Slashdot Mirror
Paying People to Argue With You
The interesting result was that some of the rebuttals were quite insightful, and resulted in me making changes to the argument that I would make if I had to present it again. Judging by the literacy and intelligence of some of the respondents, most of them probably wouldn't need Mechanical Turk as a source of income, so I assume most of them fit the profile of this Salon.com writer and are doing it just for fun. Hell, you can find enough people on UseNet and Slashdot who will argue with you just for free.
But there were a few reasons I found this preferable to the conventional ways of gathering interesting rebuttals to your own reasoning. If you send out a sample argument to all of your e-mail buddies, you will probably get some useful replies, but they may start to think you're a little weird for asking them to evaluate your thought processes, especially if you do it over and over. Post an opinion on UseNet or Slashdot, and you may have to wade through a lot of crap to find the useful responses (while others may consider your post to be part of the crap that they have to wade through). And in both cases, there's the potential embarrassment of what you're asking for -- the risk of seeming so uncertain about your own opinions that you want other people to check your work for you. (I actually think that being uncertain about your own beliefs is a virtue, but it doesn't seem to be one that our culture prizes very highly.) Using Mechanical Turk addresses most of these problems; even though you're still admitting to total strangers that you might be wrong and asking them to shoot you down if they can, at least the evidence of your insecurity won't turn up when your next employer or Internet date does a Google search for your name. ("Damn it, I want a man who doesn't question his bumper stickers!")
So, while I didn't find it useful enough that I would run every opinion through the Mechanical Turk machinery to see what feedback I could get from it (I'm not paying a bunch of them to proofread this article), I did like enough to recommend it to people for certain arguments in certain settings. The main kinds of arguments that I would try out on the Mechanical Turk service would be about abstract philosophical or moral questions on issues that have been around forever, like abortion or the death penalty -- topics so explosive that you'd risk making your friends very uncomfortable if you test-marketed your arguments on them, and which would seem almost rude to post about in a public forum because the debate topics have been around for so very, very long. But on Mechanical Turk, $1 is apparently enough to get people to ignore the awkwardness and the exhaustedness of the topic and to focus on what you ask.
And what was the argument that I used to test it out? Perhaps the geek crowd will feel more sympathy with this than the general public does. Basically it was that the conventional wisdom behind allowing adults to smoke, but banning cigarettes for people under 18, is wrong. Either you can believe that smoking should be permitted for everybody, or that it should be banned for everybody, but there is no consistent set of assumptions that could lead you to conclude that smoking should be banned for people under 18 but allowed for everyone else. You have two groups of people under consideration -- people under 18 who smoke, and people over 18 who smoke. What possible reason could there be for wanting to protect the health of the people in the first group, but not the people in the second group?
The problem with the conventional reason for smoking age restrictions -- "Younger people have worse judgment, so they are more likely to smoke" -- is that if this is true, all that means is that the first group of people will be proportionally larger, relative to the total population of people in their age range. But even after that assumption, you're still left with two groups of people, who exhibit the same continued bad judgment with regard to smoking cigarettes. Treating the two groups differently, is a bit like saying we should have lighter sentences for female murderers than for male murderers, just because men are more likely to commit murder.
And yet this conclusion did give me pause, so this is a classic example of an argument where you'd want someone to check your work. Off I went to create a Human Intelligence Task (HIT) on Mechanical Turk simply asking people to read the argument and respond. In the first round, most responders missed what I thought was the point of the argument, and responded with some variation of "Minors are more likely to smoke because they have worse judgment", without addressing the question of why the two groups of smokers should be treated differently. A few people responded with variations of "We've always done it that way" (referring to similar restrictions on alcohol, pornography, etc.); fair enough, it just reminded me that if I asked the question again I'd have to say I didn't consider any argument valid that boiled down to "We've always done it that way".
But then came some more interesting responses. One worker replied that I was wrong to assume that the effects of a cigarette were "the same" on adults and minors because cigarette smoke has been shown to be more damaging to developing tissues. OK, that was worth a dollar. On the other hand, that just means that there is some number N cigarettes that would be just as harmful to an adult, as 1 cigarette would be to a minor, so you're still left without a consistent reason for why you'd let the adult buy those N cigarettes but prevent the minor from buying 1 cigarette. Then another user called me out on the opening line of my original argument, "There is no reason to ban cigarettes for minors but not for adults." He said, quite correctly, that I had only attempted to debunk the most commonly given reason, but it was wrong to conclude that there was no such reason.
So, this led me to another idea for how to present an argument and solicit feedback on Mechanical Turk: in the form of a series of mathematically precise statements, each one following from the previous ones. The new HIT was to ask users if they disagreed with the conclusion, and if they disagreed, then to identify the first statement that they disagreed with. The idea was that each statement would follow logically from the ones before it, so identifying any statement as the "first" one that they disagreed with, would be tantamount to a self-contradictory paradox.
Now, whether or not you want to use this format when running an argument past the Turk workers, depends on what your goal is. If you want to really find out if your own argument is valid, then breaking it down mathematically is one approach. On the other hand, if you already believe your own argument, and you're just trying to find the most persuasive way of phrasing it, then you may not learn anything useful by breaking it down into a series of mathematical steps, because that's probably not going to be the format of our final persuasive essay.
Anyway, the new mathematical format of the argument was (slightly reworked from what I posted on Amazon):
- Government should ban smoking by people under 18, because of the harmful health effects.
- If that's true for the entire group of underage smokers, then it's also true for each individual smoker under 18. In other words, even if only one person under 18 smoked in the entire country, it would still be justified for the government to ban them from smoking.
- Whatever bad health effects are caused by the average person under 18 smoking 1 cigarette, there is some number N cigarettes that would cause the same bad health effects in the average adult who smoked them.
- If banning 1 person under 18 from smoking 1 cigarette is justified (even if they were the last smoker on Earth), and the health effects would be the same for an average adult who smoked N cigarettes, then banning 1 adult from smoking those N cigarettes would also be justified (again, even if they were the last smoker on Earth).
- If banning 1 person over 18 from smoking would be justified, then the same logic would apply to every person over 18, which would imply banning smoking for all people over 18.
- Hence, if you believe that smoking should be banned for people under 18, then the same logic would lead to a ban on smoking for people over 18 as well.
The response from a lot of workers who responded to this HIT was that... I lost them. Each of them identified the first statement in the list that they disagreed with, as required by the HIT, but many commented that the whole thing was phrased confusingly. There was no clear winner for the first statement that people disagreed with, but several people picked #3 and #4, arguing some version of "People under 18 have less developed judgment." (I still say that doesn't matter, because you're talking about comparing a person under 18 who smokes, with a person over 18 who smokes, and their judgment in both cases is the same, etc.) So this particular experiment failed -- it didn't make it easier to persuade people by formulating the argument as a series of steps, and it also didn't lead to any agreement on what was the Achilles' Heel of the argument itself.
However I think the general idea, of using Mechanical Turk to find sparring partners, may be useful to a lot of people. If you were interested in publishing some kind of persuasive argument, you could use an Amazon HIT to have readers compare several different versions of the same argument and identify the one that they thought was most convincing. If you were feeling more philosophical and simply wanted to know if your argument was correct, you could pay people to look for flaws in it (and here is where the mathematical phrasing could come in handy). If you're crafting an argument for public consumption, you could even have HIT workers build up your argument for you -- start with a position and have them come up with reasons supporting that position -- although to me that feels like a cheapening of the debate process that crosses the line, because you're not even trying to reason your way to a conclusion, instead starting with the conclusion you want and then working backwards (not that this isn't what a lot of debaters do anyway!). My own interest would be to see next if certain types of arguments are more likely to persuade people who are more mathematically inclined (by asking respondents to indicate how well they did at math in school). Perhaps arguments with flowery language are more likely to appeal to people who were English majors, while arguments spelled out as a series of logical steps are more likely to appeal to people who look at things in a mathematical way (also known as the "real" or "right" way of looking at things).
Maybe my preference for the controlled, user-reimbursed process of "debating" that is enabled by Mechanical Turk, has to do with a lifelong focus on bottom-line results: Decide what the result is, and judge the process by how well it brings about that result. I don't think debate and discussion should be like soccer, valued for the fun and the exercise; I think a good debate should actually get somewhere, persuading the participants or the listeners of a new point of view that builds on their old one, or else the debate has failed. If paying HIT workers kills the "spirit" of a good debate but helps achieve the goal, then so much the better. On the other hand, we'll never run out of people who enjoy the process of debating and arguing for its own sake, and will continue to debate things into the ground without anybody paying them. Hey look, here come some of them now!...
Do you want to have the full argument, or were you thinking of taking a course?
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
Oh I cant help it! This reminds me too much if Monty Python's Argument Clinic
"Hell, you can find enough people on UseNet and Slashdot who will argue with you just for free."
no you can't.
What the fuck are you blabbering about? Is there any way you can summarize it into 100 words or less?
Maybe if there was ONE useful class in High School, no one would even consider a paying service to people who actually can think all by themselves of different ways to look at things.
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
Shut your festering gob, you tit! Your type really makes me puke, you vacuous, coffee-nosed, maloderous, pervert!!!
Or is that in another office down the hall?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
No offense, but your argument's not that good, or maybe I'm not understanding your point.
-You just "proved" that no paternalistic intervention is ever justified, *even by parents to newborns*. Hey, if you believe compelling someone to eat is okay if they're under 2 years old, obviously, there must be some insufficient amount of eating you can do when over 2 years old that would justify force-feeding. Er, yes, there is, it's just not encoded in any specific law that way.
-The "judgment" argument is completely unrelated to the "health results" argument (up to a limit). You seem to think the argument is that
"People under 18 shouldn't be allowed to smoke, because if they did, they would smoke a lot due to bad judgment, and people over 18 would not excessively smoke due to bad judgment."
It's not. It's more like,
"People under 18 shouldn't be allowed to smoke because their poor judgment makes them unable to accurately weigh long-term consequences of smoking. Therefore, they will smoke, and later regret the poor health and addiction. Adults may do it in the exact same amount, but then it would be with accurate judgment of the consequences. The rational self would not be victimized by the previous irrational self."
-You perform a reductio saying that banning smoking for minors would imply banning some amount of smoking (N) for adults. There is such a ban, so there's no contradiction. Namely, if you smoke so much at once as to nearly kill yourself, that can be considered a suicide attempt, and people can legally restrain you from doing it further until your body can cope.
(I'm not saying 18 is right age to ban smoking. I'm not saying there should be any one age. I'm just saying that this is a poor representation of the case for banning underage smoking, and a poor argument for a change in policy.)
Now, give me my $1.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
If your argument has anything to do with religion, you can get free "rebuttals" by posting about it on Slashdot.
...that is, if the quality the reasoning is not important.
I skimmed the detailed list of arguments, and there's apparently no mention of the fundamental premise to this restriction: people under 18 can't be trusted to make their own decisions. This is why children can't vote either, or do you think my 4-year-old should be allowed to cast a ballot?
Please tag this apropriately : )
THE MONTY PYTHON REFERENCES.
Quite disrespectfull to a lot of Turks I know
:(
There was a time the word 'turk' meant: dirty human (in the Netherlands, in the previous century)....when 'I was young I saw that with my own eyes in a very respectable dictionary.
Good friends of mine at that time I called Ahmet, Mesut and Bekir (Turks), I felt very ashamed
I suppose I can also pay a Turk $1.45 to read this long-ass article for me.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-572077907195969915
.. that your logic is flawed insofar as you ignore the difference between someone starting to smoke and someone continuing to smoke, when considering judgement. What percentage of those >18 smoking started smoking below 18? Smoking is highly addictive, and I suspect therefore that whether one starts smoking early in life is an excellent predictor of whether one will continue to smoke later. If one starts smoking below 18 due to bad judgement, but would have not started after 18 due to an improvement in judgement, one might still CONTINUE smoking after 18 due to the extra difficulties in dealing with an addiction.
Of course, the other reason is that people below 18 are less likely to be able to vote the politicos banning the tobacco sales out of office, than the addicts above 18 who may be driven to become single-issue voters from such a ban.
I don't need to pay someone to argue with me. I have children.
Here's the first argument I thought in favor of the under-18 ban. It has nothing to do with "people under 18 have worse judgement".
(1) Adults inherently have more rights, and are expected to shoulder more responsibility, than those who are minors (e.g., voting, driving, running for office, registering for military service, medical care, curfews, etc.)
(2) Granted that smoking is bad, we have considered banning it for everybody.
(3) It's been decided that this is not so critical an issue that it trumps adult rights and self-responsibility; therefore we feel it would be improper to make a ban for adults. However, it does rise to a level above the threshold for minor rights, and therefore a ban for minors is considered an acceptable prohibition.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
So maybe your a Facebook or MySpace weenie, you have no friends or social life, but you can now hire people to pretend their interested in what you write to argue with you and perhaps make it look like your newbie blog is interesting. Hmm...sounds like a service that some here will likely make use of!
The presented rationale for not banning smoking for youngsters misses, I think, the real reasoning for having the ban. The reasoning goes something like:
1. Smoking is bad, and should be discouraged as much as possible.
2. All people should have the freedom to do what they like to themselves. However, an exception to this rule can be made when it comes to minors, who may make poor choices. The freedom of a minor can be abridged if it can be shown that this is "for their own safety". In any case, adults (defined as 18+ in most jurisdictions) shall have full freedom to do what they want to their own possessions and bodies.
3. Smoking is sufficiently "bad" that it warrants the restricting of a minor's freedom.
In this argument, the difference between the minor and the adult is not the harm it causes them, but the assessment about personal responsibility. Our society views the safety of minors as being a communal responsibility. Until the minor is old enough to reason for themselves (arbitrarily set at age 18), then their parents and/or society will make certain choices on their behalf. If they still select the harmful behavior as an adult, that's their choice. But it would be immoral for society to allow those without full cognitive ability to make harmful decisions. (Same rationale applies to adults who have impaired cognitive abilities; in which case someone is designated to make responsible choices on their behalf.)
We "allow" adults to smoke not because the consensus is that it isn't "bad" but rather because personal freedom and self-determination are viewed as being more important than saving someone from themselves.
Linux is a terrible, insecure operating system with a higher TCO than Windows.
Bill Gates is more enigmatic than Jobs and more intelligent than Stallman
The MPAA/RIAA are well within their rights when they sue people.
Darl was right.
I love the PS3 and hate the Wii
Discuss!
Monstar L
"children" under 18 don't have the same judgment as adults (18 is an arbitrary age, but has some precedence).
It is justified to protect "children" from themselves, by making it illegal for them to smoke.
Adults, on the other hand, are allowed more freedom. In effect they are assumed to know better than to engage in self destructive actions (because they can judge what those things are better than anyone else).
As a society we have chosen not to protect adults from themselves to the same extent.
This is a varient of the "don't have the same judgment" argument...so I'll address your counterpoint. I still say that doesn't matter, because you're talking about comparing a person under 18 who smokes, with a person over 18 who smokes, and their judgment in both cases is the same The fact that both the "child" and adult smoke has no bearing on their judgment, and whether society trusts it.
The "child" is assumed to not know better than to smoke.
In the case of the adult, the person is assumed to know the risks involved and be able to choose what is best for themself.
As far as using "Mechanical Turk", that's a very interesting use for the service.
Tharkban (It is a signature after all)
This is a much better use of the Mechanical Turk service:
http://www.thesheepmarket.com/
Get 1,000 random Internet users to draw you a left-facing sheep.
Comment of the year
Your smoking argument falls flat for at least one major oversight: the two groups you distinguish (under-18 and over-18 people) are not independent. Male smokers don't (often) go on in life to become female smokers, and most female smokers didn't begin their habit as a judgement-impaired male. But smoking kids leads to smoking adults, and a very many smoking adults (I would guess) started as smoking kids. Stopping any smoker from smoking is much more difficult than keeping a non-smoker from starting. So since babies aren't (often?) born smoking, then one rational approach is to try and keep people from smoking until they are old enough to realize how bad an idea it really is.
If that's true for the entire group of underage smokers, then it's also true for each individual smoker under 18. In other words, even if only one person under 18 smoked in the entire country, it would still be justified for the government to ban them from smoking.
I disagree. There is a societal cost to the damage smoking causes in young people in the form of increased medical burden. There is also a societal cost in enforcing an under 18 ban on smoking. If the cost of the ban is less than the cost eliminated by the ban then the ban is good for society and should be enacted. If the cost of the ban is more than the cost eliminated by the ban then the ban is a waste and should not be enacted.
A ban that affects a single person has to identify that person and enforce the rule. That is not very cost effective and is bad for society. If we looked at all the of the ways that minors die, I am sure we would find all sorts of crazy scenarios. That does not mean we should pass a law banning each and every one of those scenarios.
I think the idea of micropayments for individual tasks is an interesting one. The biggest flaw in the system I see is that there is a wide variety of skill levels, worker to worker, which will effect the results you get, and I don't see any way of ensuring that you get someone whose work you can trust.
Incidentally, the biggest flaw in your thesis is your basic statement: the reason that smoking (and alcohol, and driving, and legal contracts, and consensual sex, etc etc etc) are limited in age is because below a certain age threshold, we as a society have agreed that children are not capable of making an informed decision that will effect their health, and the health of others. These things are not left in the hands of parents (in most cases) because of the great number of incompetent, neglectful parents out there.
In other words, we don't keep kids from smoking because it's bad for them, we keep them from smoking because we know that at that age, they can't understand how bad it is for them.
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
You are paying people to argue with you?!? If the thing(s) that you are arguing are valid enough to really be argued about, maybe you should submit your arguments to a scientific periodical and ask for comment or response.
There are clinics that can help people with overly aggressive behaviors. If you are willing to pay good money to get people to argue with you, maybe you should look in to one of those places because it sounds like consiously, or maybe subconsiously, you are too damned aggressive and want all the answers, and want to prove your side of the argument is always right in the end..
Since you started with moral debate and stuff in your experiment, it sounds like you are on of those idiots that posts to belief.net or considers yourself a Bright or something. I think sometimes athiests overthink everything, get paranoid, and as you can see in this post, develop aggressive personality disorders.
I don't see any problem about this disrespecting people in Turkey or this being offensive to anyone of Turkish or Near Eastern heritage. The one problem I see is if you use this service for any kind of serious scholarship. Low-wage labor is used in scholarship all of the time (grad students, undergrad hourly workers), but if someone makes a significant contribution, a co-authorship may be in order, and for a more minor contribution, even the undergrad hourly often gets acknowledged. If one of these low-wage anomymous knowledge workers helps you make a key argument, how do you properly cite this in your journal article?
There isn't a factual reason for cigarettes being illegal for minors and legal for adults. The Bill of Rights gave us personal liberties, Congress has determined that the right of self determination is flawed, as only they and a few others know what is best for us. As for children, they suffer because adults before them proved they couldn't handle teaching Johnny good judgement, so the government now does that for you, not by teaching good judgement, but by limiting the number of choices to the 'safe' choices. A 14 year old can choose to have a baby or not, but can't choose to smoke. I am sure we are headed in the right direction. not.
In most places, it is not illegal for people under 18 to smoke. It is illegal to _sell_ or _give_ cigarettes to people under 18. And although 18 is probably excessive (I'd say 16, or maybe even 14), I think it makes perfect sense to impose some limits on advertising targetted at children and young teens, especially when we're talking about addictive and / or unhealthy products.
You imply that adults "weigh" the long-term consequences of smoking and then make a rational choice to continue smoking. As a former smoker, I'm not sure that's an accurate reflection of what's happening with smokers (adults or children) nor a compelling answer to why we ban underage smoking.
A clearer explanation, in my opinion, would be that we expect adults to accept the consequences of their actions as a matter of personal responsibility. In other words, adults could reasonably know that smoking is dangerous and choose to smoke anyway, but they have to live with the consequences; lung cancer, emphysema, etc. We don't necessarily hold "minors" to the same standard. If a child gets their father's gun, takes it to school, and shoots another child, the consequences (should) fall mainly on the parent.
Of course, in our modern society, there are some really wacky things going on. People can sue corporations for the result of bad choices they've made, because we've pretty much abdicated on the idea of personal responsibility in non-criminal cases, while at the same time a five-year-old can be tried as an adult and sent up to the Big House if they use crayons to draw a gun in kindergarten.
But my take on this is more that (historically) we've decided that kids aren't held to the same standard of personal responsibility that we've (historically) assigned to adults.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
Finding people for a quality argument would be difficult though. It's not like programming where you make a mistake and it doesn't work. Garbage-in does not always lead to garbage out with programming; it often leads to nothing out. Not so with verbal communication.
Finding people to argue with who use Logic as opposed to logical fallacies would be the difficult part. In the case of something controversial like smoking (especially underage smoking), it would be easy to presume that most people would concentrate their arguments (more) on their own biased world view instead of concentrating on the logical process of the argumentation itself. I see this enough on Slashdot itself. You criticize an argument, and some people seem to think that you are criticizing them, or their products or ideals.
are you kidding me? i'd kill you for a klondike bar.
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
4) If banning 1 person under 18 from smoking 1 cigarette is justified (even if they were the last smoker on Earth), and the health effects would be the same for an average adult who smoked N cigarettes, then banning 1 adult from smoking those N cigarettes would also be justified (again, even if they were the last smoker on Earth).
5) If banning 1 person over 18 from smoking would be justified, then the same logic would apply to every person over 18, which would imply banning smoking for all people over 18.
In statement 5, you dropped the very important clause "(from smonking) those N cigarettes", therefore extending conclusion 4 to any number of cigarettes, not just "N or more". Therefore, you violated your own rule of "every statement follows logically from the previous statement".
Now, I understand you wanted this problem to serve as an example for testing argument techniques, but remember: garbage in, garbage out. Your example was faulty with respect to the rules of the method you wanted to discuss, so you can't be certain to draw correct conclusions about that specific method.
Hey, you wanted mathematical precision, so there you have it. Maybe take it as a piece of evidence that social interaction (of which laws are a part of) does not always care about logic and mathematical precision to the maximum extent possible.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
The benefit of a ban is possibly improved health in the group of people the ban effects.
The cost of the ban is decreased freedom in the group the ban effects.
Your argument address the possibility that the value of the benefit might differ with age.
You argument fail to address the possibility that the value of the cost might differ with age.
Since society value freedom for adults much higher than freedom for minors, the age discrimination is justified in this case. QED.
(A totally different discussion is whether society should value freedom for adults higher than freedom for minors, but it clearly does).
I would argue that you really only have the choice to start smoking; after that, each subsequent cigarette is less of a conscious choice and more your body taking over, until you make another conscious (and more difficult) choice to quit. If minors are less able to make a well-reasoned decision to start smoking, AND they are more likely to wind up addicted and thus not really choosing each additional cigarette as adults, you wind up with more adults who have never made a well-reasoned decision to smoke. If you make them wait until they are a bit older, when they are less likely to get addicted, you are giving them the opportunity to make a well-reasoned decision every time they light up. (This is my super-fast gotta-catch-the-bus-but-can't-resist version of this argument, just so you know.)
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Just come to /. and quarrel for free.
Well, not really for free. You employer pays.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Why not simply charge people for disagreeing with you?
That will be $1/response (unless you plan to agree with me) by the way!
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
On the topic of underage smoking, I think the author has missed the effect that smoking has on the very judgment that is considered inadequate before a person turns 18. Because of addiction effects, having chosen and been allowed to smoke as a child permanently inhibits the ability to apply reasoned arguments to the choice to continue smoking even after the age of 18.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
Why aren't all drugs given a consistent set of regulations under the FDA? If someone needs to get morphine, they get a prescription. If someone gets morphine without a prescription, they're being naughty. If someone needs to get marijuana, they get a prescription. If someone gets marijuana without a prescription, they're being naughty. If someone needs to get cigarettes, they get a prescription. If someone gets cigarettes without a prescription, they're being naughty.
There appears to be an implicit assumption in your line of reasoning, and that would be MY first point of disagreement:
0. It is the government's responsibility to protect the health of citizens and residents, even protecting them from their own judgement.
As a matter of personal philosophy, people who are assumed to be capable of making informed decisions have a fundamental right to make bad decisions (subject to the limitation that those bad decisions don't harm others). This re-frames the question to: are people under 18 capable of making informed decisions about smoking?
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
Its not surprising to me that many people fall back to the "minors have inferior judgment" argument for explaining why there are laws prohibiting them from exercising the same freedoms as adults. Consider the following questions:
I think most people are going to answer adults in each case. Now, I was careful to use the phrase 'more likely' above for good reason. We all know some adults that act more immature than 12 year olds, and we know some minors who already have more gray hairs than Granpa Frank. The problem with smoking and drinking laws is not that there is different rules for different groups, that concept seems obvious to me. Some cases warrant treating groups differently, especially when it comes to minors and adults. I don't think any sane individual is going to effectively argue that an average 12 year old has the same capacity for judgment than an average 32 year old does.
The problem with these laws is in the way we quantify the differences between groups. Its easier to play the averages and assume that age closely correlates to more maturity and common sense, but there is always the idiots and the geniuses on the edges of the statistical curve that are exceptions to the rule.
Understand that this is coming from someone who is male, unmarried, and who used to be younger than 25. I got raped on car insurance, even though I had neither recieved a traffic ticket nor had ever been responsible for an accident. In that case, I was one of the out-liers, paying a premium for insurance due to the careless driving behavior of the average unmarried male under the age of 25. So I am all for coming up with better criteria to discern between groups, but given the lazy ass nature of mankind, I think we will always just stick with the averages.
They person you buy the abuse from called is a Dominatrix. Or so I heard... I mean a friend told me ...
YOU CAN BREAK
IT INTO 2
Slashdot is free. Just watch.
Linux SUCKS It's the worst operating system EVER!!!!
Vista is soooo much better, Linux does not even play wow.
Also
Solaris is a FAR better operating system.
I find your entire approach to be misguided. There is no "hence" or "therefore" in debate about issues like this.
(2) Why can you assume that something that is true for a large group of people MUST therefore be true for each person individually? Here is the counterpoint: if a law costs $1000bn to implement and saves one life, it probably isn't worth implementing (unless you put an effectively infinite value on a human life).
(3) Prove that N is finite. You can't. This wouldn't fly in a real mathematical proof so why would it fly here? There may exist people who are immune to the ill health effects of cigarette, ergo, N would be infinite. This isn't number theory. You can't generalize about all people by knowing something about a few.
(4) Seems to follow from (3) except it uses this non-mathematical term "justified" and I'm not sure what that means.
(5) Doesn't follow at all. If the courts ban someone from driving that doesn't mean that all drivers should logically also be banned.
(6) Complete non-sequiteur. You claim to have demolished all possible arguments to the contrary but you have done nothing of the sort.
I find it broadly disturbing that you think simple non-rigorous mathematical "proofs" can be composed to show that certain laws are misguided. It's a bad misunderstanding of mathematics and it's a bad misunderstanding of the law.
This is the classical fallacy of division (See, for example, http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/division.html). Note that it is *possible* that an *individual* smoker might be immune to the harmful effects of smoking, but this is clearly not a feature of the group of all smokers. Therefore, your claim that this is a logical argument is the actual problem.
Now, if none of your readers identified this correctly, I would argue that your experiment failed. I require my students to be able to identify such mistakes in news articles they read for class.
No you're not.
..........FULL STOP.
The reason your second experiment failed, where you tried to break your argument down into postulates, is because you changed the audience that would react to it.
...Also, your postulates were badly written.
In the first case, if you write a moderate-length, articulate, well-reasoned argument, you'll get a certain amount of similarly written responses back along with all of the normal internet chaff.
In the second case, you lose the interest of those with something insightful to say, while simultaneously making it more accessible to people that wouldn't have bothered to write a reasonable reply to the first case.
Political consultants and focus groups are common tools used by the politically savvy (like presidential candidates) to vet and refine the language of major policy speeches (and even the content of the policy itself). These are people that are paid to help identify the weak points (either the content or the presentation) in the speech and improve it. Focus groups largely are paid a small amount to give you soft impressions: do you agree or disagree, are you excited or bored, etc. Political consultants are paid a lot more to tell you more specific things: change the wording of this sentence, emphasize this point by saying XYZ, don't say this or you'll antagonize so-and-so, etc. This is, in part, how a State of the Union address comes about.
Ideally, the President (not just Bush, any President) would have people on salary whose sole job is to play the devil's advocate. These would NOT just be people who actually agree with you but can argue the other side, but rather people who genuinely believe the other side. Democrats should hire Republicans, and vice versa. One common criticism of the current President is that he surrounds himself with people who all agree with him. To the people they work for, they're royal pains in the ass, but they are of benefit, too.
Now, one might ask why a President should pay someone to disagree with him, when he can surely walk down the street to Congress and get an earful for free. That has merit, too, and it's something that appears to be lacking these days. But there are advantages to having your own nay-sayers in house: it allows you to craft better policy from the start, rather than duking it out in public; you don't tip your hand before you are ready; when you do announce policy, you are prepared for counter-arguments; and, you avoid the appearance of always doing it your way (again, a common criticism of this current President).
Cigarettes are more like a differentiable equation then some linear function of x cigarettes cause y damage. The addictiveness of cigarettes mean that if you start at a younger age you will be doing more physical damage, but worse yet, cementing the addiction to a higher degree.
I've heard of studies that show that people who start smoking over the age of 21 are more likely to quit. This would imply that starting at a younger age is worse than later, giving another reason to set an arbitrary age ban.
Since I can't link to the study I won't expect anyone to believe it fully, but I think the factor of addiction cannot be ignored in this argument.
"how can they call it a MINE if everything here is THEIRS?!?!" -Straight Jacket
It's called Opposition Research, where you have one of your own people make the best argument they can against your position.
TRHOnline - Staggering Towards Brilliance
Obviously any age limit is going to have
1. People younger but mature enough.
2. People older but not mature enough.
While he makes a good case the 18 is arbitrary, he hasn't come up with a better way of handling the problem. We ban all sorts of (potentially harmful but fun) things for minors that adults can enjoy freely. Some things (like driving) we have both an age limit and a test, others (cigarettes, alcohol, sex) we have only an age limit. An age limit isn't perfect, but it's a reasonable way of handling the problem- alternatives would be having tests with some way of authenticating 'maturity', or having no limits at all.
He could just as easily be complaining that TCP/IP is a arbitrary protocol that has some disadvantages. His complaints may be accurate, but unless he has a better way of handling the problem they mean very little.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
"Most of these people clearly weren't in it for the money," Koblin says. "They weren't doing it so they could get 2 cents. It was more about participating in something larger."
It looks like a creative way of "1c from every human on the planet" kinda scheme.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Why did Constantinople get the works?
Minors don't have the same risk-aversion, experience, foresight and long-term planning capabilities that adults do. If you're going to discount judgement, then you should also support no minimum age for driving. Who thinks that's a great idea? Even judgement aside, N cigarettes will not stunt the growth of an adult nor cripple their physical endurance before they can play high school sports, nor entice them to steal from their parents because their allowance can't cover their new addiction.
Oddly, unlike most of the mechanical turk users, I disagree with the first statement.
Government should not be allowed to ban smoking for minors due to the health effects.
Government should be allowed to ban smoking for minors, because they are insufficiently mature to make a reasoned decision about the health effects.
Starting from that premise, the conclusion "but it is acceptable for government to allow adults to smoke" is reasonable -- adults are considered able to make reasoned decisions about the health effects.
Note that I make no appeal to it being more important to protect minors, or how large the effect of smoking once or N times is. We as a society have set various age thresholds, where people below that threshold are considered unable to make certain decisions, usually those with long-term bad impacts but short term good ones. You can argue about whether the particular threshold is a good one (and certainly "18 years old" is a blunt tool for "mature enough to decide about things with long term subtle effects"), but there is no reducto ad absurdum here...
This is generally why youth are not allowed to drink, smoke, vote, join the army, or enter into most contracts. We vary the threshold for some of these, based on various thinking about the harms and maturity involved, but they all flow from that basic principle.
It's interesting and surprising to me that you do not even consider the possibility that a rebuttal may change your mind. You seem to assume that the only thing that will happen is that you will change or improve your argument in order to strengthen it. Apparently if you have some reason for your belief, and you find that there is a very effective rebuttal, you will simply avoid citing that reason in your future arguments; but knowing that one of the reasons for your belief was wrong will not make you less likely to hold it.
It's a pretty sad commentary on the state of our reasoning process and makes one wonder why people even try to come up with arguments. I guess they can be seen as tools for closed-minded people like the OP to persuade the open-minded (which the arguers apparently consider weak-minded).
(anonymous because the very thought is making me blush)
The data should be valuable for image analysis. Mirror them, and develop an algorithm to find the head and tail of a sheep. Pay people to draw cows, and develop an algorithm to distinguish between species.
... COW ... YOU HAVE DRAWN!"
Only problem is, I'm not sure how valuable automated software for analyzing drawings is.
NANNYBOT 1.0: "WHAT A FINE
Great idea, this mechanical turk thing, but I think the example you gave shows its limitation if none of them objected even to the first item in your list:
1. Government should ban smoking by people under 18, because of the harmful health effects.
It's not because of the harmful effects, it's because people under 18 are not considered legally responsible for their actions. Yeah, there may be exceptions and inconsistencies to that (can't buy alcohol until you're 21, but you can die in a war at age 18, for instance), but that's the reason.
Anyway, you need at least one Turk that responds to each of your presumptions.
Nobody here is choosing #2. I don't get it. First, statistics don't reduce to the individual in the manner you appear to assume. Second, and more specifically, this policy is an artificial measure intended to address, however so subtly, an entire list of social ills: peer pressure, industrial malfeasance, stress on the healthcare system, etc. etc. etc.. There is no law that you can't gargle bleach until you are 18, because there's no stupid fashion for gargling bleach.
So, no, if just one person wanted to smoke cigarettes, there wouldn't be, and wouldn't need to be a law.
Point A: it isn't about right or wrong, it's about socially destructive or socially tolerable. Point B: this is precisely why it's the government's business even though it infringes on personal liberties. It's the individual's responsibility to manage their own ethics (including conforming to laws without calculating the extent of the penalty, because...). It's the state's business to manage the interactions of bulk human behaviour. Because that's why we have one.
...when you can do it for free? I patented the "multiple personality" troll when I used to be Trolling4Dollars (old of mine ID here). Let me give you a sample to show you how it's done.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
- Government should ban smoking by people under 18, because of the harmful health effects.
The government should ban smoking by people under 18, because this is a cost-effective and meme-wise implementable way of achieving the true intent of preventing people under 18 from incurring harmful health effects from smoking.
The ban incurs positive utility on average from the extensive lives young people on average have in front of them, however negative utility from the fact that it prevents people from doing what they would like to do.
- If that's true for the entire group of underage smokers, then it's also true for each individual smoker under 18. In other words, even if only one person under 18 smoked in the entire country, it would still be justified for the government to ban them from smoking.
I don't see any neccessity to induce from the many to the one - the ban could be intended to prevent the average person under 18 from incurring unhealth H by smoking a large number of cigarettes, and is simply enacted as a blanket ban, as mentioned above. If the single person under 18 was someone who did not want to smoke a lot of cigarettes, but only a very limited number that was not sufficient to incur unhealth, then a ban would not have been required. It feels more natural therefore to stay with the averages.
- Whatever bad health effects are caused by the average person under 18 smoking 1 cigarette, there is some number N cigarettes that would cause the same bad health effects in the average adult who smoked them.
There are no harmful health effects from banning the average person under 18 from smoking 1 cigarette, and that is not the true intention of the ban to prevent either. It is simply implemented because it is a useful proxy for the true intent of preventing smoking so much that it incurs harmful health effects.
If you scale up 1 cigarette to 20 cigarettes, then certainly, there is a number N cigarettes that the average adult may smoke to incur a similar health cost. Or is there? Firstly, disutility of health should not be defined simply as being in a state of unhealth, but rather in terms of the deficiencies of life that this unhealth incurs. Because a young person has a longer life in front of them, then for any unhealth Y, the disutility of health that results from a certain state of unhealth Y must be scaled down in line with the life they would have left to live. Hence it is not only sufficient to take as your starting point an adult that smokes N cigarettes, but rather, you should say that a young person smokes Z cigarettes where Z is a number sufficient to incur a state of unhealth Y, while there is any number of X cigarettes that an adult could smoke that would incur a proportionally larger state of unhealth so that the disutility of health of the young person and the old person becomes equal to R.
We take that as the starting point instead - for any number Z of cigarettes a young person smokes to generate a certain total disutility of health R over their life, there must be a number X cigarettes that an old person could smoke that would incur the same disutility of health R. If the intent behind a ban is to prevent a young person from smoking Z cigarettes, then this should also justify preventing an older person from smoking X cigarettes.
That is however not the only adjustment that you can make - in the eyes of many people, preventing young people from doing as they feel like has a lower negative utility than preventing adults from doing what they feel like. Possibly justified by them with reference to the desires of young people being easier to change through external influence, being more prone to short-term views rather than long-term, and other fanciful observations they claim to have made. If you accept this, then the disutility from lack of health in an adult cannot simply be X cigarettes at state Y of unhealth, but rather >X cigarettes, (let's say T cigarettes) enough to incur an even greater health cost to create a positive utility
Even though he forgot to promote the buying of SCO stock so his own shares go up in value.
God spoke to me.
Smoking is the only socially acceptable form of suicide.
Considering the length of TFA exceeds /.'s mandatory 5-second-attention-span limitation by an order of magnitude or two, he doesn't need the Course to bring him up to speed.
The WSJ had an article a few weeks ago about something similar, "bribing" blogs to give favorable placement. It seems most bloggers are just fine with this practice:
- "Your iPhone suxx0r!"
- "Sorry to hear that, here's your free iPhone"
- "iPhone rocks, A++++++++++++++"
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
I cannot find the study, but sometime within the past 24 months or so I heard a sound-bite on the CBC about a recently completed study of the effects of smoking in adolescents. According to my memory at least, the researchers found significant physiological effects on 12 year old subjects after only a single cigarette. The subjects seemed to be experiencing physical/chemical withdrawal effects after this one single exposure. This is in contrast with those over 21 who seem to develop chemical addiction to cigarettes much less easily. If my memory is correct, and such findings are in fact valid, this would give further legitimacy to age restrictions on tobacco products. Even if my memory (or the above mentioned study) is not completely valid, there are numerous other studies (I think) linking age of first cigarette with level of addiction, and a variety of studies showing the effectiveness of age limitation laws on tobacco purchase and future addiction levels. Personally I have never encountered anyone (baring those employed in the tobacco industry) who actually is against society as a whole discouraging smoking by anyone - the differences of option are always in how we decide how to do that discouraging. I have always thought that we should implement a law that totally bans the use of tobacco products in those born after the year 1993 (14 year olds), which I don't think anyone could possibly have an argument against. Then every two years, move the tobacco ban up one year - so that in 2009 nobody born in 1994 or later could use tobacco, in 2011 nobody born in 1995 or later could use tobacco, and so on. After twenty years the ban will extend to those who are 24 years old, after forty years it extends to those who are 34 years old, after sixty years it extends to those who are 44 years old. The moving year of prohibition means that we are never taking current (legal) smokers and making their addiction legal, but at the same time we are gradually limiting the number of new smokers that the industry can sell to. It should give those in the industry to find something else to make their money on, while gradually weaning the whole society off of this unhealthy habit, all without ever forcing anyone to give up their lifestyle choices. Should I submit that idea to the Turk to test it out?
That crap wasn't worth a dollar. Well, maybe to you. I guess "in loco parentis" is a concept you and a lot of others in our increasingly rebellious pop culture don't even want to think about? As several others have already pointed out, there is a necessary distinction between adults and minors.
Actually, two of them.
1. In your mathematical reasoning, you lost me at #2. If only one guy (minor or not) smoked, society wouldn't give enough of a shit to ban it. Such laws are about things that affect enough people to make laws about them, that's the way they work.
2. Congratulations, you just discovered that thresholds are arbitrary. See above post about how your argument applies to e.g parents force-feeding a baby who won't eat. Or in other words, you could imagine a continuum with a mildly addictive but mostly harmless substance (say, chewing gum) at one end, and some seriously dangerous drug or poison on the other. Unless you take the view that society should never prevent you from harming yourself (which is tenable in itself, but not very humane, and doesn't sound like your position anyway), you'll have to choose a point in this continuum where you start making the substance less freely available. Once you've done that, and since it is a continuum, there's no way to avoid the effect that just a tiny, almost undetectable amount of change in "badness" would put you on the "allowed" or the "controlled" side of the fence. Which is logically absurd, for high enough values of "logically".
Fun with reasoning and the real world.... ever wondered how many atoms you could take out of an apple without it ceasing to be "an apple"?
The medical mechanics of point (3) are wrong.
There are some forms of damage that accumulate, and point (3) does hold for "1 cigarette" vs "N cigarettes" for these forms of damage.
But...
There are other forms, most notably cancer, that don't work that way. Any given cigarette either does or does not trigger the replicator cascade that is cancer. "Odds" and "infection rates" and similar apply to groups. As an individual, a given single cigarette either gives you cancer, or it doesn't. It's like playing "Russian Roulette" with a million cylinder gun.
To bad none of your $1 "checkers" caught that...
it's a sound argument that the OP makes, but it does overlook the part of minor's judgement process which the minor does not make; the outside influences. This includes what parents, authority figures, and advertisements say. If I grew up watching cigarette commercials in between my Saturday morning cartoons, I would likely have a much different attitude towards smoking than I do now. (Or if I didn't have a different attitude, I would likely be chemically addicted by now).
What's the value of information that you don't know?
2. Legal guardians/people responsible for others are held to a higher standard than those making decisions for themselves. That is, while you may legally decide to engage in risky behavior, including racing cars or smoking cigarrettes, you are not legally allowed to allow those same risky behaviors for others that you are responsible for.
Thus, while it may be legal for you yourself to smoke, it is illegal for you to allow ANYONE else that you are responsibel for to smoke. As children are by law not responisble for themselves but instead have others responsible for them, it is by definition illegal for anyone to give them permission to smoke, so selling ciggarretes to them is illegal.
3. Ciggarretes health effects are not 100% known. It is quite possible that the affect they have on the young is exponentially greater than they have on adults. So much so, that it is not possible for someone to reasonably smoke enough 'N number of ciggarretes' to match the physical badness from one child's ciggarettes.
4. Smoking is addictive. By preventing the young from becoming addicted, we fairly work against the negative effects to society as a whole. We do not outright make it illegal because in the past we have found such laws (prohibition, drug wars, etc.) to be more trouble than they are worth. So instead we publicy denigrate the practice via ads, while also making it illegal for the young
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
So for a tiny amount of $ the poster got a mechanical turk to critique his argument, the experience has led him to submit it to /. which forces an indepth argument existence. Hundreds of people respond to each others points and another group of people who have not commented on the discussion rate the reponses so you can effectively weed out the trolls and the morons.
The poster is a genius.
But I must have wandered into the 108th upperclass twit of the year show.
Just luck I suppose we are not in any danger of the world deadliest joke in these parts.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I believe it was Hungary that studied the economic effect of smoking. More precisely, the effect on their budget. Tobacco tax revenue minus the delta government costs. What they found is that was surprising. The delta of government costs was negative. Not only were smokers paying additional taxes through cigarettes, they were dying sooner, which meant they were drawing less pension.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
No monthy python references and no point about smoking bans, instead I want to talk about his idea.
Does the mturk system allow you to test an idea. No.
The answer should be bloody obvious, it is the yes-man problem and the fact that most suck at a self criticism. The yes-man problem comes from the fact that you PAY for answers that you "approve", therefore the people trying to answer will have a motivation to tell you what they think you want to hear.
Then comes your own capability to see an answer that goes against what you want to hear as being correct. This is a flaw we all have and it bites us in the ass constantly, we just don't want to hear we are wrong. Not even if you are paying for it. To touch on the asked question, you still have smokers denying the dangers of smoking even as they are dying of cancer. It doesn't matter how "right" the doctor and anyone else is, they don't want to hear.
Finally comes the trickiest, even if you know the answer (and then why are you asking it) what makes you think mturk workers know the answer. From what I read about it they are not exactly the brightest bulbs or they wouldn't be working for pennies. I would suggest that you are tapping a very odd barrel of workers here. Most definitly a cross section of society as most people would see the salary and laugh.
The idea itself is not without merit, but at best you could use it as cheap editor, very cheap, to find obvious flaws in your article. Perhaps slashdot should use it to correct spelling errors, RTFA and dupe detection. As way to come up with the "truth", no. Might as well hold an election and simply go with the hype of the day.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It's discouraging that you don't even know (or, perhaps, care) about this distinction...but the word you were reaching for is "logically". When you argue (in the philosophical sense), then you employ logic. It may be poor logic...but that's the tool you should grab, not the tire iron.
Your argument might have turned out better if you had not actually started out by arguing; it may sound strange, but you might have found it helpful to agree with your opponents. When you compose an argument, the very first thing you should do is to imagine an intelligent opponent who actually holds the position you are trying to refute. No matter how wrong-headed you think he is, ask yourself why a smart person might hold such an opinion; think of the best possible argument this person might advance. Then, and only then, should you begin your own disputation. (You might even surprise yourself at this stage, and change your mind!) Always begin by understanding your opponent's best possible argument; this puts you in the best position to refute him. It's also the honest thing to do.
As for your formulation of the anti-smoking argument, I attained MEGO (My Eyes Glazed Over) at step 1. It's pretty obvious that if the only reason we have for prohibiting under-age smoking is that it's harmful, then the argument leads to a blanket prohibtion. Perhaps proposition 1 might have been something like, "Young people should be given special consideration and protection by the state." Number 2 might be, "This special status extends even to protecting them from the consequences of their own actions by prohibiting them from doing things that will hurt them".
The Turk thing is interesting (but why is it Turkish?)—the notion of getting paid to argue has great appeal to me. However, I think I'm worth more than a buck per argument.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
There is more to life than your physical health.
Isn't that what a slashdot subscription is for?
1. Government should ban smoking by people under 18, because of the harmful health effects. :. Based on b,c,d we used to say that humans under the age of 21 were not accountable as adults and did not have the privileges of adults. We didn't allow them to have sex, get married, vote, etc.
:. Based on the prior conclusion and a,e,i,j,h we do not allow humans under 18 to smoke cigarettes.
This is a false statement. You are omitting several additional conditions. The reason that smoking is banned is because of an accumulation of factors.
a) smoking is harmful
b) young people are ill informed of the risks
c) even when informed of the risks, young people under 13 do not have fully formed logic centers in their brain so they are generally incapable of reasoning at an adult age yet.
d) even when the logic center is formed, young people undergo a massive surge of hormones between 13 and their early 20's which renders them basically insane at times.
e) for reasons unknown to me at this time, public education ends when most people are 18.
f) for economic reasons over the last 50 years, many 18 year olds now can afford to move out on their own.
g) for social reasons, most parents do not prefer that their children live with them past 18.
h) smoking- unlike goth makeup- is physically addictive. Even if you do not enjoy smoking, you are punished when
you try to quit if you smoke enough cigs to develop an addiction.
i) Due to the baby boom, there were so many 18 to 21 year olds at the same time that their political force was able to cause society to change the rules and treat 18 year olds as adults (from e,f,g).
j) As the baby boom has gotten older, they took those rights back from 18 year olds (who can now die in a war and may smoke cigarettes but who may no longer drink).
My summary is that your argument starts off with a proposition of the form "Have you stopped beating your wife?"
I.e. you have built in some bias's to your question that are not explicitly laid out.
Given that the rest of your argument was based on a shaky foundation, I won't address it.
However.. I would argue that since we would not allow a child to smoke and we do argue adults to smoke then at some age chosen to represent the break between child and adult we would allow people to choose to smoke and suffer the consequences.
2. If that's true for the entire group of underage smokers, then it's also true for each individual smoker under 18. In other words, even if only one person under 18 smoked in the entire country, it would still be justified for the government to ban them from smoking.
3. Whatever bad health effects are caused by the average person under 18 smoking 1 cigarette, there is some number N cigarettes that would cause the same bad health effects in the average adult who smoked them.
4. If banning 1 person under 18 from smoking 1 cigarette is justified (even if they were the last smoker on Earth), and the health effects would be the same for an average adult who smoked N cigarettes, then banning 1 adult from smoking those N cigarettes would also be justified (again, even if they were the last smoker on Earth).
5. If banning 1 person over 18 from smoking would be justified, then the same logic would apply to every person over 18, which would imply banning smoking for all people over 18.
6. Hence, if you believe that smoking should be banned for people under 18, then the same logic would lead to a ban on smoking for people over 18 as well.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I know this is sort of off-topic, but here's my take on the children-smoking issue:
1) It's true that children have less mature decision making abilities. The ban on children smoking is partially a ban on *advertising* to children. The advertising has a much greater affect, regardless of the volume of advertising. It is more likely to result in a child making a bad decision than advertising directed towards adults affects adults.
2) The negative effects of smoking on children is more severe than on adults. When a child gets cancer or emphysema, it runs through the system quicker. The resulting illness is much more damaging. This isn't affected by the number of cigs the person smokes. Smoking more increases your chances of getting cancer, but it doesn't increase the damage the cancer does. Being younger both increases the chances and the damage.
3) Right or wrong (I think wrong), our system of laws has always had 2 standards. A child simply does not have the rights an adult does. This means it's much easier to enact draconian laws that target children than adults. In reality, we should ban smoking for all citizens, or allow it for all. But, we also recognize the rights of adults to make self-damaging decisions is much more broad than that for children. So, it's not that the laws devalue the adult, but that enacting similar laws against adults would come up against resistance by the ACLU and others.
4) Most of these laws were made before children were recognized as a valuable demographic. If we tried to make it illegal for children to smoke today, the tobacco companies would resist much more forcefully than they did in the 1970s when these laws were made.
-Dave
Citizens Against Plate Tectonics
The assumption you are making here, I think, is that a person is worth the same amount to society no matter how old he is, when conventional wisdom states otherwise. Children, as assets, are worth more (or believed to be worth more) because their potential to contribute and change society is higher than adults. In fact, as an individual grows older, his value increases until it peaks (depending on how useful it is, the peak may occur at any time between 18 to 99 years old) and then the value drops. Banning cigarettes from minors, then, could be viewed as premium on the insurance society buys to reduce the likely-hood of the assets to spoil pre-peak. We pay more to insure a brand new car than one that's been around the block, and this is really the same thing.
:-)
My argument raises a very obvious question, and that is if I'm right why do we have social welfare programs for the elderly? And the answer to that is, social security as well as other similar programs were put in place as incentives to keep our citizenry productive. Telling people they won't be discarded once they become useless boosts morale and helps maintain their value as assets. Promising future advantages for current yields is a cheap and inexpensive (in the short-term) way to boost productivity. It is especially effective when competition is steep for labor. Why pay through the nose for a good worker when you can offer intangible benefits that may or may not materialize? The idea is, you want do do as much promising as possible without actually following through on it, which is why when social security was enacted, the retirement age was so close to the life-expectancy age.
Anyway, getting back to your argument, if we look at the smoking ban as a premium society pays on its insurance for the citizenry, then age 18 is when we perceive the first depreciation of that asset and the extra we pay is removed.
Hope this helps.
parents comment makes it clear that everyone who voted grandparent up is somehow vulnerable to flawed axioms.
- some vote to continue things "the way they have always been"
- some vote with the crowd because "everybody thinks so" or because some one they respect has told them to
- some would ban all smoking because it harms smokers
- some would ban all smoking because it raises health costs
- some would ban all smoking because they fear or dislike secondhand smoke
- some would ban minors from smoking because young lungs are particularly vulnerable
- some would restrict minors' freedom because they don't trust minors to choose wisely
- some don't trust anyone to choose wisely, but believe they must let adults choose anyway
- some vote irrationally (e.g., based on their level of grumpiness on Tuesday morning)
- some (smokers and tobacco cos.) would ban minors smoking because it is a middle ground that avoids a ban on everyone
- some voted for prohibitionist representatives for unrelated reasons (e.g., party politics)
- some (smokers) vote to preserve their own option to smoke
- some (tobacco cos. and resellers) would allow all smoking to make money
- some would allow all smoking for personal freedom reasons
- some vote to change things for the sake of change
- and on and on and on
You can polish any one of these arguments until it gleams, but be aware that even one individual may choose by balancing how strongly they feel about two or more of these arguments. A person may be irrational; people definitely are."We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Hmmm. The junky responses I've seen here on /. seem to indicate that there is a lot of noise and useless response. If I was constructing this, I would disallow arguments that violated rhetorical soundness by containing any rhetorical fallacies. I would probably set a standard such as the 83 fallacies described in "Attacking Faulty Reasoning" by Damer. The standard is not so high as to exclude anyone but the best logicians, but is high enough to exclude most morons. I might also require anyone arguing to write in E-prime or otherwise avoid the syntactical deficiencies that Korzybski wrote about in "Science and Sanity".
/. are concerned with constructing the counter-argument. (Most of these attempts seem to be trivial.) I would disqualify anyone who didn't understand or read the proposition.
I've noticed that many of the responses here on
Lastly, there is a format, used since the Ancient Greeks, for stating a proposition and deriving a conclusion. Starting with the "givens", the formal representation of classical argument avoids a lot of confusion. This format limits the domain of the argument to what is specifically relevant, but (unfortunately) excludes irrelevant arguments that would have a high value in another context. The author specifically states that he is looking for logical justification or refutation of the proposition that it is fair to exclude adult smokers from a smoking ban. This is an interesting exercise, but less useful than an exercise in "How to reduce the harm caused to people who smoke."
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
I'll take a few seconds to punch a nice hole in your argument:
:-P
The effect of smoking on minors is DIFFERENT than on adults. I don't have time to give you references, but off the top of my head I can tell you it affects the growth of children; obviously your growing up is all done by the time you are 18.
So: there is NO number of cigarettes that has the same effect on an adult than a child, which kills your argument at #3.
QED. And I want my 1$ too
You're not old until regret takes the place of your dreams.
Medical science has time to prevent the high costs associated with smoking by younger people, but not older.
....
Slashdot is supposed to be technical people, systems-level thinkers, with an understanding of dynamic systems
I'd pay them to attend & ask questions at my bogus FEMA press conferences.
18 is also the age of your last year of your traditional basic education. The drinking age seem more arbitrary to me (which I'm well over).
Quack, quack.
... a college course in symbolic logic. But somehow I think the benefits of course in symbolic logic would be of greater worth.
So in the end this posting to Slashdot will serve the author (at least) three purposes:
:)
1) Additional rebuttal arguments for the smoking issue
2) Feedback from a group of people on the "pay for argument" model.
3) Help the author assess other people's reaction to his "debate for debate's sake" viewpoint.
Ok, I don't really fell THAT used, but I do find it amusing that item number three might actually be the authors true intent of this entire exercise.
Also... Go Slashdotters! I already see several great rebuttals posted!
RudeDude
Perl/Linux/PHP hacker
We in the ol' days called it alimony...
It is harder to quit when you start smoking at an early age. If you start smoking in you early twenties instead of 13, you have a much better chance of quitting. There is your "reason"
God Exists prove me wrong.
Please note that I don't not necessarily believe in the above statement it is just for argument purposes.
"Because I said so... How about this, you and your brother take a bath without arguing with me tonight? Sound good?" How can kids manage to perform the exact same behavior as millions of other kids around the world, even though they've never seen it modeled anywhere? "No, you can't watch Power Rangers for the 5th time today. You've had enough time to pick out a toy now GET UPSTAIRS." Seriously, though. I love my boys.
[quote]
several people picked #3 and #4, arguing some version of "People under 18 have less developed judgment." (I still say that doesn't matter, because you're talking about comparing a person under 18 who smokes, with a person over 18 who smokes, and their judgment in both cases is the same, etc.)
[/quote]
You seem to be saying "An adult who chooses to smoke has the same poor judgment as a youth who choose to smoke", that is, choosing to smoke is proof of poor judgment in an adult. However, poor judgment in this context means an inability to make rational choices rather than a history of bad choices. You and I might believe smoking is a bad decision, but choosing to smoke is not defacto proof of inability to make rational choices.
Most people would say that a youth has, on average, less ability to weigh the long-term implications of their choices than an adult. An adult has presumably weighed the costs and benefits of smoking and made a decision, a youth lacks the ability to weigh the costs and benefits rationally.
just to continue your experiment...
you should not ban the use of the cigarette, but you might ban the misleading marketing that leads to using a cigarette.
in the one case you are attempting to ban something that one does to oneself, in the latter, you are attempting to ban something someone does to another.
this is generally where I find the useful cutoff when considering any legislation. legislation should never be about preventing someone from doing something to themselves, only preventing someone from doing something to someone else.
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
Now normally, I'm not a big fan of taxes for taxations sake, but...
Just tax the hell out of cigarettes and put the money into socialized health care projects.
You want to stop a 16 year old kid from smoking? Tell him he needs to cough up $7.50 for a pack. Not many kids are going to be paying that rate for long. Especially with the price of gas climbing. And if you've got the money to pay for $7.50 packs of smoke, you've probably got money to pay for your own health insurance, so smoke on.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Am I the only one who got a chill when reading the following:
If you're crafting an argument for public consumption, you could even have HIT workers build up your argument for you -- start with a position and have them come up with reasons supporting that position -- although to me that feels like a cheapening of the debate process that crosses the line, because you're not even trying to reason your way to a conclusion, instead starting with the conclusion you want and then working backwards (not that this isn't what a lot of debaters do anyway!).
That seems like a perfect application of this "pay a lot of people a little money each to do something" technology. Mix this approach in with a little statistical knowledge, a little marketing research insight, etc, and you'd have a process which takes an arbitrary conclusion as input and produces an argument that a statistical percent of the population is going to agree with as output. Not only will that X% agree with it, but some Y% of the X% will feel like there's something about that argument (or arguer) that really summed up how they always felt about the issue but only now could put into words. The really chilling aspect is that both X and Y are just a function of how many 'turks' wrote up an argument (which is itself just a function of how much money was poured into the process.)
I know focus groups and market research has been used before, but imagine using the internet to give micropayments to a massive amount of people to not just give their opinion on an issue but to give an argument that has been crafted from their individual beliefs. If a politician can't find a way to turn that into a generalized position that the majority of any given populous agrees with, then they're not working hard enough...
A crucial step that politicians and marketers take, that the story poster did not, is to identify your target audience and make sure your feedback approximates it. The poster now has an idea of the types of counterarguments he's likely to get from geeks who enjoy participating in the Mechanical Turk program. That does not necessarily mean that his arguments are going to be any more effective when pointed at politicians (for example). There may be whole classes of objections or different ways of framing the argument that he is missing.
There is a reason that market research firms and political consultancies can charge so much money. They are charging for the cost of providing a reliable approximation of your target market, for you to experiment on.
People should not make the mistake of thinking that every argument needs to be universal to be successful. In politics for instance the desire is sometimes to reach and motivate a small group of people to action. Inflammatory speech and seemingly minority positions on a variety of subjects can effectively be combined into a winning strategy. Likewise many businesses choose only certain segments of a market to target, and make sure their communications are targetted to those markets only.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Try Ouchy
When I want people to argue with me, I just go on IRC. Am I missing something?
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
I disagree with statement 1.
I can't find, in my head, this website, or anywhere else, a single argument that can rationalize why smoking is legal for anybody. Ever.
It's toxic, addictive and your smoking can harm me. Since your rights stop where mine start, you should have no right to smoke where it could be inhaled by anybody else (or get on their carpets, in their hair, in their furniture, clothing, etc.)
Discuss.
Let's see...
#2566 takes forever to draw because somebody created the black background with the thinnest brush there is instead of a fill tool.
#6118 is taking a dump.
#6124, #6129-#6140 aren't even sheep.
$6140, #7291 are rocket ships.
#6850 has a duck beak.
And every so often, you'll see dogs, cats, horses, cows, and some fire-breathing ones in there...
Actually, it's not the attempt to mathify that I find problematic—I find that encouraging. It is, though, the results.
My (awesome) university philosophy professor had us do a very interesting exercise that was, though more logical than mathematical in nature, similar to what the author of TFA was going for. It goes like this...
Write down a belief that you have. For people new to this process (the entire class), this should be a strongly held belief...doesn't matter how controversial. Let's say, for example: I think abortion should be a woman's choice. (For you controversy-hounds out there, please don't mistake this for my actual belief—I'm intentionally not going to define my actual belief on this topic here.) Don't worry about getting the wording just right—you're free to revisit your initial statement as many times as you like throughout and revise it to more concisely represent your intent.
Now write down the set of "sub-beliefs" that you have which form the basis of your belief. For our example: 1. Life begins at conception. 2. Every life is equally valuable. 3. A life has no quantifiable value, but is inherently precious and ought to be protected if at all possible. Etc. Next we iterate, applying the same process to each belief listed. Obviously, you will very quickly diverge into an explosion of statements that resist corralling at every effort. Do not fret—I haven't told you about the thrust of the exercise yet.
(I should mention here that we did an entire section on identifying context-free statements, and we were asked to make our best effort to ensure that each statement was context-free, or as free of context as possible. "Context-free" means that the statement is true of our beliefs regardless of the circumstances in which the statement is tested. If that's not possible—and it's not often possible—we'd go for "generally" true, where "common sense"—whatever that is—dictates obvious exceptions.)
You will find it unnecessary to list each and every belief supporting your initial statement, which would quite likely fill several thick volumes if you did so exhaustively. Luckily, you don't have to do this to satisfy the point of the exercise, which is: where necessary, skip down to "lowest level" beliefs...that is, at some point you will mentally reach a point where you have identified a belief for which you have no further basis beliefs. When you reach this point, you have identified an axiomatic belief—that is, something you accept essentially on faith, on gut feeling, because you think it is correct. If possible, identify the key beliefs that go from your initial statement to the set of axiomatic beliefs identified.
The next step is to look at your beliefs, both axiomatic and intermediate, for consistency. In every case in carrying out this exercise, one will invariably find a whole host of contradictory statements. Then we did an iteration that attempts to resolve these conflicts by tweaking our initial statement, etc...provided we were tuning up the language to indicate real intent and not moving the statements further away from our actual beliefs, great. The ultimate idea is to identify our beliefs in all their gory, inconsistent, warty detail.
Then, we make up a list of so-called axiomatic beliefs and they are given to 5 random classmates (all double-blind, of course). You then are tasked with taking home those 5 lists of axiomatic beliefs and attempt to drill down further. If they are truly axiomatic, you won't be able to do this—the idea here is that you ultimately get back 5 people's analysis of your list and given another chance to continue the process—most of the time, it turns out you realize your axiomatic beliefs weren't axiomatic for you after all, and that you can actually drill down even more.
Anyway, it goes on like this, the ultimate point being that you arrive at some network of beliefs which yo
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
... before you pay people to argue against you maybe you should be familiar with the actual topic. The smoking ban for minors is not in place because smoking is more or less harmful to that age group (though it is). The concensus in many societies is that children are not abled to make decisions that affect them in the long run because their horizon tends to be rather small. This is important especially for anything that causes some kind of addiction precisely because an addiction has consequences 20 years down the line. Kids can't plan for the next week, let alone the state of their health in their forties.
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
Paying people to criticize your work is a great idea. You are getting a benefit, and the mechanical turk collects people who want to be involved. When you spam your friends for feedback, since they are your friends, you'll get responses similar to your own world view.
BTW, using age 18 as an arbitrary breakpoint for responsibility has never made much sense to me, especially since in the south, the legal age for the idiocy of your choice varies from state to state.
HBO did an addiction special about 3 - 4 months ago where they gave a compelling reason for blocking children and teen's exposure to mind altering substances. The brain is still growing and maturing even up to the teen years, and when those individuals substitute nicotine, alcohol, etc. for coping skills, their brains stop maturing. Even worse, functional MRI scans can show differences in neurotransmitter levels between addicts' brains and normal brains.
The younger they are, and the worse their coping skills, the more likely they are to become addicted, rather than a casual user. So attempting to block their exposure would have a payoff if they are likely to become addicted at 12, but less so at 18.
Medically, the cutoff point for vulnerability to addiction in normal adults seems to be age 30. Your argument seems to be based on the idea of ROI for restriction of choice vs the number of people affected. Implementing such a ban would just be prohibition again.
I'd be interested in reframing your argument around the factors controlling individual's choice to try a cigarette. Exposure to advertising, peer pressure, product placement in movies, would have to be balanced against the person's understanding of costs, health risks, the difficulty of dating a non-smoker, and teenage belief in immortality.
And that brings me back to age 18 again. By that age, the majority (say 85%) of non-addicted teens have completed the final brain growth stage and can analyze their own thought processes, especially decision making. At 12, almost none of them have that capacity.
Pushing the legal age up to 21 would only get you a few percentage points of gain, either on the addiction resistance, or brain growth sides of the equation.
Putting the effort into cutting out the pro-nicotine propaganda, providing the information needed to make an informed decision, and coaching on decision making skills would pay off better.
Getting back to the people who lost you along the way. I think some may have just not read all the points, but others may have seen the issue in a different light, and thus only responded to part of it.
Just pay for a Slashdot subscription :)
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
#2 doesn't follow from #1. Responses vary. If a single individual were somehow completely immune to all health effects caused by smoking, that wouldn't have a measureable impact on the average response.
#3 doesn't follow from #2. It's a wild assertion.
#4 doesn't follow from #3. It presupposes that the only distinctions between adults and children, in law and in fact, are physiological. This is the link in the chain which encapsulates his position, which would be stated much more simply as "There is no basis for drawing a dividing line to distinguish those who, on account of their youth, are vulnerable and should be treated as such by the state, and therefore no attempt should be made to draw such a line."
The step to #6, remarkably, is actually valid if you take #1-#5 as axioms, but all in all this is less a chain of reasoning and more an ill-disciplined train of thought.
Hello, I'm Smokes-too-much
Well, you'd better cut down then!
Wherever you go There you are
I'm surprised no one came up with the following. Unless this is under the category of "We've always done it that way"
You neglected to notice that the legal system that creates and enforces any such ban on underage smoking is not necessarily based on any logical argument.
One reason we do not ban smoking for everyone is because theres a big population that is addicted and is used to being able to legally obtain tobacco. Another is that there is a business interest that profits from tobacco sales. No amount of logic will work against an addict. It takes an awfully compelling argument to counter the profit argument. The compelling argument is slowly shrinking the tobacco industry. Extremely slowly.
The reason we ban underage smoking is because we acknowledge it is not a good idea to smoke.
If you didn't get anything approaching the above argument, which seemed obvious to me, then I would argue the the Mechanical Turk is lame.
This has probably been already mentioned someplace below, but I was too lazy to go past the first page of comments so here's my version. Just let me know at which statement you stop agreeing with me.
1. Smoking is addictive and increases the risk of diseases including hypertension, atherosclerosis, cancer, and emphysema.
2. If you never start smoking, you won't get addicted to it.
3. The ability to decisions that optimize long-term benefit to one's self is lower in children than in adults.
4. The younger a group of children is, the larger the fraction of them that would opt to start smoking (and risk addiction) if offered the opportunity to do so.
5. The lower the age at which one is first permitted to smoke, the larger percentage of nicotine addicts we will end up with.
6. With increasing age, the curve asymptotically approaches a flat line (i.e. there will always be some tiny number of smokers out there).
7. Your opinion on the appropriate age for smoking to be permitted is based on the value you place on each incremental decrease in the number of nicotine addicts versus the cost you assign to the enforcement of these laws (cost to taxpayers, restriction on free enterprise, abridgement of freedoms, etc.).
8. The consensus opinion in the US appears to be that the value of fewer smokers and the cost of enforcement balance out somewhere in the neighborhood of 18 years of age.
The government wants smoking gone. It wanted alcohol gone once too, and tried a flat ban. That didn't work well. Adults have the means to easily circumvent a ban, so an effective ban isn't possible. Children have limited means compared to adults, so while it may not be possible to prevent children from smoking altogether, you can over-all reduce the amount. (Or so it is thought.) If you can prevent a child from smoking until after you've drummed it into their head how horrible it is, maybe they won't start, and without impacting the freedom of adults who can fight back, you've eliminated a future smoker.
A good thought if
a: you can prevent kids from smoking long enough to get in your arguments before they get their first chance to smoke
b: the kids won't automatically dismiss everything you say as being more hypocritical adult nonsense (adults never want us to do anything fun! no spray-painting, no sex under 18, no playing with explosives...)
c: you consider a child's right's moot, which if you consider them incapable of making decisions makes some sense, at least on the surface
The problem with kids and decision making ISN'T that kid's can't make good decisions based on facts, but that the facts they have to work with are less than what an adult has to work with (good logic + missing data = ?) and that the kids are in a boy who cried wolf mode. All their lives the kids have been told NO to all manner of small harmless things by adults being overcautious. The kids come to expect a buffer after a while, anything an adult says is bad, is probably not REALLY bad, just bad if it gets out of control and the adult is clearly too lazy to define the issue. Kids know things aren't black and white, and resent the monolithic NO. Not only do kids not have enough data, but they have good reason to adjust the data they do have in the less-caution side. At what point do the kids learn where issues really stand? It varies, but you can expect logic errors from kids, without ANY lack of intelligence on their part.
If your topic fits into one of the forums (say, Religion) you can hone your arguments day in, day out, always with a good mix of seasoned experts as well as wide-eyed newbies. It's free, and there's both depth, and stupidity, both of which you need to learn to deal with if you really want the honing to matter.
"It takes a torque to put that on his card..."
viz Sir Archibald's Letter!
Far, FAR worse than your silly upperclass Monty Python twits!
.
- aqk
F U
> Depends on the point of view doesn't it? Somehow I don't think most cognitive under 18's will see it that way.
How so? Will they disagree with the claim that society value their freedom less than the freedom of adults?
You are both still chasing the same red herring the article submitter tried to kill. Smoking is always the wrong choice (unless, of course, you want to look cool), so anyone choosing to smoke shows poor judgment, independent on age.
The reasons society value the freedom lower for kids are 1) kids don't have any anyway, being dependent on their parents, and 2) kids must undergo socialization before they can function in a society. The second reason is obviously politically incorrect, but nonetheless scientifically correct. 18 is arbitrarily chosen for some legal purposes as an age where the kids are supposed to be able to function independently.
M: Oh look, this isn't an argument.
A: Yes it is.
M: No it isn't. It's just contradiction.
A: No it isn't.
M: It is!
A: It is not.
M: Look, you just contradicted me.
A: I did not.
M: Oh you did!!
A: No, no, no.
M: You did just then.
A: Nonsense!
M: Oh, this is futile!
A: No it isn't.
M: I came here for a good argument.
A: No you didn't; no, you came here for an argument.
M: An argument isn't just contradiction.
A: It can be.
M: No it can't. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.
A: No it isn't.
M: Yes it is! It's not just contradiction.
A: Look, if I argue with you, I must take up a contrary position.
M: Yes, but that's not just saying 'No it isn't.'
A: Yes it is!
M: No it isn't!
A: Yes it is!
M: Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes.
(short pause)
A: No it isn't.
M: It is.
A: Not at all.
It's the same concept: "Paying People to Argue With You".
But I think that at 1.45 a week, the amazon way is certainly cheaper.
.. is that someone who hasn't started smoking by 18, is highly unlikely to ever smoke. I seem to remember a study indicitating that 99.9% or something like that of all adult smokers started well before they were 18.
An outright smoking prohibition would never work (just look at alcohol prohibition from back when). And there are perhaps civil/personal rights issues with such a ban, anyway.
But such a ban on minors is acceptable, and no one (not even most adult smokers, since they wouldnt want their kids to smoke) are going to take issue with it.
Basically, because thats what adults (eg, people who can vote) have decided they want.
The more effective the ban is it preventing kids from smoking, as time goes on, the fewer and fewer adult smokers there will be, and eventually (hopefully), there will be enough adult nonsmokers to perhaps take more aggressive action against smoking. The only bad side effect is that it makes smoking appear more desirable to minors, and they look forward to the day they turn 18 so they can smoke. (Ditto with alcohol and age 21)
Personally, my take on the issue is that any adult has the right to inhale the fumes of burning leaves as much as they want, but they should not be permitted to exhale/exhaust them into the air in any public or semi-public space, or in any private space unless they are the owner or the owner has granted them permission. Perhaps an exception could be made for outdoors public spaces where there was no other person within coughing distance (I'd suggest 50 feet), and it was not a place where children might frequent (such as playgrounds or near schools)
(And yes, this has nothing to do with the mechanical turk)
... but i'm at work, so don't have time to read it all.
The problem with expressing complex social phenomena as a mathematical argument, is that you miss a lot of the subtlety. The argument above shoehorns everything into the idae that treating two groups of smokers is inconsistent. However, it ignores much wider social questions such as responsibility for choices.
Few people argue that cigarettes aren't harmful. The idea is that people who have reached a certain level of maturity can be left to make their own decisions about whether or not they expose themselves to the risk. There's probably very few four year-olds who are mature enough to make a reasoned decision about the risk. Likewise, there's few 40-year olds who are too immature to decide for themselves (arguably . . . ).
Governments have reasoned that it is not practical to legislate that cigarette vendors do not have the time to ascertain whether people are mature enough to reason about the health risks, everytime they buy cigarettes, so set the limit for responsibility at 18.
Even this is a gross simplification of the argument, but at least it begins to hint at questions of agency, choice and government. Things which are difficult to express with syllogistic reasoning.
Right, the second set of arguments were not "mathematical", but they were sequential. I don't think the submitter thought the argument was a mathematical one just because he had introduced "N". Instead he structured his arguments into a logical sequence. In some vague sense this is more mathematical since some part of mathematics deals with this form of logical argument. Think of the steps of algebraic manipulation, or lines of a geometrical proof. I think the work of Turing and others was also along these lines.
But I agree that the sequence was highly flawed in many ways. The submitter was struggling for ways to apply absolute principles to a situation that was more a matter of compromise -- trying to do more good than harm. He rejects all arguments based on responsibility. _Why_ is it right to ban smoking for people under 18? He doesn't see that the reasons for younger people to not smoke are substantially different than reasons for older people not to smoke. And these reasons are not necessarily true for every individual in every situation, but based on an aggregate effect, the smoking ban for minors may be doing some good. There is also the political environment to consider -- it would be very hard for politicians to pass a ban on smoking for adults as most politicians themselves smoke. But politicians aren't minors. The fact that smoking cannot be banned for adults does not mean that banning smoking for minors is wrong to do. Also, we allow adults to work in hazardous areas (with heavy machinery, construction sites, etc.) where children are not allowed to work. But sometimes adults get seriously injured or killed while working. Yet the same arguments used to ban children from hazardous work areas do not apply equally to adults. It just isn't practical (or necessary) to ban adults from this. How about military service? And so on...
I disagree with the logic leading to statements 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6. Statement 3 is a new axiom, and is valid only if you identify just one bad effect (such as lung cancer), and allow for uncertainties in N. But (3) is still problematic because it refers to averages, which encourages us to consider every individual to be average. This leads to lots more logical fallacies ("the flaw of averages").
Your major problem begins in your first step: "1. Government should ban smoking by people under 18, because of the harmful health effects." I don't think that's why we ban people under 18 from smoking. It's not because of the harmful health effects, it's because we, as a society, believe that minors don't have the appropriate mental facilities to appropriately handle and take responsibility for the harmful health effects.
For example -- examine the following statement: "Government should ban driving by people under 18, because of the harmful health effects." Well, that's certainly plausible enough; we don't want them to hurt themselves or others. But both you and I know that the above reason is NOT why we ban underage people from driving; it's because they are not COMPETENT to assume the responsibility of their own and other people's lives. After all, adults risk their own and other people's lives daily by driving automobiles, but because they can understand and take responsibility for the involved risks, we tend to think it's ok.
The most puzzling point in your argument, for me, was this: "Treating the two groups differently, is a bit like saying we should have lighter sentences for female murderers than for male murderers, just because men are more likely to commit murder." Or it's more like having lighter sentences for child murderers than adult murderers? Why would you use a bad analogy when the actual state of affairs shows how absurd your conception is? Do you think a 5-year-old should do 25-to-life for "play" shooting mommy with daddy's handgun? No, of course not -- it's fairly obvious that the child does not possess the skills and knowledge necessary to be held accountable for his actions.
The truth is much simpler than you're making it out to be: we don't think that people under 18 can handle the responsibility of life-or-death decisions (and even some other types of decisions). Therefore, we restrict them from making such decisions. We shouldn't allow children to smoke because, quite frankly, the average 7-year-old is too freaking stupid to understand the effects that smoking might have on them. I don't necessarily think that adults are that much better off in the "understanding and appreciating risks" area, but at least we tend to think: "that dumbass brought it on himself" when an adult cognizant of smoking's risks takes up the habit.
And another interesting quote, to respond to this type of objection: "(I still say that doesn't matter, because you're talking about comparing a person under 18 who smokes, with a person over 18 who smokes, and their judgment in both cases is the same, etc.)". This statement is a bit unclear, but I think you're actually raising a DIFFERENT counter-objection than you think you are. I think you're saying this: 'maybe we're comparing a 17.995-year-old to an 18.005-year-old -- they can't be that different, right? Why should one be allowed to smoke and not the other?'
While I agree, this is a completely separate argument. You're arguing about the arbitrary point at which something "becomes a good idea". Maybe you're right, there, but it doesn't respond to the objection raised. If it's a 17 and 18-year-old, that's one thing. But what about a 5-year-old and an 18-year-old? Surely you wouldn't say the reasoning skills of those two individuals will be the same in this regard? And yes, you're right -- any arbitrary point in time will lead you to the conclusion of "hey why is this banned now but not 5 minutes from now?" The answer is simple and obvious -- because any arbitrary point in time is as good as another, and so we choose an average arbitrary point in time that maximizes our satisfaction that the smoker is "competent" to understand and accept the risks of smoking.
All in all, I think your argument is lamentably poor. Rather than arguing against the age split between allowed to smoke vs not allowed to smoke, you're much better off creating a good argument for banning it for everyone (e.g., the same en
-----[0_o]-----
We are not amused.
I like my coffee the way I like my women - roasted and ground up into little tiny pieces.
It's hard to find people to read bad poetry... and I write a lot of it. So I used the Turk to hire people to read my poetry. This was my post on Turk:
Go to http://www.poemhunter.com/john-kipling-lewis/poems/ and rate the 69 poems found there.
1) If a poem is rated 9 or 10, please leave a comment as to why.
2) If a poem is rated 1 or 2 or 3, please leave a comment as to why.
3) If you rate a poem from 4-8 and feel it could be a 10 with a change, please comment how.
Warning: This site has heavy pop-up ads. Please be aware that the site is very hard to use without a pop-up blocker installed in your browser and potentially an ad blocker.
It worked great. I got good responses and advice as well as getting different viewpoints on my poems. Writers take note.
If you're crafting an argument for public consumption, you could even have HIT workers build up your argument for you -- start with a position and have them come up with reasons supporting that position -- although to me that feels like a cheapening of the debate process that crosses the line, because you're not even trying to reason your way to a conclusion, instead starting with the conclusion you want and then working backwards.
quote2
Maybe my preference for the controlled, user-reimbursed process of "debating" that is enabled by Mechanical Turk, has to do with a lifelong focus on bottom-line results: Decide what the result is, and judge the process by how well it brings about that result.
I hope you are comfortable with the fact that:
1. There is little distinction between the context of these two statements.
2. They obviously contradict one another.