Two Bad Inferences

Arguments from sarcasm and lists of examples

1 Lists of examples

The world is filled with lots of very bad inferences.

The fallacy mongers are wrong about the sorts of bad inferences people make: people are not running around committing fallacious God of the gaps (in part because that one isn’t fallacious), appeals to authority, appeals to popularity, and so on. But nonetheless, there are lots of specific kinds of bad inferences. While I’m a little hesitant about putting a label on a common pattern of reasoning, these are widespread enough that it’s worth pointing out how unconvincing they are.

In this reasoning, people will, when defending a broad, general claim, simply rattle off a list of a few examples consistent with the claim. For example:

You say immigration is good for America. Was it good for America when and immigrant came in and killed 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray? Was it good for America when Julio Cesar Pimentel Soriano immigrated to America and killed a family in their home? Was it good when Calderon immigrated to America and killed a mother?

Alternatively:

You say we should have the death penalty. But what about Carlos DeLuna, Ruben Cantu, and Larry Griffin who were executed despite being innocent?

This is generally seen as quite rhetorically effective, particularly when the speaker quickly and confidently rattles off a long list of examples. Yet it’s clearly a very poor instance of reasoning.

When one makes a claim about some large collection having some property—e.g. immigrants, as a whole, make America better—they are not claiming that every single immigrant makes America better. Rather, they are claiming that the net effect of immigration as a whole is positive. Pointing out that some immigrants make it worse does nothing to negate that.

Similarly, when a person claims that the death penalty is good, they don’t claim that every instance in which a person is executed is right. Rather, they claim merely that the death penalty as a whole is good. Pointing out a few instances of unjust executions does nothing to show that that is wrong.

Of course, it can be that many instances of a thing show something about the thing. If you are arguing, for instance, that I write a lot of articles about the self-indication assumption, pointing to a bunch of examples of me doing just that would be relevant. But that’s because it makes up a sizeable share of my articles—if I had written 10 billion articles, pointing to three about the self-indication assumption wouldn’t tell us very much.

2 Sarcasm

Paul Crowley, over at the Minds Aren’t Magic blog (false, btw) has an article titled Never be sarcastic. It’s a very short article, so I’ll quote it in full:

I’m sometimes sarcastic, but I’m trying to give it up altogether. It’s bad to be sarcastic because civility over disagreements is a good idea, and sarcasm is uncivil. But there’s another reason to avoid it.

There are mistaken arguments that sound vaguely persuasive when cloaked in sarcasm whose flaws would be obvious if you tried to say them straightforwardly. People say things like “oh, yeah, I’m sure if cigarettes are in plain packets then no-one will ever smoke again, that’ll solve the problem”. What’s the non-sarcastic form of this argument? The obvious turn-around is “I think that there will still be smoking if cigarettes are put in plain packets”—but put this way, it’s obvious that it’s arguing against a position that no-one is taking, since a reduction in smoking that stops short of elimination is still a good thing.

Or “the minimum wage is great, let’s have a minimum wage of $1000 an hour and we’ll all be rich”. Here the argument is at best incomplete—we can all agree that a $1000/hr minimum wage wouldn’t be a good idea, but you’re going to have to spell out what you mean this to tell us about, say, a $15/hr minimum wage. If there’s a real argument behind what you say, you should be able to make it without sarcasm, and exactly what you are trying to argue will be clearer to all of us, including yourself.

2017 addendum: One further problem is that you put the onus on the other person to reconstruct the non-sarcastic form of your argument in order to reply to it, and you reserve to yourself the opportunity to muck them about and be uncivil some more by telling them they got it wrong while still failing to set it out.

This is exactly right. It’s possible to make a sarcastic quip about literally any position. But sarcastic quips are not arguments and they shouldn’t move us. For instance, suppose you want to argue that it shouldn’t be illegal to hit baby with hammers. You might quip:

Oh yes, for no one ever does anything illegal.

If you wanted to argue against AI risk, you might say:

I too am very scared of powerful robots that we made to cheat on English essays killing everyone.

If you wanted to argue for AI risk, you might say:

Nothing bad has ever happened from intelligences with weird goals.

Most sarcastic quips just involve eggregiously strawmanning the other side and then making fun of the idea. No one claims, for instance, that banning things makes them never happen, just that it reduces their prevalence. If the argument was convincing, it wouldn’t need to be a sarcastic quip—it could just be made as an argument.