Um, yes, the slippery slope most certainly is a fallacy. While it's true that people adapt better to small changes than to large changes, that, in fact, has nothing whatsoever to do with slippery slopes. I think what you're referring to is "Boiling the frog", which is another fallacy altogether. Slippery slopes involve assuming that once a couple of changes happen, then that means the other changes must necessarily happen. For example, if I'm driving down along a road that ends in a brick wall, I may notice that over the past few seconds, the brick wall is looming closer. The conclusion from the slippery slope fallacy is that I will definitely crash into the wall (which is ludicrous; I've driven along a road exactly like this many times, and haven't crashed once).
Now, the slippery slope fallacy is often applied to government and law, pointing out changes that a given person doesn't like, and the person concludes that we are in crisis, since that action will inevitably lead to its horrifying hyperbolic extreme (and so immediate and harsh action is required). However, the standard retort to this is that people simply won't allow for things to go this far. This is where the boiling the frog fallacy comes into play, where the first person suggests that these inevitable changes will happen so slowly that people will not notice. Now, it is true, as you say, that small changes are less likely to be noticed, and it is even true, so I'm told, that you can actually boil a frog by slowly increasing temperature, but this does not imply that it will work to take us to hyperbolic extremes. We might end up somewhere closer to that extreme, but it requires extraordinary proof to establish that we will get all the way to the extreme before we actually notice and react, that is, the boiling the frog fallacy is insufficient to establish that conclusion (hence its being a fallacy).
The slippery slope argument can be a fallacy, but so can everything else if misused. To say it is a fallacy out of hand is, well... a fallacy.
If a fallacy can be a "fallacy", then it is a fallacy! The point of fallacies is that there are situations where you can follow its hypotheses, but its conclusions are wrong. It doesn't mean that the conclusion will never be right if the hypotheses are satisfied. There may be some fluke, or some other non-obvious inference working behind the scenes. The point is that you can't conclude anything just by looking at the argument and whether its premises are satisfied; you actually need some evidence to back your claim up.
It's not draconian. Preventing convicted drunk drivers, who have been drinking, from driving is a proportional and reasonable response to their crime. In fact, if anything, it would be a little too lenient, given how severe the consequences of their actions could turn out to be. I think that forcing them to choose between drinking and driving for a period after the offence beats the hell out of jailing them for a period after the offence, to keep them from endangering others on the streets.
People will see the raised prices, no matter what the reason, and buy that cheaper car over there. It's only if they see extra value in added features that they'll actually choose the more expensive model.
That's why the idea of a "price hike", in most cases, doesn't actually work. They're charging the price that generates them maximum profit. Raising the price, as far as they know, will just cause them to lose money through defecting potential customers.
The only exception to this is when situations change that make it no longer optimally profitable to charge at that point, at which point, it's typically the same for every car company, which will uniformly raise prices, without collusion.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around the reason why people think that companies need an excuse to drive up their prices. Why would they over-engineer their cars at their personal expense, when they can just write a new number on the price sticker?
How do you propose to conduct a lawsuit or other legal proceeding without involving the government?
That's pretty weak. Pretty damn weak. I suppose that the reason why this is allowed is because idiots are reproducing faster than non-idiots, which caused us to elect idiots, who put idiots on the bench, who make idiotic decisions?
That's nice. Meanwhile you illustrate one of the problems with reacting that strongly to a word merely because you wouldn't use it yourself.
That's pretty nice yourself. You are expressing a causal relationship between two things, A and B. There are exactly two possibilities: A causes B, and B causes A. You've managed to choose the fundamentally stupid one.
(And thank you for noticing that I was part of the problem. I'll get onto that fornication as soon as possible.)
So, you've taken this study, read it as something completely different, i.e, something that confirms your prejudices, with no justification for doing so, and got modded "informative".
I think the point is that you have to file suit against a john or jane doe, not a specific person. Don't forget, a specific person can defend themselves.
Yes. Selectively ignoring roadsigns is treacherous and irresponsible habit to get into. You can't assume you have perfect knowledge of the reasons behind a road sign, even if it seems obvious. The traffic authority probably has a more complete perspective of the road's conditions and the reasons behind the sign. At worst, it's a bureaucratic error, and you end up driving a little bit more slowly and safely for a little while.
Besides, manually traversing the enormous tree of possible Rubik's Cube states to get to the solution in 20 moves will make any person's life seem much, much longer!
Eh, I was going to ignore you, but I'm going to respond out of boredom.
Has it occurred to you that I might actually know what I am talking about?
Not once. Still no.
When I question things, I listen exceptionally well. I ask a lot of questions and I listen to everything I can get my ears on. If my resulting judgments seem odd to you, then perhaps that is only because you haven't got enough information.
Yet another claim that doesn't seem to hold up to the slightest scrutiny. Out of all the actual content in my largely content-free post, you've seemed to avoid the actual points I made, or at least dismissed them ("Wow. Those are some very ignorant questions.") in a fashion that tells me either you haven't actually understood them, or you are deliberately trying to avoid actually answering them.
Plus, you've arrived at some absurd conclusions. I have talked to informed, uninformed, intelligent, stupid, informed, and thoroughly ignorant people in my time, and in a vast majority of cases, there is something in their arguments that is food for thought, has some basis in reality, or at least managed to have some kind of pseudo-logical structure. I am bewildered that you've managed to provide me an argument lacking in all three.
Basically, you've managed to cobble together some kind of argument from bravado, put-downs, and abundant claims of superior knowledge and information. But, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and, unfortunately, having one does not put you half way there.
You say, "probably worth"? Exactly. You don't know. Yet you call something dreck without having the knowledge necessary to render such a judgment.
Oh that is priceless! You think that if you don't sound absolutely certain on all points, your arguments will be seen as weak. This pretty much explains your entire style of argument, and also why it actually doesn't work on people who are remotely intelligent.
Oh, and I call it dreck, because it's dreck directly out of movie. Evil government comes up with yet another absurd scheme to enslave the masses for no clear reason (typically something about power, but no reason what benefits such power actually provides). Now, it's really quite funny that you pull me up on "...call[ing] something dreck without having the knowledge necessary to render such a judgment," if you think about it. I observed that your opinions sound a lot like a cliched movie plot, and concluded (fallaciously) that you ripped the scheme off a movie. This was done deliberately to draw parallels to your own original argument, when you noticed that the "internet key" scheme, invented by the politicians, is suspiciously like a different cliched movie plot. You made the same fallacious argument, except with deadpan sincerity.
I wasn't anticipating you'd get it. It was more for my own personal amusement, plus for any smart and observant/. readers who might stumble across this thread while perusing the archives. I am, however, anticipating that you'll now claim that you do get it after all, and that the reason why I did not realise this is that I haven't done enough research to claim that you haven't. I'm only kind of joking.
It plays directly into the hands of the hoaxers...
... and then the hoaxers will win! You're either with us or against us. I call upon all/.ers to do everything to stop these hoaxers. Thank you. Now watch this drive!
You've missed the point: did they sell more than they would have without the piracy, or less?
It's nearly impossible to answer.
No, pirates just want you to believe that it's nearly impossible to answer. The answer can be arrived at, with a fair degree of certainty, just by thinking about a couple of points:
1) It's possible to gauge a game like World of Goo by other methods than downloading a full copy. For example, you could look at reviews, look at the previous history of the developer (well, not so applicable to some freshman indie efforts), ask friends who own it, or download a demo (very applicable to freshman indie efforts). Without piracy, people would employ these methods to try a game they were interested in. Plus, game sites tend to hype up games they're excited in, so that covers the "word of mouth" aspect. Basically, all the purported benefits of piracy can be found elsewhere, and would be found elsewhere, if piracy was not an option, and so, sales generated by the purported benefits of piracy would still occur without piracy.
2) If piracy was beneficial financially to artists/publishers, then we would see the most financially driven artists/publishers flock to the piracy model. It makes no sense for them to rely on blocking piracy, even to the tune of spending millions, when they could get more money by allowing piracy. It's one thing to say that publishers are evil, but it's another altogether to say that they screw with us, just for fun, at their own massive expense.
These two, in conjunction, provide fairly conclusive evidence that piracy, for the most part, hurts artists. It would be smarter for a pirate to make the argument that the benefits to the consumer outweigh the suffering of the artists, but even that has its flaws.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, yes, the slippery slope most certainly is a fallacy. While it's true that people adapt better to small changes than to large changes, that, in fact, has nothing whatsoever to do with slippery slopes. I think what you're referring to is "Boiling the frog", which is another fallacy altogether. Slippery slopes involve assuming that once a couple of changes happen, then that means the other changes must necessarily happen. For example, if I'm driving down along a road that ends in a brick wall, I may notice that over the past few seconds, the brick wall is looming closer. The conclusion from the slippery slope fallacy is that I will definitely crash into the wall (which is ludicrous; I've driven along a road exactly like this many times, and haven't crashed once).
Now, the slippery slope fallacy is often applied to government and law, pointing out changes that a given person doesn't like, and the person concludes that we are in crisis, since that action will inevitably lead to its horrifying hyperbolic extreme (and so immediate and harsh action is required). However, the standard retort to this is that people simply won't allow for things to go this far. This is where the boiling the frog fallacy comes into play, where the first person suggests that these inevitable changes will happen so slowly that people will not notice. Now, it is true, as you say, that small changes are less likely to be noticed, and it is even true, so I'm told, that you can actually boil a frog by slowly increasing temperature, but this does not imply that it will work to take us to hyperbolic extremes. We might end up somewhere closer to that extreme, but it requires extraordinary proof to establish that we will get all the way to the extreme before we actually notice and react, that is, the boiling the frog fallacy is insufficient to establish that conclusion (hence its being a fallacy).
If a fallacy can be a "fallacy", then it is a fallacy! The point of fallacies is that there are situations where you can follow its hypotheses, but its conclusions are wrong. It doesn't mean that the conclusion will never be right if the hypotheses are satisfied. There may be some fluke, or some other non-obvious inference working behind the scenes. The point is that you can't conclude anything just by looking at the argument and whether its premises are satisfied; you actually need some evidence to back your claim up.
Or, as I like to call it, the "come suck on this thing so that I'll blow in that thing so you can start your car" loophole.
It's not draconian. Preventing convicted drunk drivers, who have been drinking, from driving is a proportional and reasonable response to their crime. In fact, if anything, it would be a little too lenient, given how severe the consequences of their actions could turn out to be. I think that forcing them to choose between drinking and driving for a period after the offence beats the hell out of jailing them for a period after the offence, to keep them from endangering others on the streets.
God made geeks
Geeks look bad
Ergo...
Sneak preview!
People will see the raised prices, no matter what the reason, and buy that cheaper car over there. It's only if they see extra value in added features that they'll actually choose the more expensive model.
That's why the idea of a "price hike", in most cases, doesn't actually work. They're charging the price that generates them maximum profit. Raising the price, as far as they know, will just cause them to lose money through defecting potential customers.
The only exception to this is when situations change that make it no longer optimally profitable to charge at that point, at which point, it's typically the same for every car company, which will uniformly raise prices, without collusion.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around the reason why people think that companies need an excuse to drive up their prices. Why would they over-engineer their cars at their personal expense, when they can just write a new number on the price sticker?
That's pretty weak. Pretty damn weak. I suppose that the reason why this is allowed is because idiots are reproducing faster than non-idiots, which caused us to elect idiots, who put idiots on the bench, who make idiotic decisions?
That's pretty nice yourself. You are expressing a causal relationship between two things, A and B. There are exactly two possibilities: A causes B, and B causes A. You've managed to choose the fundamentally stupid one.
(And thank you for noticing that I was part of the problem. I'll get onto that fornication as soon as possible.)
OK, the movie was preachy, but it wasn't that preachy...
TERRORIST!
I can take ignorance and a lack of critical thought, but what I can't take is ignorance and a lack of critical thought being used to spread hatred.
Yes, I know the reference. Still, the word he's searching for is "idiocy". The fact that there's no reference to the government should be a give-away.
Not that I'd condone the use of that inane reference even if there was.
So, you've taken this study, read it as something completely different, i.e, something that confirms your prejudices, with no justification for doing so, and got modded "informative".
Only on Slashdot!
It's spelt "idiocy". Seriously.
I think the point is that you have to file suit against a john or jane doe, not a specific person. Don't forget, a specific person can defend themselves.
Yes. Selectively ignoring roadsigns is treacherous and irresponsible habit to get into. You can't assume you have perfect knowledge of the reasons behind a road sign, even if it seems obvious. The traffic authority probably has a more complete perspective of the road's conditions and the reasons behind the sign. At worst, it's a bureaucratic error, and you end up driving a little bit more slowly and safely for a little while.
But I can't find a valid use for Twitter! Surely that means Twitter has no value?
I doubt it. I'm only guessing here, but it might have something to do with one being forbidden and one being encouraged.
But I haven't programmed in that command just yet!
Besides, manually traversing the enormous tree of possible Rubik's Cube states to get to the solution in 20 moves will make any person's life seem much, much longer!
Eh, I was going to ignore you, but I'm going to respond out of boredom.
Not once. Still no.
Yet another claim that doesn't seem to hold up to the slightest scrutiny. Out of all the actual content in my largely content-free post, you've seemed to avoid the actual points I made, or at least dismissed them ("Wow. Those are some very ignorant questions.") in a fashion that tells me either you haven't actually understood them, or you are deliberately trying to avoid actually answering them.
Plus, you've arrived at some absurd conclusions. I have talked to informed, uninformed, intelligent, stupid, informed, and thoroughly ignorant people in my time, and in a vast majority of cases, there is something in their arguments that is food for thought, has some basis in reality, or at least managed to have some kind of pseudo-logical structure. I am bewildered that you've managed to provide me an argument lacking in all three.
Basically, you've managed to cobble together some kind of argument from bravado, put-downs, and abundant claims of superior knowledge and information. But, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and, unfortunately, having one does not put you half way there.
Oh that is priceless! You think that if you don't sound absolutely certain on all points, your arguments will be seen as weak. This pretty much explains your entire style of argument, and also why it actually doesn't work on people who are remotely intelligent.
Oh, and I call it dreck, because it's dreck directly out of movie. Evil government comes up with yet another absurd scheme to enslave the masses for no clear reason (typically something about power, but no reason what benefits such power actually provides). Now, it's really quite funny that you pull me up on "...call[ing] something dreck without having the knowledge necessary to render such a judgment," if you think about it. I observed that your opinions sound a lot like a cliched movie plot, and concluded (fallaciously) that you ripped the scheme off a movie. This was done deliberately to draw parallels to your own original argument, when you noticed that the "internet key" scheme, invented by the politicians, is suspiciously like a different cliched movie plot. You made the same fallacious argument, except with deadpan sincerity.
I wasn't anticipating you'd get it. It was more for my own personal amusement, plus for any smart and observant /. readers who might stumble across this thread while perusing the archives. I am, however, anticipating that you'll now claim that you do get it after all, and that the reason why I did not realise this is that I haven't done enough research to claim that you haven't. I'm only kind of joking.
... and then the hoaxers will win! You're either with us or against us. I call upon all /.ers to do everything to stop these hoaxers. Thank you. Now watch this drive!
No, pirates just want you to believe that it's nearly impossible to answer. The answer can be arrived at, with a fair degree of certainty, just by thinking about a couple of points:
1) It's possible to gauge a game like World of Goo by other methods than downloading a full copy. For example, you could look at reviews, look at the previous history of the developer (well, not so applicable to some freshman indie efforts), ask friends who own it, or download a demo (very applicable to freshman indie efforts). Without piracy, people would employ these methods to try a game they were interested in. Plus, game sites tend to hype up games they're excited in, so that covers the "word of mouth" aspect. Basically, all the purported benefits of piracy can be found elsewhere, and would be found elsewhere, if piracy was not an option, and so, sales generated by the purported benefits of piracy would still occur without piracy.
2) If piracy was beneficial financially to artists/publishers, then we would see the most financially driven artists/publishers flock to the piracy model. It makes no sense for them to rely on blocking piracy, even to the tune of spending millions, when they could get more money by allowing piracy. It's one thing to say that publishers are evil, but it's another altogether to say that they screw with us, just for fun, at their own massive expense.
These two, in conjunction, provide fairly conclusive evidence that piracy, for the most part, hurts artists. It would be smarter for a pirate to make the argument that the benefits to the consumer outweigh the suffering of the artists, but even that has its flaws.
You idiot. Mathematics is far more complex and subtle than that. You forgot that P could equal 0.
" The P = NP question"
As in, is it P = NP, or P != NP?