This comment matches a pretty bad pattern. No doubt you’ve seen it too; e.g., “There were some people who tried to create an orderly society; they were called Nazis”.
That said, it’s definitely worth considering that prisons might find ways of reducing recidivism that we wouldn’t like.
Yes, it does, but why is the pattern bad? It’s a hint at the observation that the potential solution space includes not only rainbows and unicorns, but also some pretty ugly monsters.
In this particular case there is even no implication that the OP himself might belong to this class of ugly monsters, only that his proposed solution creates incentives to look around the solution space mentioned above...
In my mind, the prototypical instance of the pattern is essentially an attempt at the fallacious implication, “You want to create an orderly society; the Nazis wanted to create an orderly society; you’re a Nazi”.
How would you concisely express the idea of “wanting to create orderly societies can lead to bad consequences, we have historical examples, such as the Nazis” without that implication?
You might just have to go with the long form. People are accustomed to pretty bad debating behavior. It’d be great if they could be charitable enough to consider alternate possibilities in a venue like LW, but empirically they often do not.
To be fully clear, I didn’t intend an attack on you. I’ve upvoted your top post; it raises an important concern, and the way it’s expressed makes perfect sense if you don’t confuse it with similarly-phrased fallacious implications.
But even I downvoted it before I thought about it for five seconds, and I felt I had some insight to share into why that was such a common response.
This comment matches a pretty bad pattern. No doubt you’ve seen it too; e.g., “There were some people who tried to create an orderly society; they were called Nazis”.
That said, it’s definitely worth considering that prisons might find ways of reducing recidivism that we wouldn’t like.
Yes, it does, but why is the pattern bad? It’s a hint at the observation that the potential solution space includes not only rainbows and unicorns, but also some pretty ugly monsters.
In this particular case there is even no implication that the OP himself might belong to this class of ugly monsters, only that his proposed solution creates incentives to look around the solution space mentioned above...
In my mind, the prototypical instance of the pattern is essentially an attempt at the fallacious implication, “You want to create an orderly society; the Nazis wanted to create an orderly society; you’re a Nazi”.
How would you concisely express the idea of “wanting to create orderly societies can lead to bad consequences, we have historical examples, such as the Nazis” without that implication?
You might just have to go with the long form. People are accustomed to pretty bad debating behavior. It’d be great if they could be charitable enough to consider alternate possibilities in a venue like LW, but empirically they often do not.
To be fully clear, I didn’t intend an attack on you. I’ve upvoted your top post; it raises an important concern, and the way it’s expressed makes perfect sense if you don’t confuse it with similarly-phrased fallacious implications.
But even I downvoted it before I thought about it for five seconds, and I felt I had some insight to share into why that was such a common response.
That’s OK. I feel that a slight troll aroma tends to improve the complexity of the flavour :-D