I like this Wikipedia article, however, I would have preferred it's contents to be transmitted directly to my brain in real time when I opened Hacker News. That would have been so much better.
There's already a solution for that can be made to transmit arbitrary data to the brains of people who know Morse code and have their head in a certain particular orientation that tends to be popular among management:
What do you call the opposite fallacy? The one where any proposed solution is worse than the status quo because of all the things that could hypothetically go wrong?
What-if-ism?
Add: Example: A restaurant that throws away 10% of their supplies each day proposes to donate them instead to a soup kitchen a day before they would normally dispose of them. Then somebody asks, "What if the soup kitchen holds on to them too long and then somebody gets sick from the food we donated and we get sued?"
By definition fallacy is something that looks correct but is wrong due to a sneaky error in reasoning itself. Your case has to do with information not reasoning.
"These anti-drunk driving ad campaigns are not going to work. People are still going to drink and drive no matter what." = fallacy
"These anti-drunk driving ad campaigns are not going to work because a study from 50 years ago sponsored by Big Alcohol definitely proves so." = many possible issues (too lazy/stupid/malicious to check a better study) but no fallacy
I see this a lot when people are looking for some library / framework / programming language / game engine. You keep adding requirements and assume that you can spend some additional time evaluating alternatives to make up for the longer list of requirements you have. Reality is, there are often only a few serious alternatives in the first place. Adding more and more requirements to your search is, in some way, a stubborn refusal to prioritize among those requirements. Prioritization doesn’t just mean affirming that some of your priorities are important, it means acknowledging that some of your priorities are unimportant and can be discarded.
Related is the assumption that any custom-built library you write is going to beat an existing, well-known library that doesn’t exactly match your needs. It’s easy to come up with a list of problems with existing libraries, but your theoretical custom-built library can be perfect, because you’re not imagining that it has any serious bugs or design flaws. You end up building your own solution and, in the process, rediscover why the existing library was built the way it is.
Another related pattern: rock-paper-scissors comparisons.
Say we're looking to choose a library.
A - Let's use FooLib. It seems to be the most widely used.
B - Nah, FooLib's kind of outdated. We should use NeoFoo, it's more modern.
A - Well plain old libfoo is way faster.
B - But FooLib has a way friendlier API...
Because you're not deciding what you care about, instead of a straight bakeoff, each option is in multiple two-way fights where only its strengths or weaknesses over a particular other option are considered relevant. Option 1 beats option 2, beats option 3, beats option 1...
Prioritize your requirements. Try out sentences of these forms:
I would be okay with lower performance if the API is easier to use.
I would prefer a fast implementation of this even if it were unsupported.
If you're not comfortable with them, you have learned something about your true priorities.
> Seat belts are a bad idea. People are still going to die in car crashes.
These examples are _such_ straw arguments. lol. Might as well prefix them with, "so this one time a guy in the subway / buddy of mine in the bar / guy on the radio says..." because at least that'd provide context toward a bit of face-validity.
And first, never reply with a logical fallacy PSA to someone who actually says this. It's a waste of time. Better to understand that logically-stunted sentence as permission to explore other, less-logic-focused ways of influencing them.
So many people who talk like this are not reasoning with logic. The logic is a foil for their emotion.
They are stressed out about things they can't control (seat belt laws for example), terrified of their own future (to say nothing of the world's), and therefore unsuited to this more formal debate & logic approach.
Better to say--"hey. I care about you buddy. I don't care if you think it's a secret plot by the lizard people, I hope you'll wear that seatbelt and not end up looking like one of those crash test dummies when a zombie driver crosses into your lane."
You expose the emotion in the room, you make a caricature of the fear, and you refer back to hard evidence in a visceral way.
But really. Still a straw man. I wish the examples themselves could be better characterized: Is this in a university class setting? A university bar with Ph.D. candidates? Or a bar full of military conscripts at the end of a hard day? Or some mommy blog that you can't help but comment on, as a Ph.D.??
If you know and can acknowledge _any_ of these things you will probably be far better prepared than by knowing about logical fallacies.
Not really. The first one about the anti-drunk driving is pretty similar to what many pro-gun people say: "banning guns won't stop murders". And just answering that the point is reduction seems reasonable in this case.
This is usually just used as a sneak attack on someone's else's suggestion, a way to call it unrealistic without actually making a case that it's unrealistic. Rest assured, the people who tell you not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good do not think that what you suggested is either perfect or good, they just want you to shut up.
The "fallacy" in this vein that I see is when after Bob suggests idea A to solve problem X, Mary says that idea A shouldn't be done because idea B is better for problem X, but Mary also doesn't support idea B. Mary actually supports problem X, but if she admitted that, she would lose her influence on the reaction to problem X.
This is a corollary of the fallacy of relative privation, aka the “kids are starving in Africa so you have no right to complain about anything less severe” fallacy. Both fallaciously dismiss arguments by comparing them to unrealistic extremes.
If the "so you have no right to complain" part actually happened. Many people (including smart ones) throw around popular memes with little regard for whether they are using them legitimately.
This meme has excellent potential for that as the definition is subjective, but not explicitly disclosed as such creating a dependence on the reader to realize this.
Funny you would respond with a fallacious comparison.
Relative privation is not fallacious because comparison was useless. Kids do starve (realistic) and there is even worse in the world (so not an extreme either).
But you need to choose by some metric where to use your abilities, if you don't want to end up being an egotistic hedonist.
You should help to right wrongs in ways amenable to your abilities, not more, not less. Honesty is key obviously, both ways.
Or "Do whatever I say because there's a slight chance if you don't follow my arbitrary rules you will be tortured forever by one of the characters in my arcane storybook"
In my experience, this is how clueless managers try to force their coders into doing the impossible.
I just ran into this, a couple of days ago. We had a usability problem. Basically, the user could end up in a sequential-navigation “rabbithole.” It would be an unlikely scenario, but there was nothing preventing it.
I proposed a solution that I have seen before, where a second “all the way back” button appears, after a prescribed number of stack pushes. This would unwind the entire stack, instead of just jumping back one.
A “kludgy” solution, but one that I actually implemented and demonstrated in about 15 minutes. It was safe, obvious, and bug-free. Probably, 90% of our users would never see this second back button, and, if they did, its function is completely obvious.
Instead, the team leader wanted to hack the Tab Bar, so that the selected item would enable, after the stack started, and would do the same thing as the “all the way back” button. This was actually a more elegant solution.
This would have required messing with the tab bar, or replacing it with a toolbar. Since the app had been designed from the start as a tab bar app, the second option would have required a complete rewrite of the app structure, and the first option could risk strange bugs, and, almost certainly, issues with future screen configurations and operating system updates. I’ve hacked the tab bar before, and regretted it.
I made every effort to give them what they wanted, but there was really no way to do it, without that rewrite. Since the app is at about the 70% complete stage, this would be a disaster.
I put my foot down, and insisted on my kludgy solution, while making the toolbar implementation a “2.0” feature. I really don’t like to throw my weight around, like that. I think it damages team cohesiveness, and intimidates creative discussion, but it needed to be done.
There needs to be a common understanding of iterative development, tradeoffs, solution design etc. It should be possible to get to pragmatic solutions without someone throwing weight. But it needs a good leader to get there.
Maybe related to this but with different framing, I actually think comparing the real world to the ideal can help us prioritize and take steps towards making improvements.
For example: I think abortions should be legal, but in an ideal world the number of abortions would be near zero because access to social safety nets, birth control, and sex education is plentiful.
The thing about reality is that it forces us to deal with engineering constraints, and we have to carefully consider and understand the tradeoffs being made.
That's usually a shorthand for a child's limited understanding of complex factors when parents are too tired or unable to explain things better - not an actual moral claim.
Something I say often is "utopia means 'no place'" or "no such place as utopia" - people too often focus on trying to build a perfect world/thing/product/whatever rather than focusing on how to exist in an imperfect world.
That at least is a name that somewhat represents the idea. Nirvana was a poor choice and probably stems from a misunderstanding of the idea by the economist.
I read a memoir once by a serviceman who heard endless complaints that things were screwed up in the service because the situation was “not real army”. He called it the “real army carrot” because it was intended to get you to stick around until you could experience this mythical “real army” situation. The last straw was when someone said “that’s because we’re at war, real army is peacetime”. Seems like the “real army” would be necessary for fighting wars.
I see the same problem with the various lists of cognitive biases, rethoric devices, etc.
I think the trick is to see them as patterns which should allow you to more easily construct a counter argument - instead of pretending that merely pointing out the pattern itself would already be enough to disqualify the argument.
e.g., in the examples from the "perfect solution" section, they didn't just shut down the discussion with "well, that's a Perfect Solution Fallacy, so your argument is invalid!", they actually explained in each case, why a non-perfect solution is still desirable.
You could compare it with chess: An opponent is absolutely allowed to leave a piece vulnerable and you don't get an automatic win by just pointing out a bad position - you only get an advantage if you actually take the piece.
Most “fallacies” are informal and rhetorical and not direct logical fallacies. Almost no one will say that X is not perfect, therefore it can be discarded. But plenty will focus their argumentation on how X is not perfect and leave the implication on the table that X is not worth bothering with.
By contrast, the transaction cost economics models make-or-buy decisions as rational choice between real, available alternatives, imposing the reality principle at choice time.
In my experience of collective decision-making, it's often the case that more aggressive, less-proven technologies are rejected as unproven or unrealistic, largely because no one wants the reputation in the group of having championed a mistake.
By contrast, people deciding alone often will take the more optimistic choice. In technology, that can mean that person/engineer who's now on the hook finds ways to make the new technology work (and avoid its flaws).
That translates to high-achieving organizations giving individuals the power to decide, but also holding them responsible for the consequences. Whether the "move fast, break things" permission to fail in service of learning new technologies and the problem domain actually works depends on some real capture of knowledge. Probably the job cuts in tech now (particularly at Twitter) are driven by realizing this "real capture" ain't happening.
So it's not enough to avoid the Nirvana fallacy. You also have to get past decision paralysis to learn, but show the lessons you learned are worth something to the company.
Posit (fallacious): Why should I read HN comments, if I'm not going to remember every word verbatim?
Rebuttal: Reading comments can still provide valuable insights, broaden your knowledge, and improve critical thinking skills and reading comprehension, regardless of remembering every word verbatim.
My initial thoughts when reading the headline was more related tot he band and how when something tragic happens to them, they become more popular than they probably would have.
[+] [-] pachico|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Natsu|2 years ago|reply
https://github.com/RonSijm/ButtFish
[+] [-] tbm57|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shermozle|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] photochemsyn|2 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopian_and_dystopian_fiction
[+] [-] kasztelan_|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joemazerino|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freeopinion|2 years ago|reply
What-if-ism?
Add: Example: A restaurant that throws away 10% of their supplies each day proposes to donate them instead to a soup kitchen a day before they would normally dispose of them. Then somebody asks, "What if the soup kitchen holds on to them too long and then somebody gets sick from the food we donated and we get sued?"
[+] [-] minsc_and_boo|2 years ago|reply
There's also an appeal to consequences where if the outcome of something is considered undesirable, then that something must be false.
[+] [-] MichaelZuo|2 years ago|reply
That is a real legal concern in US jurisdictions. I'm fairly certain there's some on-the-record case law too.
Plus, a real system can be almost limitlessly decomposed, the lower bound is the black hole limit.
So it doesn't seem like there could be an inverse fallacy.
[+] [-] throwaway290|2 years ago|reply
"These anti-drunk driving ad campaigns are not going to work. People are still going to drink and drive no matter what." = fallacy
"These anti-drunk driving ad campaigns are not going to work because a study from 50 years ago sponsored by Big Alcohol definitely proves so." = many possible issues (too lazy/stupid/malicious to check a better study) but no fallacy
[+] [-] cperciva|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] renewiltord|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tormeh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klodolph|2 years ago|reply
Related is the assumption that any custom-built library you write is going to beat an existing, well-known library that doesn’t exactly match your needs. It’s easy to come up with a list of problems with existing libraries, but your theoretical custom-built library can be perfect, because you’re not imagining that it has any serious bugs or design flaws. You end up building your own solution and, in the process, rediscover why the existing library was built the way it is.
[+] [-] jameshart|2 years ago|reply
Say we're looking to choose a library.
Because you're not deciding what you care about, instead of a straight bakeoff, each option is in multiple two-way fights where only its strengths or weaknesses over a particular other option are considered relevant. Option 1 beats option 2, beats option 3, beats option 1...Prioritize your requirements. Try out sentences of these forms:
If you're not comfortable with them, you have learned something about your true priorities.[+] [-] themodelplumber|2 years ago|reply
These examples are _such_ straw arguments. lol. Might as well prefix them with, "so this one time a guy in the subway / buddy of mine in the bar / guy on the radio says..." because at least that'd provide context toward a bit of face-validity.
And first, never reply with a logical fallacy PSA to someone who actually says this. It's a waste of time. Better to understand that logically-stunted sentence as permission to explore other, less-logic-focused ways of influencing them.
So many people who talk like this are not reasoning with logic. The logic is a foil for their emotion.
They are stressed out about things they can't control (seat belt laws for example), terrified of their own future (to say nothing of the world's), and therefore unsuited to this more formal debate & logic approach.
Better to say--"hey. I care about you buddy. I don't care if you think it's a secret plot by the lizard people, I hope you'll wear that seatbelt and not end up looking like one of those crash test dummies when a zombie driver crosses into your lane."
You expose the emotion in the room, you make a caricature of the fear, and you refer back to hard evidence in a visceral way.
But really. Still a straw man. I wish the examples themselves could be better characterized: Is this in a university class setting? A university bar with Ph.D. candidates? Or a bar full of military conscripts at the end of a hard day? Or some mommy blog that you can't help but comment on, as a Ph.D.??
If you know and can acknowledge _any_ of these things you will probably be far better prepared than by knowing about logical fallacies.
[+] [-] diehunde|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] russdill|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pessimizer|2 years ago|reply
The "fallacy" in this vein that I see is when after Bob suggests idea A to solve problem X, Mary says that idea A shouldn't be done because idea B is better for problem X, but Mary also doesn't support idea B. Mary actually supports problem X, but if she admitted that, she would lose her influence on the reaction to problem X.
[+] [-] MontyCarloHall|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mistermann|2 years ago|reply
This meme has excellent potential for that as the definition is subjective, but not explicitly disclosed as such creating a dependence on the reader to realize this.
Another excellent point:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36076175
[+] [-] Loquebantur|2 years ago|reply
Relative privation is not fallacious because comparison was useless. Kids do starve (realistic) and there is even worse in the world (so not an extreme either). But you need to choose by some metric where to use your abilities, if you don't want to end up being an egotistic hedonist.
You should help to right wrongs in ways amenable to your abilities, not more, not less. Honesty is key obviously, both ways.
[+] [-] atleastoptimal|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|2 years ago|reply
I just ran into this, a couple of days ago. We had a usability problem. Basically, the user could end up in a sequential-navigation “rabbithole.” It would be an unlikely scenario, but there was nothing preventing it.
I proposed a solution that I have seen before, where a second “all the way back” button appears, after a prescribed number of stack pushes. This would unwind the entire stack, instead of just jumping back one.
A “kludgy” solution, but one that I actually implemented and demonstrated in about 15 minutes. It was safe, obvious, and bug-free. Probably, 90% of our users would never see this second back button, and, if they did, its function is completely obvious.
Instead, the team leader wanted to hack the Tab Bar, so that the selected item would enable, after the stack started, and would do the same thing as the “all the way back” button. This was actually a more elegant solution.
This would have required messing with the tab bar, or replacing it with a toolbar. Since the app had been designed from the start as a tab bar app, the second option would have required a complete rewrite of the app structure, and the first option could risk strange bugs, and, almost certainly, issues with future screen configurations and operating system updates. I’ve hacked the tab bar before, and regretted it.
I made every effort to give them what they wanted, but there was really no way to do it, without that rewrite. Since the app is at about the 70% complete stage, this would be a disaster.
I put my foot down, and insisted on my kludgy solution, while making the toolbar implementation a “2.0” feature. I really don’t like to throw my weight around, like that. I think it damages team cohesiveness, and intimidates creative discussion, but it needed to be done.
[+] [-] quickthrower2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] underwater|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheAceOfHearts|2 years ago|reply
For example: I think abortions should be legal, but in an ideal world the number of abortions would be near zero because access to social safety nets, birth control, and sex education is plentiful.
The thing about reality is that it forces us to deal with engineering constraints, and we have to carefully consider and understand the tradeoffs being made.
[+] [-] n4r9|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skulk|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lr4444lr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] osigurdson|2 years ago|reply
The argument here is there is that improving one thing will make something else worse, therefore nothing is worth doing.
[+] [-] acidburnNSA|2 years ago|reply
https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html
[+] [-] mock-possum|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Brendinooo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtraven|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eikenberry|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] compiler-guy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjklin|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zokier|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thewataccount|2 years ago|reply
From my understanding it's very difficult to make a good faith debate without one of the bajillion fallacy's being applicable somewhere.
Is there a name for the difficulty of making a debate without any single fallacy?
[+] [-] xg15|2 years ago|reply
I think the trick is to see them as patterns which should allow you to more easily construct a counter argument - instead of pretending that merely pointing out the pattern itself would already be enough to disqualify the argument.
e.g., in the examples from the "perfect solution" section, they didn't just shut down the discussion with "well, that's a Perfect Solution Fallacy, so your argument is invalid!", they actually explained in each case, why a non-perfect solution is still desirable.
You could compare it with chess: An opponent is absolutely allowed to leave a piece vulnerable and you don't get an automatic win by just pointing out a bad position - you only get an advantage if you actually take the piece.
[+] [-] avgcorrection|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gpderetta|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] w10-1|2 years ago|reply
In my experience of collective decision-making, it's often the case that more aggressive, less-proven technologies are rejected as unproven or unrealistic, largely because no one wants the reputation in the group of having championed a mistake.
By contrast, people deciding alone often will take the more optimistic choice. In technology, that can mean that person/engineer who's now on the hook finds ways to make the new technology work (and avoid its flaws).
That translates to high-achieving organizations giving individuals the power to decide, but also holding them responsible for the consequences. Whether the "move fast, break things" permission to fail in service of learning new technologies and the problem domain actually works depends on some real capture of knowledge. Probably the job cuts in tech now (particularly at Twitter) are driven by realizing this "real capture" ain't happening.
So it's not enough to avoid the Nirvana fallacy. You also have to get past decision paralysis to learn, but show the lessons you learned are worth something to the company.
[+] [-] gitgud|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tangent-man|2 years ago|reply
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/nibba...
[+] [-] xeromal|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jehb|2 years ago|reply
The Duke Nukem Forever fallacy, maybe?