On 11/10/03 8:50 PM, "Andrew Lih" <alih(a)hku.hk> wrote: At least according to Wikipedia, "the straw man rhetorical technique is the practice of refuting weaker arguments than your opponents actually offer." That is what people have been doing. Your use of the word "crying"--when describing what people are doing in a textual medium--unnecessarily vilifies the posters. For one, slippery slope arguments are fallacies too. Secondly, you actually made a straw man argument again: "when standards for 'articleness' are lowered". I am not advocating lowering standards for 'articleness'. Rather, others are advocating changing the standards, and claiming that the new standards are the "real" standards and that any other position is for lower standards. Thirdly, slippery slope arguments are generally connected to a further straw man argument when the "what if" scenario is deemed to be bad and used to attack the original position. Finally, I hope you're not trying to characterize what James Duffy wrote above as a reasonable "what if" argument.

On 11/10/03 11:01 PM, "Andrew Lih" <alih(a)hku.hk> wrote: Yes. Have you ever heard the saying "Little strokes fell mighty oaks?" I like that one because it rhymes. So? Yes, they are. By definition it is a fallacy. Slippery slope arguments, by definition, are missing the connecting tissue. You seem to have a basic misunderstanding of logical fallacies.

Andrew Lih wrote: I'd agree with that, and calling it a fallacy is often a sneaky attempt by opponents of a particular issue to evade the real questions. The basic issue is that it is a fact that moving in a direction makes it easier to move further in that direction. When we move 5 arbitrary units in a direction, things that were 10 in that direction are now 5. It would be a fallacy to say it is *inevitable* that then we will go the additional five, but it is entirely logical to say it is now *more likely* we will do so, and thus a legitimate point of contention for those who oppose doing anything to make such an outcome more likely. To pick one example, it is often held that if we begin allowing the government to intrude on our privacy with anti-terrorism legislation like the Patriot Act, this will set the stage for more intrusive legislation to follow--the new more-intrusive legislation is, by comparison, no longer a huge power grab, only an incremental one. This isn't a fallacy, but simple fact, and empirically attested to by legislative history. If The Cunctator's argument was correct, "precedent" would be a logical fallacy, which it is most certainly not: precedent is appealed to all the time. The fact that something happens today makes it more likely that something similar will happen in the future, as today's act will be appealed to as partial precedent. See court history for another example. Back on topic, I believe I did elucidate my argument in quite mind-numbing detail. The argument, for those who missed it, is as follows: * By allowing entries for people whose only interest above any other random person who has ever existed is "died in September 11 terrorist attacks", we are forming a principle that dying in a notable event is sufficient for inclusion in Wikipedia. * Notably, we are forming the principle that "so-and-so died in a notable event" constitutes sufficient grounds on which to oppose deletion of such biographies. * Thus, we have no legitimate grounds on which to oppose the inclusion in Wikipedia of those who died in any other notable tragedy. * Thus, if it occurs in the future that a group of people begin a sustained effort to add thousands of articles in Wikipedia on people who have died in a notable event but are not otherwise notable themselves (World War II soldiers, Holocaust victims, etc.), we have no legitimate grounds on which to ask them to stop doing so or to remove their articles. After all, we let the Sept. 11 biographies be included, so how could we how ask that they refrain from adding their WW2 soldier ones, or suggest that they be deleted? I don't see how this is a logical fallacy. Those who oppose this point of view need either to find some reason the argument is wrong (is there some grounds on which we *can* legitimately object to WW2 soldiers, but not to Sept 11 victims?), or need to disagree with its premise (that it is undesirable to allow tons of biographies on otherwise not notable people to be included in Wikipedia). I believe The Cuncator has done the latter, but I also think most people disagree with him there. As for the particular *harm* such entries cause, it will be ridiculous if every single Wikipedia entry on a famous person has at the top (or bottom), "so-and-so was also the name of [somebody not notable in any way whatsoever], so so-and-so (disambiguation)". This _will_ eventually happen, given no policy against the inclusion of non-notable people and enough time. That's not a slippery slope argument either, just an observation that as we continue to add biographies of people who are not notable, eventually we will add many thousands (if not millions) of such biographies. In short, we must either excise the Sept. 11 biographies, or allow unrestricted biographies of essentially anyone. The Cunctator seems to be arguing that there is no slippery slope here: that we can allow the Sept. 11 biographies and go no further. But there is no legitimate grounds on which to do so: there is no way we can say that the Sept. 11 biographies are notable, but 6 million Holocaust victims are not. Many people, in fact, would argue the reverse, with that particular example. -Mark

The Cunctator wrote: Then I think the simple disagreement boils down to that. I think that this is opening the door for a flood of stuff Wikipedia doesn't need and shouldn't have to deal with, while you disagree that it is undesirable for us to have such entries. So I suppose slippery slope doesn't enter into it at all: I think we should have none of them, and you think we should have all of them. Is that accurate? I'm curious what you meant by "necessary interface changes". Do you mean we wouldn't reference the non-notable people at all on the articles of the famous people? I'm objecting to an article on, say, Thomas Jefferson, saying "Thomas Jefferson was also a chemical engineer who worked for Raytheon in the 1960s and 70s," or "Thomas Jefferson was a high school student who died in an automobile accident in 1952," or even a link pointing to a "list of other Thomas Jeffersons" which is populated with such non-noteworthy people. If they can somehow be kept completely isolated in a "people who are not notable" ghetto, such that [[Thomas Jefferson]] doesn't have to include them or a link to them or a disambiguating page containing them, I'd have no objections to their mere presence in the database--it's the pollution of the namespace I'm objecting to. I also have a secondary (and lesser) objection that these are the sorts of articles that never get cleaned up, and are more likely than most to just stay crap for extended periods of time (as some of the Sept. 11 entries illustrate). -Mark

On 11/11/03 2:04 AM, "Andrew Lih" <alih(a)hku.hk> wrote: Changed it back, you mean. http://www.datanation.com/fallacies/distract/ss.htm http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/slippery-slope.html I did not call those questions straw men. Now you're changing the subject. It may be a nice commentary, but it's not a logically valid argument.

On 11/11/03 4:35 PM, "Jimmy Wales" <jwales(a)bomis.com> wrote: That's an inductive argument, not a slippery slope argument. All inductive arguments are fallacies, in the rigorous sense. Only deductive arguments are rigorously valid. Although they are fallacies, that does not mean that inductive arguments should be ignored. They simply need to be recognized as such--that there is necessarily an element of uncertainty about the conclusion.