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J_Taylor comments on The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world? - Less Wrong
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This is the original definition given for TWAITW. Note that the examples Yvain gave all had the form of: "X is in a category whose archetypal member has certain negative features. Therefore, we should judge X as if it also had those features." However, working with the explicit definition outlined by Yvain, as opposed to the implicit definition used by Yvain, we can easily conjure liberal examples:
Other liberal examples, using Yvain's implicit definition:
However, I am not entirely sure if our capacity to conjure examples matters.
Edit: Changed the free speech examples.
I very much like "Abortion is a medical procedure". It's actually a believable WAitW to make, and has the admirable feature that it completely ignores every aspect of abortion relevant to the debate.
I think the "free speech" examples don't quite have the right form: the central question probably is whether or not pornography or flag burning is free speech, and the conclusion "Flag burning is free speech, therefore it should be legal" is valid if you accept the premise.
It seems rather probable that the free speech examples were problematic. As such, the post has been edited.
I really like "Abortion is a medical procedure". I suspect that we could remove some of the mind-killing by presenting the examples in pairs:
Hmm, creating these pairs is harder than I thought.
No problem here. Not even non-central.
Indeed. Many evolutionary biologists are highly dismissive of evopsych. In evolutionary biology you have to start with a variation in a trait, in an environment where - overall, over all interactions - one side of the variation gets a strong enough advantage... then there's genetic studies, and so on. One has to deal with the bother of doing a whole lot of actual science.
If you look at evolutionary psychology - Tooby and Cosmides, or Pinker, that's folks literally making up caveman stories with no well defined physical traits and mechanisms to start with, no demonstration that a trait is a net benefit, no genetics... and, usually, not even any evolution, in the sense that there's no identification of the original proto-trait and it's gradual path of evolution.
You misunderstand me. Dspeyer used it above as an example of a non-central fallacy, implying that Ev Psych is not very much like what science is. I meant to disagree. To the extent of my awareness, Ev Psych makes predictions and tests them, and goes on to build up theories, making it a typical example of a science.
I'm not so sure when you say it doesn't specifically use evolutionary theory in the same way Biologists normally do, and thus it's not a science. Even if that were true, that's like saying Meteorology isn't a science because they don't always use meteors in their work. I think that if you want to say something isn't a science, you need to show that it doesn't make falsifiable predictions, doesn't describe the world, and hasn't made any advances in our knowledge. Furthermore, you should really have a good explanation as to why Ev Psych people get scientific funding and have papers published in specific Ev Psych journals. And finally, if you're going to dismiss a field, you should be very knowledgeable about said field (or have other very strong evidence, like the studies showing Psychoanalysis is useless). You can't really make that decision that a field is bad, without that sort of evidence, even if it just seems that way to you.
I don't see where in your link EvPsy first makes a falsifiable prediction and then tests it. The experiment described looks like data mining for correlations to me. The expression "was almost exactly what a Darwinian would predict" is yet another post-factum story.
Well perhaps it's not a good example, although that this single example doesn't work doesn't remove the burden of evidence required to dismiss a field.
And then again, maybe it is a good example.
Are there any good examples?
You seem to have some strong privileging of a hypothesis going on here.
What prior would you assign to the scientific competence of a field purporting to be a science, that has journals and textbooks and experts, that's based on an extension of good theory (evolution)? I'm aware that you have more evidence than this, from (I imagine) online discussions and you've read some of the experts, but I've not had this experience, and I think that I am more likely to misunderstand an area of science than to have understood it better than its proponents.
Just like astrology, then? :-) It's based on "an extension of good theory", too...
Whether something is a science is not decided by how many sciency-looking accoutrements and trappings it has.
Someone uttering this may claim that they are not using the worst argument in the world as defined:
They claim that it does have the critical features in question. Even the person they are arguing against may agree that it is equivalent to shouting out loud "My country is a @#$% disgrace! Screw my country!". The disagreement seems to be whether one should be permitted to do that kind of thing.
"Flag burning is freedom" should be a legitimate example along the same lines.
I do not possess any particularly strong intuitions regarding freedom of speech, for better or for worse. For this hypothetical arguer, could you outline what they think are the critical features?
Something along the lines of being able to say (or otherwise express) whatever you wish without fear of punishment.
How would you say the War on Some Drugs is different than Prohibition?
I wouldn't say that. However, I also wouldn't say that the War on Drugs is the same as Prohibition. I do not have any opinions on these matters that I view as worth stating at this time.
I would say that the War on Some Drugs is sufficiently like Prohibition to make this not an instance of the WAitW. It's still a fairly weak argument, since it's lacking in details, but I don't think it's trying to sneak in any connotations, and I think basically all of the problems with Prohibition are also problems with the War on Some Drugs.
Prohibition was unpopular with a large portion of the population. It caused a lowered respect for the law in general, because so many people casually broke the law in response. It funded organized violent crime. It invaded personal liberty in order to prevent something that only caused harm as a contributing element, not direct harm. It didn't work.
Prohibition was a war on a different subset of drugs. It had a constitutional amendment that made it unquestionably legal for the federal government to be doing. It had few medical implications. There was not an obvious historical argument that it would fail catastrophically when it was implemented.
In other words, I think one could reasonably come to different conclusions on the two cases based on cost/benefit analyses, but I think it's reasonable to call them two instances of the same thing. I also think it's reasonable to say that most of the reasons Prohibition was bad also apply to the War on Some Drugs.
As an example of the fallacy, I think it's less than ideal.
There seems to be a significant difference between "prohibition" and "war on drugs" to me, that may justify it being WAitW : prohibition is attacking a behavior that most people actually do. Nearly everyone drinks alcohol, at least on special occasions. While drugs (even the "softer" of the prohibited one, cannabis) are only used by a small fraction (in the USA, where it's pretty high, according to Wikipedia, it's 13% who used cannabis at least once in 2009). I'm not in favor of "war on drugs" (in my opinion, it has a lot of negative consequences and doesn't work well at all at reducing drug usage), but there is a significant difference between forbidding something "everyone" does and something 10% of the population does, and "prohibition" does bring in the "forbidding something everyone does" connotation.
I would find it more accurate to call the ban on filesharing "prohibition" than to call war on drugs "prohibition" (but both are a form of WAitW).
You think that more people have tried filesharing than drugs?
Tried, I would say it depends of the age group. But "tried once in your life" is not the most important for prohibition issues, it's people using it regularly the real issue.
So, do it regularly (at least once a year) ? It's hard to find stats on filesharing usage, but the data I remember is about 1/3 of people with internet access using p2p, which is about 2/3 of the population, so 2/9 = 22%, nearly twice the 13% who used cannabis "once per year". Cannabis is not the only durg, but p2p isn't the only form of filesharing, so it more or less compensates.
Is that your real question? It feels like you're objecting to something else or asking an entirely different question, like, say, "Does filesharing really deserve the 'prohibition' connotations more than drugs?".
That's my real question. I'm not really objecting to anything, I just found the implied estimate surprising.
Thanks for clarifying.
Unlike the other examples, this one doesn't really fit the pattern: it's "X is like Y" and not "X belongs to category Y". The difference is that "X is like Y" does not sneak in any connotations; it's well understood that "The War on Drugs is Prohibition" is a rhetorical way of saying "The War on Drugs is very similar to the Prohibition of the 1930s".
"Affirmative action is like hanging people just because they're black!" doesn't carry the same sneaky rhetoric as "Affirmative action is racist!"