Freakonomics Podcast on Slippery Slope Arguments

Camel (A) sticks his nose under the tent (B), which collapses, driving the thin end of the wedge (C) to cause monkey to open floodgates (D), letting water flow down the slippery slope (E) to irrigate acorn (F) which grows into oak (G). [Illustration by Eric Kim, from my idea.]

An interesting episode, with participants that include Dahlia Lithwick and me. The audio and transcript are here, and it's on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and elsewhere. Check it out; in case you'd like to read more, here's my Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope article, a somewhat condensed version, a co-written 3-page magazine version, and the blog posts serializing the bulk of the article.

Comments

[Brett Bellmore]

Based on the illustration, you seem to have slippery slopes and Rube Goldberg machines confused.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

I took it to mean that slippery slope arguments are confused and illogical, stretched beyond reason.

[Gandydancer]

Which is idiotic and completely contrary to experience.

As you can see in, e.g., the escalating provision of military equipment to Ukraine.

Or from "don't ask, don't tell" to a tranny 4-star Admiral and putting nuclear waste in the care of a tranny luggage thief.

Or... well, the examples are legion.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

It is not contrary to my experience. Most consequences are unpredictable. It's one of the problems of all-powerful governments, that they make one-size-fits-nobody decisions which have a myriad of unexpected and unforeseen consequences, all requiring further one-size-fits-nobody decisions.

The only thing predictable is the unpredictability.

[Gandydancer]

I can't tell what you mean to convey by that ipse dixit arm-waving.

I gave two examples, neither of which was unpredictable.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

It takes only a cursory historic knowledge to learn of many many examples of unintended and unforeseen consequences.

Asking anyone to name a few is like asking someone to show examples of adding odd numbers to get an even number.

[Gandydancer]

Your claim was not that consequences can be unpredictable but instead was that “[m]ost consequences are unpredictable”, and a few examples of unpredictability wouldn’t anyway prove THAT. And I certainly wasn’t asking you to provide any.

“The only thing predictable is the unpredictability” is false, as my examples showed. F-16s for Ukraine has been predictable for some time now. Only whether they'll be used to launch Storm Shadow missiles at the Kremlin ("Putin did it!") is still in doubt.

[Frank Drackman]

"Luggage Thief"??
I think the better word is "Kleptomaniac" which is an actual DSM-5 Diagnosis.
On second thought, Luggage Thief is better.
Love to see that poof steal Ronda Rousey's luggage, he/she'd be spittin chicklets,

Frank

[Brett Bellmore]

But, that's not his actual position, as I understand it. He thinks that slippery slope arguments are often quite reasonable.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

I did not know that. I too think slippery slopes exist.

[Brett Bellmore]

His Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope article is an attempted typology of slippery slopes. Which are serious concerns? Which aren’t? How might you go about making the slope less slippery, so that you can safely venture onto its edge?

“Slippery slopes are, I will argue, a real cause for concern, as legal thinkers such as Madison, Jackson, Brennan, Harlan, and Black have recognized, and as our own experience at least partly bears out: we can all identify situations where one group’s support of a first step A eventually made it easier for others to implement a later step B that might not have happened without A (though we may disagree about exactly which situations exhibit this quality). Such an A may not have logically required the corresponding B, yet for political and psychological reasons, it helped bring B about.

But, as thinkers such as Lincoln, Holmes, and Frankfurter have recognized, slippery slope objections can’t always be dispositive. We accept, because we must, some speech restrictions. We accept some searches and seizures. We accept police departments, though creating such a department may lead to arming it, which may lead to some officers being willing to shoot innocent civilians, which may eventually lead to a police state (all of which has happened with the police in some places). Yes, each first step involves risk, but it is often a risk that we need to take.”

[Gandydancer]

It’s not a good illustration. Water doesn’t need a slippery slope to flow downhill. The reason the camel’s nose under the tent is a problem is that letting the wind in causes the tent to blow away. In the absence of wind why would the tent stake/wedge get pulled out? The monkey needs to go down not up to yank open the sluice gate. And (the acorn?) growing into a mighty oak is not on the right time scale for a Rube Goldberg device..

That Cybersecurity Podcast guy was experimenting with AI-produced cartoons for his Volokh column. I think AI would have done a better job of integrating “slippery-slope” and Rube Goldberg. Those involved in this would do best to keep their day jobs.

[Brett Bellmore]

Proverbially, (I have no real experience with camels.) the reason a camel's nose under the tent is a problem is that the camel wants into the tent, and isn't going to settle for just a nose.

It would actually be kind of fun to build a Rube Goldberg machine that operates so slowly it would take generations to reach its conclusion.

[Gandydancer]

Hmm... Wikipedia seems to agree with you
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel%27s_nose
...but the desert can be a windy place and I see no reason why camels should be particularly hard to drive out of tents, so I like my interpretation better.

[MaddogEngineer]

People only believe the slippery slope applies to their particular concerns, never that of the other guys. That's why it falls under the umbrella of tribalism and is a cousin to "whataboutism".

[Brett Bellmore]

Sometimes people do believe the slippery slope applies to the other guy's concerns. Denying it is part of applying more grease to the slope...

[Gandydancer]

"Whataboutism" is a dismissive name for calling attention to double standards. And, like double standards, taking notice that the consequences of failing to hold on to some is a slipper slope to having none is a perfectly valid observation about reality.

[VinniUSMC]

Yet, sometimes slopes are, indeed, slippery. And sometimes it's too late to put the monkey back in its cage. When the snowball reaches the bottom, it's no longer a pebble, but a butterfly whose wings flapped and caused a tsunami.

[You're not smart]

Best...comment... EVER!

[Frank Drackman]

Monkey back in the cage? I thought it was "Toothpaste back in the Tube" (ever tried it? its hard)
so if I go back in a Time Machine and don't kill the butterfly, does Sleepy Joe get un-erected??

Frank "is that Thunder?"

[Rossami]

It is a logical fallacy to say that X will lead to Y will always lead to Z.
But it is just as much a logical fallacy to say that X will lead to Y but never lead to Z.

The slippery slope is neither a fallacy nor a surety. It is a heuristic. It is a rule-of-thumb that is often but not always true.

[Brett Bellmore]

It's the difference between formal logic and heuristics.

Formal logic is guaranteed to arrive at a correct conclusion given true premises. That's powerful, but the scope for real world application is not great.

Heuristics are rules that arrive at the correct conclusion more often than not. While they're not guaranteed to always be correct, they have the advantage of being much more widely applicable than formal logic.

In the end, a lot of logical fallacies are valid heuristics. It would be a fallacy to assume that, just because the guy you're picking up by the side of the road is a serial killer, and you match his victim profile, you're going to end up dead. Maybe he's in a hurry and just wants to get somewhere without any fuss!

But that would not be a smart bet.

In political arguments, much of the time that somebody complains of a fallacy, they're really trying to avoid your applying a valid heuristic, because they don't WANT you arriving at the correct conclusion.

[bernard11]

It is a rule-of-thumb that is often but not always true.

I would say "sometimes" rather than "often."

It is easy to overestimate the frequency because of salience bias. We are aware when it happens, but not when it doesn't.

[Rossami]

I must disagree. Things don't become useful rules of thumb unless they are right rather considerably more often than not. Failures in the rule of thumb are what is obvious and therefore more likely to be salient, not the reverse. I'm sticking with "often".

[bernard11]

Things don’t become useful rules of thumb unless they are right rather considerably more often than not.

Or possibly if they are perceived as being right more often than not, which goes to the salience issue. Also, of course, claiming a slippery slope is a useful argument any time someone wants to oppose some little thing, but realizes that few will take it seriously in itself.

"Gee, if we let them lower the speed limit on this street to 30MPH next they will want to make it 5MPH, and it will be impossible to get anywhere."

I think there are a great many things that are possible starts of a slippery slope, that don't turn out to be one. We don't notice that the speed limit is still 30MPH, years later.

[Rossami]

You are conflating 'slippery slope' with 'reductio ad absurdum'. While there are some superficial similarities, they are different concepts in logic and rhetoric.

[bernard11]

I don't think so, Rossami. My example is not at all reductio ad absurdum, which I take to be a method of refuting a logical proposition by showing the it leads to a contradiction, or or other impossible conclusion.

Yes, it's silly, but really, most of the time someone proposes a change you can argue that if we allow that we will then allow who knows what.

[Brett Bellmore]

Technically, heuristics are rules that are true usefully often, and depending on the cost/benefit ratio, "usefully" can be a lot less than 50% of the time.

For instance, "Items in the fridge that have become soft and runny will cause food poisoning" probably doesn't reach the 50% threshold, but quite easily clears the "usefully often" threshold.

[Sarcastr0]

"Salience bias (also known as perceptual salience) occurs when we focus on items or information that are especially remarkable while casting aside those that lack prominence. Yet, people tend to overlook this difference because it often appears irrelevant from an objective point of view."

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

Donald Trump has been in the news lately . . . today is a big day in a pseudonymity case involving George Santos . . . the Supreme Court has ruled against race-targeting gerrymanderers . . . and Prof. Eugene Volokh offers his downscale, conservative fans this two-day-old, warmed-over, diversionary chaff.

None of the other Conspirators seem to have much to say about current events that do not flatter right-wingers, either.

Partisans.

Cowards.

Hacks.

Hypocrites.

[Frank Drackman]

Jerrys

[Gandydancer]

That Trump has been indicted for a nothingburger in an attempt to dilute his advantage over Biden in that he can campaign in public without drooling, and as a short-term distraction from evidence that Biden indeed was the intended recipient of $Millions from Burisma, doesn’t reflect well on our we-escaped-a-bullet partisan hack AG.

Nobody gives a damn about Santos as a legal matter or as a person. It’s just tactics, party v. party. Who cares whether we’re told who went his bail?

The Voting Rights Act has been used since its inception to mandate race-based gerrymandering to produce black Democratic officeholders. Now, all of a sudden, it’s an attack on our Democracy to do so. What do you want to actually say about that? Or any of these issues?

As usual you’ve actually got NOTHING to say, but instead just vomit empty imprecations and slurs.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

What is remarkable is not what you say, but that you can type anything at all with your nose stuck so far up Prof. Volokh's ass.

Carry on, clingers. Guys like me will continue to let clingers know just how far.

[Gandydancer]

I take back "as usual". "As always" matches our experience with you better.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

Pat Robertson dead. Trump indicted (again). James Watt dead. Bigots on the defensive. Conservatives flailing.

Sunshine in America!

[Gandydancer]

Do you ever notice that the space between your ears is filled with strange noxious vapours?

Your assertion that Pat Robertson was MY asshole was typical. I must have seen him in photographs, but couldn’t have picked him out of a lineup. And I in effect told you this just a couple of days before, yet you went back without hesitation to imagining me as an evangelical. Are there treatments for your dementia that work AT ALL?

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

Robertson was worse as a partisan, delusional far-right firestarter than he was as a greedy, despicable televangelist. That made him your asshole.

[Gandydancer]

Your familiarity with your own asshole is legendary and I cannot claim any such expertise, but if Robertson were my asshole I would surely know more about him than I do.

[Frank Drackman]

watch out Jerry, you know these celebrity deaths always come in threes. (what a way to go!)

Frank

[BravoCharlieDelta]

They probably aren't picking up the Trump stuff because their lives could be in danger if they speak out against the Democrats targeting their political opponents.

[QuantumBoxCat]

It’s notable that the graphic used to convey the idea of a slippery slope has no human actors, individuals capable of making decisions that affect the outcome. When a lawyer makes a slippery slope argument before a judge, they implicitly acknowledge that the end of the slope is not preordained, because the judge, through their conscious action, can choose to exit the slope altogether (or rather, move to a different slope). In a subsequent case on the same issue, a new lawyer will make the same slippery slope argument, pointing to the previous case, and again, acknowledges that the conceived outcome can be avoided by human action.

When I take one step out of my front door, it’s a slippery slope to me walking straight into traffic and getting run over. I mean, that first step is a slippery slope to a second step, and a third step … and BAM! And yet, somehow I have avoided walking right into traffic everyday!? Such is the amazing benefit of conscious decisionmaking.

[Sanctimonica]

When I wonder whether a slippery slope argument is appropriate, I ask my opponent what their end goal is. I measure the end goal against what they are advocating at the moment. And if I hear them use, "It's a good first step," to describe a compromise position, then I know the camel's nose is under the tent.

[Krayt]

A slippery slope isn't an argument; it's a concern.

That Rube Goldberg drawing makes no sense. It seems to be missing pieces, and the logic is backwards.

A camel sticks its head into a tent. For some reason, this causes a wedge to fly out so fast, it goes under the leg of a stool the monkey is sitting on, flinging it up so fast his butt is injured. This should drop the dam into place, as the rope the rising monkey is holding on slackens, and not lift it up (so it can water an acorn that grows into a tree.)

[Brett Bellmore]

It makes no sense in a discussion of slippery slope arguments, either, unless you mean to imply that the mechanism for most slippery slope arguments is indirect to the point of silliness. And in my experience, most slippery slope arguments are very direct.