyite”.
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We know Obama has lied about his relationship to Bill Ayers, his relationship to Jeremiah Wright, his relationship to Rashid Khalidi, and his dealings with Rod Blagoyevich.
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We know he’s not good with numbers — his constant verbal slips (”57 states”, “that’s my committee”) are one thing — everybody makes verbal slips — but it is worrisome that he doesn’t seem to understand that 100 million dollars is not a large fraction of 1.8 trillion.
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We know he’s not good with history, or economics, or diplomacy — or consumer electronics. He seems to think that Muslims invented the magnetic compass, which was news to the Chinese government — and, more ignorantly, he seems to think Islam is a font of enlightenment and peace in the world (even Muslims know it’s not). He didn’t anticipate that mushrooming the deficit from $250 billion to $1.8 trillion would NOT be stimulative. That amount of borrowing is crashing the credit markets and putting us on the knife-edge of inflation/deflation. He doesn’t seem to understand that Britain and Israel are our friends, and that Iran and North Korea are not. And don’t get me started on the Region 1 / Region 2 DVD gaffe.
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The truth is that I think he doesn’t even realize what poisonous intellectual waters he’s been swimming in for decades. He attended Columbia and Harvard, and we still don’t know what he studied or how he fared, because he won’t release his transcripts. We know from his best-selling autobio that he sought out Marxist professors, a comment he has never been asked to explain, AFAIK. His record at HLaw is blank — and those were the years that “Critical Legal Studies” (aka “destroying the system from within”) were all the rage. For 20 years he listened to the sermons at the Trinity United Church of Christ, whose pastors hold to the view that the United States is a force for evil and racism in the world, and that 9/11 was a justified attack on us. His intellectual idols are Saul Alinsky and Frank Marshall Davis. His patron in Chicago politics is Bill Ayers. The CAC slush fund he ran funneled money to Mike Klonsky. The last four folks I mention all have big-C Communist ties — so feigning outrage that I’m some kind of troglo-McCarthyite for suggesting he may have been influenced by these friends is outrage that is outweighed by the evidence.
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Whew. I know, by now you think this is a rant. It’s not. I’m just laying out the case that I think explains all of Obama’s actions to date.
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Hypothetically, if a President were a stalwart big-C fellow-traveler, what would he do different from what Obama is doing now? He is crashing our economic system, putting major industries under government control, making moves to dictate pay in the private sector, trying to federalize the health-care system, apologizing to the rest of the world for our “sins”, defenestrating military procurement programs, freeing terrorists, threatening to censor critics, centralizing control of the census under the White House, and, come on — a Portuguese water dog? Dead giveaway…. Ted Kennedy has a Portuguese water dog named “Splash” (I can’t make this stuff up).
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Oh, and the pretext: I, too, was surprised to read that “slippery slope” is considered a classical informal fallacy. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope. IMV the fallacy is being too lazy to connect the dots. If you can show a plausible and likely path from point A to point B, and give cogent reasons to believe we are risking B by accepting A, then it’s not a fallacy.
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A good example is abortion. When Roe v Wade federalized an abortion right, critics said it would lead to a right to, and ultimately a demand for, assisted suicide. Proponents of abortion rights dismissed this argument, saying that slippery slope arguments are invalid. Of course, the critics’ arguments were well-researched, thoughtful, and detailed. And time has shown them to be correct. Assisted suicide jurisprudence relies heavily on Roe v Wade and the concepts of medical privacy it invented. And now, in 2009, reports of coerced assisted suicide aren’t even news anymore.
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As always, a pleasure to hear from you! BBB

By: dave

dave — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:02:43 +0000

I certainly don’t start with a deeply ingrained view that Obama is a lying,moronic Stalinist. Yes, I bellieve they don’t want to set compensation levels-I don’t think he personally wants to and if he did he certainly wouldn’t have people like Geithner and Summers (and a marginalized Volker) in charge of his economic agenda. Nor would he have run Robert Reich off (as he rightly did. I’ll get back to him).
I still believe he never wanted to take GM over, and wants out as soon as practible (which is sort of unfortunate,because it means selling those shares before they make much of a profit for the treasury. Assuming they eventually would have).
Anyway, I came here to talk about fallacies. I’m unaware of ’slippery slopes’ ever being used as a type of fallacy. It shouldn’t be, because it seems offhand that it would be easy to construct such slopes with a bit of (mathematical) induction.
OTOH, ad hominem is actually a family of arguments, including most prominently the abusive kind often taken as “ad hominem” simple, as well as appeals to authority. Neither is formally valid, yet neither is (necessarily) without probitive value. If I look at footnotes and bibliography and see nothing but references to von Daniken, Velikovsky and ‘the annals of the mutual UFO network’ I won’t read the article, unless I have a need to (I’m being paid to refute it). On the other side, I accept your conclusions concerning an aircraft design even though I can’t follow your reasoning. Just as with the abusive argument, the appeal to authority survives in the human population because we aren’t perfectly rational, we’re nearly rationalIN our world the perfect is the enemy of the good. I think you understand my claim here
So when I read Debbies remarks I saw someone I agree with, and assume that MM is Michelle Malkin since you seem to be accepting uncritically everything she says. I wouldn’t know, since after the second column of hers I read I never again read more than a paragraph. Unlike Jonah Goldberg, who I sometimes actually agree with, I’ve never found any of MMs comments to be worth the infuriation of reading, and it saddens me to see someone whose intellect I admire parroting views that I find not only abhorrent but ignorant
An another subject, i read the M Moore piece you referenced. I like Mike, and often agree with him. This was the kind of article that gives liberals a bad name. Unlike Reich, it doesn’t even appear to make sense. Drawing upon the economic theories of Reich and his cronies (clinton and Magaziner for instance)is another way to get me to turn the page. I don’t think Cintonomics did anything terrible for the economy, but I don’t think Reagonomics did either. They both had a modestly negative legacies, but both were based on crackpot theories of economics

By: bbbeard

bbbeard — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 03:44:32 +0000

If you believe they don’t want to set compensation levels, you probably believed them when they said they didn’t want to take over GM, either….

By: dave

dave — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:52:49 +0000

Oh, that story. The one where they don’t plan on setting compensation levels. The one where they plan to change SEC rules to make it easier for shareholders to control salaries,make the process more transpparent to shareholders, and make sure that compensation comittees are independent of the executives whose compensation they are setting. IOW, to let markets determine compensation rather than cronieism.

By: bbbeard

bbbeard — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:27:04 +0000

…leads me to wonder if BBB and MM are secretly-–lovers?
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On the other hand, I think ad hominem attacks still qualify as fallacies. What MM and I do in the privacy of the hot tub is our business.
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BBB

By: dave

dave — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 11:19:06 +0000

Again, most of my comment was left out. The link to ‘obama administration wants to limit executive pay across the private sector’ gives me a yahoo search page with nothing relevant on it. If this was a flatly true claim I’d think I’d hear the ruckus even if I covered my ears. Last I heard, even the limits on TARP recipients exec. comp. were ineffective.