Nirvana fallacy
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
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?"
There's also an appeal to consequences where if the outcome of something is considered undesirable, then that something must be false.
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.
All systems more complex then two electrons can behave unpredictably. That's just a fact, that will always be true in 100% of all possible scenarios.
There's of course a norm in day-to-day life to not quibble about every possible combination of 3 electrons or however many below a reasonable threshold, but that norm is based on the differing opinions of individuals in society.
There have been a few attempts to substantiate this, but as far as I know there's no solid evidence that it's ever actually happened, let alone happened regularly enough to represent a serious risk. It's reminiscent of a lot of "stupid lawsuit" urban legends (some of which resemble real cases, but omit or change key facts).
The thought is that since exceeding the expiration (or more accurately, the quality) date of the ingredients (for example, tomatos) renders the finished products as substandard in some way, its frankly kind of a dick move to serve food you wouldn't sell to paying hungry people to any hungry people let along poor hungry people.
Quality dates are a big part of spoilage in the food service industry, so the quality departments in all of these organizations try to min-max the dates to best represent their required quality, and of course their requirements are longevity, palatability and mostly sales.
If an otherwise reputable food retailer begins serving a secondary market with what is definitionally substandard products, it opens a large and murky doorway to liabilities extending far beyond a mere lawsuit. What if the next kitchen mishandles the food and serves gross food to people in need? Even hungry poor people will dislike week old, vinegary tomato slices.
There is also the possibility of cross contamination, but in general it is just best to avoid being one local news reporter away from revealing that FoodCo got $foo tax write off for serving mushy tomatoes to old people.
A better use of this resource would be to transfer the wasted or spoiled food to a facility which creates compost for local residents or farms.
I've helped a food bank guy load donated food from the Safeway. It is not substandard. Bananas, for instance, are donated if they have any spots. Bread is donated after a day, when it's perfectly edible. Also a lot of milk.
Second Harvest is a good place to research, and they oversee my food bank. Strict food safety rules are enforced, and they donated a refrigerated van to us.
One thing they were able to do is freeze their precooked egg patties that would have been thrown away for texture reasons for later use in a protein stock for a charitable kitchen's cafeteria in some way that I was not informed of.
This corporation was a prepared food retailer, not a grocery store in case I have been too unclear. In their case they used nitrogen-packed presliced tomato pans to streamline food prep for their line, which is why I chose tomatos as the example.
If an otherwise reputable food retailer begins serving a secondary market with what is definitionally substandard products, it opens a large and murky doorway to liabilities extending far beyond a mere lawsuit. What if the next kitchen mishandles the food and serves gross food to people in need? Even hungry poor people will dislike week old, vinegary tomato slices."
"the food service industry" : that term doesn't seem limited to prepared food retailers, if that's what you meant.
as for "week old, vinegary tomato slices" : Second Harvest, at least, would outright reject those.
It would have to go straight onto a table somewhere, since the shelf life would be almost zero.
SH is huge, though. The big gorilla of Bay Area food banks.
I’m not an attorney and don’t know the case law, but I don’t think these sorts of risks are merely hypothetical. Big corporations don’t like wasting labor (even a few minutes per day for a few employees per store adds up to millions at Walmart scale) so if they’re doing it, there’s a good reason. I guess it might not be the reason they told us but I can’t imagine why else I’d be dying meat green as I tossed it.
"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
Radicals want to throw out everything, not just the particular thing under consideration.
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.
In other words, that by asking the question 'What kind of problem spaces need so much trial and error to understand?' you are betraying a sort of charming naiveté.
People wanted perfect solutions in one go. Everyone was blaming software developers.
If one expects only perfect outcomes then it is easy to get high fail rate.
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...
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.
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.
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 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:
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.
One should direct one's energies where they make the best contribution. For that, one has to compare alternatives.
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.
Basically I do a poll of something like (a) confidence that the solution will fix the problem (b) estimated 80% confidence time range required. I do that for whatever options have been proposed, and then use the information to determine which option is the most promising. There's some principle that the average of many guesses is better than one, so I try to use that to make a better decision.
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.
The argument here is there is that improving one thing will make something else worse, therefore nothing is worth doing.
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?
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.
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?
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/nibba...
The Duke Nukem Forever fallacy, maybe?
I don't know if its appropriate to just apply the name fallacy to any old worldview or system of argument that one dislikes. You could call communism a "labor activism fallacy" or capitalism a "capital investment fallacy." You deride any sort of system of argumentation by saying it's fallacious. Now, to be totally fair, if we accept Godel's incompleteness theorem as true, then the Nirvana Fallacy really is a fallacy under the terms of formal logic. But I believe that there is more complexity to this than that.
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