Hacker News Reader

Comment by snowwrestler | Hacker News Reader

For those not familiar with the legislative process in the U.S., the Senate does not have to pass CISPA. They just need to pass some cybersecurity bill, which can then be conferenced together with CISPA.

Some will take this as proof that the system is broken, but the truth is that we really do need some improvements and clarifications of certain laws to help companies improve their security. If the Senate passes a bill with better privacy protections, those could survive a conference and get signed into law.

View on HN

> but the truth is that we really do need some improvements and clarifications of certain laws to help companies improve their security.

Oh, well, since you put together such a persuasive argument.

The only people who disagree with this statement are people who are simply not informed.

What you see from groups like the ACLU, EFF, Demand Progress, etc. is opposition to the specific language in CISPA, not opposition to the concept of a cybersecurity bill in general. They did not oppose the Senate bill last year for instance.

> The only people who disagree with this statement are people who are simply not informed.

Please try to be less obvious about your lack of arguments.

Well prove me wrong with substance if it's so easy.

> The only people who disagree with this statement are people who are simply not informed.

So I take it that you don't realize this is a logical error called Argumentum ad populum?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum

Actually, that's not only a fairly weakly implied argumentum ad populum, as it doesn't actually argue that the number of ignorant people are small or the number of non-ignorant people are large (though the use of "only" might imply that.)

"The only people who disagree with this statement are people who are simply not informed" is more directly argumentum ad hominem, and, particularly, abusive ad hominem.

http://courses.csusm.edu/fallacies/abusive.htm

Its also, simultaneously, petitio principii since claiming that disagreement with an argument can only be due to ignorance to support an argument is equivalent to claiming that the argument is true to support the argument.

I agree with your points, but I set out to mention just one logical error, and Argumentum ad populum seemed most apt as a single example.

The argument that only a minority of misinformed people hold a particular view is a negative version of Argument ad populum. Apart from that, I agree with your analysis.

It's easy to argue about logical fallacies because anyone can look them up on Wikipedia or Less Wrong.

It is harder to make a substantive case against the need for a cybersecurity bill because to do that, one would have to actually know what one is talking about.

Here is an example of the sort of distortion that the current legal environment is causing:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732488360457839...

I hope you will consider the idea that if companies feel forced into going to lawyers for network security advice, the system might benefit from a bit of tweaking.

I take it you don't realize that arguing from logical fallacy is itself a logical fallacy?

(Ah, recursion...)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com