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Comment by NoOneNew | Hacker News Reader

And pure "logic" is a fallacy within itself. Mass starvation and pandemic deaths are extremely to justify the moment you believe human life is worth zero. Vaccines are the enemy because the planet will have a net positive with the death of millions of humans. Genocide solves climate change, diminishing land resources and unemployment.

And dont excuse my language because it is appropriate, how in the fuck do people still not understand the dangers to slippery slope? How incredibly stupid are you? The events leading up to the Holocaust are the modern textbook example of philosophies and laws that ramp to mass evil action. Pick any murderous tyrant in history and every time, they take inch by inch to erode a society into a wasteland. No, it's not a poor argument. You're ignorant.

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Slippery slope is considered a fallacy because not all things vaguely similar to previous paths to X result in X, obviously. Nobody looks at a well-run public rail schedule and thinks 'uh-oh, Fascism is just around the corner' [1]. You're conflating your personal strongly held beliefs about it with imagined inevitable consequences. We don't agree that they're inevitable at all.

[1] Popular myth nature of this quip aside.

No, it's not true that slippery slopes are automatically fallacious, that's a misunderstanding of the fallacy.

The fallacy pertains to people who argue that a causal chain will necessarily play out, or that a particularly implausible chain will play out with high probability.

The fallacy does not assert that slippery slopes don't exist, and the mere act of arguing that a plausible slippery slope has a nontrivial chance of occurring is certainly not the Slippery Slope Fallacy as it's formally defined. Saying that slippery slopes are inherently fallacious may be aptly labelled the "Slippery Slope Fallacy Fallacy".

> The fallacy pertains to people who argue that a causal chain will necessarily play out, or that a particularly implausible chain will play out with high probability.

Isn't this exactly what I described in that comment? I'm confused. Or maybe I was just not clear in my writing. Re-emphasized:

> not all things vaguely similar to previous paths to X result in X, obviously [=> even though some things do]

Also, I didn't really introduce slippery slope as a strict logical fallacy. I said they were making a poor argument and identified it as being of slippery slope form. They responded to that talking about logical fallacies so we went on that tangent, but really I just found their specific instance not credibly inevitable.

I was just responding to the statement "Slippery slope is considered a fallacy", by saying that slippery slope arguments aren't necessarily fallacious, but it seems you largely agree with that already. I wasn't so much endorsing or commenting on the logic in the original comment.

My postulate: while the slippery slope won't necessarily find itself at the prescribed (induced) endpoint, there is a virtually unlimited timeline for the slippery slope to find itself to that endpoint. With that virtually unlimited running space, if continued attempts are made, eventually probability will necessarily yield a result.

I think this applies more to wider generalizations as opposed to very specific instances due to the nature of probability and finity of resources invested in continued attempts, but it can be applied in either scenario. Think Murphy's Law.

Can't you make your point without the personal attacks?

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