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Comment by aalpbalkan | Hacker News Reader

> (underlined) Today it's a prostitution ring, tomorrow it could be an illegal gambling ring, and maybe next week it could be a drug operation.

This is textbook 'slippery slope' fallacy. https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/slippery-slope You said that if we allow A to happen, then Z will eventually happen too, therefore A should not happen.

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A slippery slope is fallacious if there's no argument for the the progression down the slope. Lots of valid arguments take the form of a slippery slope.

In this case, there is in fact an escalating progression of bad things happening in Airbnb rentals; in rough order:

* Criminal enterprises buying entire buildings and turning them into unlawful hotels

* Renters trashing Airbnb rentals

* Floating brothels

The leap from here to "gambling" doesn't sound too crazy; in fact, gambling seems more innocuous than a floating brothel.

Yes, it's a good thing we've solved all the crimes with actual victims so we can move on to regulating behavior between consenting adults.

I'm guessing the neighbors of these short term rental properties didn't consent to Airbnb's customers rezoning their neighborhoods for them.

I'm guessing that since the person in the article was informed by the police and not her neighbors, that no one had any clue.

How does that conclusion make even the smallest bit of sense to you?

The point is that any inconvenience to neighbours from such a 'brothel' is hypothetical - nobody even noticed that it was there, so they definitely weren't harmed in any way.

There isn't anywhere near enough information to ascertain whether neighbors noticed.

I have no idea who my neighbors are. If they weren't actually here, in the building, I'd have no way to contact them whatsoever. That doesn't mean I don't notice Airbnb tenants.

Illegal gambling is hardly a problem anymore since there are so many legal places to gamble. I think she just picked a random item from her mental bucket of "things that sound scary and bad".

Slippery slope is not a logical fallacy. Like any argument, it might be right or it might be wrong, and if your entire argument is, "X and Y are in some way vaguely similar, so if we allow X, then Y," then your point is certainly under-argued. But it is, in fact, the case that in at least some circumstances, people change the status quo by taking a small step outside the status quo, normalizing it as the new status quo, and then taking another small step.

If you believe that AirBnB WILL be used for prostitution, but WILL NOT be used for gambling or a drug operation, you should articulate a reason why you think there is a difference in kind that would prevent people from using AirBnB for those other purposes.

Would this be an example for Tragedy Of The Commons?

A small group of users act rational and in self-interest (by offering prostitution, illegal gambling etc.) and therefore make it worse for the other 'legitimate' users. In the long run, the 'illegal' users destroy AirBnB (by causing stricter laws etc.) and therefore destroy their own business.

It is absolutely an informal fallacy[1]. The onus is on the person making the claim of similarity to demonstrate why that similarity is valid, so on its own it lacks any argumentative weight.

Something being an informal fallacy doesn't mean that it can't be a component of a good argument (ie. correlation not implying causation doesn't mean there are no cases where something can be demonstrated to be causitive), it means that it is not an argument in and of itself.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_fallacy

Perhaps something like "allowing same sex marriage today will lead to humans marrying animals tomorrow" is a fallacy.

This seems very well reasoned. I hope you're not implying that we can't make reasoned assumptions and take actions based off them.

Also there's actual law breaking going on here.

I love and use AirBnb but the lady has some great points.

That kind of progression really happened. "Perhaps allowing interracial marriage today will lead to men marrying other men tomorrow". Gay marriage was unthinkable a hundred years ago. The ideas that are acceptable to society change over time and we can't be so arrogant as to assume our current set of values is correct while all the previous ones were wrong and no future ones will make ours look wrong. You can already see attitudes towards drug use changing to the point where Krueger's "drug operations" seem harmless to many people today.

Agreed. But the laws of today have to apply to society as we know of today. I'm all for forward progress but we can't make laws for how our evolved selves.

In 10 years same opposing sex marriage might the same as opposing interracial marriage is today. But we're not there and the laws have to reflect what society as a whole is ready for.

Sad but true.

It is a logical fallacy, however, claiming that an argument is invalid due to logical fallacy, is also a fallacy.

There is enough evidence that shows that prostitution, drugs, and violent crime are inextricably linked.

Prostitutes are more likely to be victims of sexual assault, while being under the influence of drugs provided by their pimps, who may also use violence as a means to control the prostitutes, and as way to deal with Johns.

In addition to sex, drugs, and violence, prostitution has ties to human trafficking, child exploitation, and slavery, not to mention the health risks.

It can't get much worse than one's apartment being used as a brothel, there's really nowhere to slide to at that point.

If my neighbour chooses to work as a prostitute in their apartment, or rent their apartment to someone who happens to be a prostitute - that's not nearly the end of the world, you know, they're people too, just with a comparably hard/unpleasant profession.

An active neighbour can easily be bringing some stranger they picked up at a bar twice each night; if that stranger pays afterwards then that doesn't change anything for me.

In this case it's a prostitution ring, which isn't really the same as a long term neighbor who happens to sleep around a lot. I think someone who calls an apartment home rather then stopping there once and never coming back will be more respectful.

You seem to be saying stable prostitutes or brothels are OK even though they are also illegal in those buildings. I agree with the parent that a promiscuous person is effectively a prostitute with the distinction being only an arbitrary legal one. As you say though, the temporary nature of their stay is probably the real problem.

Slippery slope would imply that each thing was worse then the last, hence going down a slope.

In this case, all there are pretty equivalently bad, and the quote was just other similar ways the rooms could be exploited.

this only bears a very superficial resemblance to the slippery slope argument. We're not leaping from a dubious, frowned upon activity to an extreme hypothetical.

All of the aforementioned activities are (a) unambiguously illegal, and (b) within the same class of illegality, in that they are all based off social norms of morality and thrive on the same drives of moral ambiguity.

yourlogicalfallacyis.com is a good way to explain fallacies, but Fallacy Man is better: http://existentialcomics.com/comic/9

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