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dspeyer comments on Open Thread, April 15-30, 2013 - Less Wrong
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The Linear Interpolation Fallacy: that if a lot of something is very bad, a little of it must be a little bad.
Most common in politics, where people describe the unpleasantness of Somalia or North Korea when arguing for more or less government regulation as if it had some kind of relevance. Silliest is when people try to argue over which of the two is worse. Establishing the silliness of this is easy. Somalia beats assimilation by the borg, so government power is bad. North Korea beats the Infinite Layers of the Abyss, so government power is good. Surely no universal principle of government can be changed by which contrived example I pick.
And, with a little thought, it seems clear that there is some intermediate amount of goverment that supports the most eudaemonia. Figuring out what that amount is and which side of it any given goverment lies on are important and hard questions. But looking at the extremes doesn't tell us anything about them.
(Treating "government power" as a scalar can be another fallacy, but I'll leave that for another post.)
More nasty details: An amount of government which supports the most eudaemonia in the short term, may not be the best in the long term. For example, it could create a situation where the government can expand easily and has natural incentives to expand. Also, the specific amount of government may depend significantly on the technological level of society; inventions like internet or home-made pandemic viruses can change it.
I think the "non-scalar" point is a much more important take-away.
Generalizing: "Many concepts which people describe in linear terms are not actually linear, especially when those concepts involve any degree of complexity."
Some discussion of that
I've seen that applied to all kinds of things, ranging from vitamines to sentences starting with “However”, to name the first two that spring to mind.