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Logical fallacies

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  • My neighbour sets up an unsecured wireless router
  • Windows Zero Configuration favors that router over my own
  • Stealing bandwidth must be legal if a major corporation's software encourages you to do so

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If he wants to be a miser with his router, well the onus is on him to protect it. Which I find paranoid and selfish by the way. Maybe it's just me though -- I like and trust my neighbors.

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But do you trust the creepy guy in a van parked near your house, whose using your internets to furiously masturbate to CP he DL'ed using your connection?

Not saying it will happen, but I've seen it on the news where a man was arrested for doing such a thing. Do you want to potentially provide your internet for such an individual?

Paranoia can at times be purely preventative to that which won't occur because necessary precautions have been undertaken to not make it a possible reality.

Live on the edge keep it unencrypted :D

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Or leave it unencrypted until a neighbor starts to use your connection to download torrents where it ends up raping your connection entirely.

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Phobus said:

I remember having to cover all of these in Critical Thinking a few years ago... interesting but the only conclusions I really came to are that arguing is seriously over-thought at some levels, and that you'd have to be a right arse to use this sort of extreme logic at any other level.


I more-or-less agree. It is important to be able to root out the problems in arguments you're presented with (ie. it's important to be able to think critically) but in real-world contexts, that hardly involves knowledge of these obscure and tedious logical complexities. I took a critical thinking course last year that had a much more practical approach to its subject matter, which I appreciated; we, the students, were given real arguments, such as philosophical and political excerpts, and were trained to analyze their structure and strength. That's much more likely to help you in day-to-day life than the ability to find the gaps in "sanitized" arguments about Alice, Bob and Carol.

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Thread bumping because a term escapes me, and it's too hard to describe for a Google search. It can be described as an overly pragmatic view: a person attempts to discredit a most likely scenario by presenting a not-very-likely-at-all scenario.

You hear about a man who was pushed out of a plane at 30,000 feet. You say, "That's a horrible way to die." One would accuse you of jumping to conclusions because it's technically possible to survive a fall from that height, in the same way that it's 'possible' for a coin to land on heads 50 times in a row. While his point of view is theoretically sound, it's not at all based on reality.

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Bucket said:

in the same way that it's 'possible' for a coin to land on heads 50 times in a row.

Interesting you should say that, because the probability of all flips being heads is exactly the same as any other possible sequence.

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Any specific sequence of 50 flips is improbable in hindsight, but after 50 flips it has to be some sequence, so you'll get that 'whoa, this sequence is very rare' feeling after every 50 flips. Aiming specifically at 50 heads (or any specific combination) with foresight is improbable.

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gggmork said:

Any specific sequence of 50 flips is improbable in hindsight, but after 50 flips it has to be some sequence, so you'll get that 'whoa, this sequence is very rare' feeling after every 50 flips. Aiming specifically at 50 heads (or any specific combination) with foresight is improbable.


No, the chance is 50%. Either you get 50 heads in a row, or you don't. One out of two possibilities.

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Twinzen said:

No, the chance is 50%. Either you get 50 heads in a row, or you don't. One out of two possibilities.

Exactly. It works the same as that old game show where they have you select one of the three options and then they remove one of the losing options. You then have the option to keep your choice or switch. Common superstition says it's better to switch but of course the odds are always the same: 50/50.

Think of it like this. Let's say your friend has a standard deck of 52 cards. He then challenges you to pick the ace of spades. You pick a card blindly and don't look at it. He then goes through the deck and removes 50 cards that are not the ace of spades. You're now down to two cards. The one you chose and the one he's holding. Should you keep your card or switch? Obviously it doesn't matter because there are only two cards left putting your odds at holding the ace of spades at 50%. No amount of superstition can change this fact.

</fallacy>

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gggmork said:

Any specific sequence of 50 flips is improbable in hindsight, but after 50 flips it has to be some sequence, so you'll get that 'whoa, this sequence is very rare' feeling after every 50 flips. Aiming specifically at 50 heads (or any specific combination) with foresight is improbable.


Just the same as any combination of numbers on the lottery...picking 1,2,3,4,5,6 gives you the same chance of winning as picking any others.

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No, the chance is 50%. Either you get 50 heads in a row, or you don't. One out of two possibilities.


Possibilities and probabilities aren't necessarily the same thing.

For one coin throw, you have a 50% chance to get heads (or tails). That's two possible sequences : heads, or tails ; two possibilities with the same probabilities.

Now do two coin throws. There's four different sequences you can end up with : heads tails, heads heads, tails heads, heads heads. Each of these sequences has an equal probability to come up, 1/4.

You can say "either you get 2 heads in a row, or you don't" here and make it only about two possibilities. However, there's only a 25% probability you'll get 2 heads in a row (heads heads sequence) and a 75% probability that you won't (tails heads, heads heads and heads tails sequences). Two possibilities, two different probabilities.

Likewise for 50 coin throws. You only have a 1/2^50 (= 1/1 125 899 906 842 624) chance to get 50 heads in a row. Incidentally, you have the same abysmally low probability to get any other sequence. That doesn't mean getting 50 heads in a row is realistic, but rather that there's a lot of possible sequences and an extremely low chance of getting any specific sequence (and "50 heads in a row" is catchier than any given random x heads y tails sequence).

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What becomes "more probable" the more coints you throw coins in the air, is that you'll get a roughly equal amount of tails and heads on the long run, which is not guaranteed for sufficiently small batches (e.g. 1 head and 2 tails in a batch of three is obviously biased and inconclusive). This is about as "good" from a gambling point of view as knowing that, in the long run, all 36 numbers of a Roulette (or 37 or even 38, if you play on a "double 00" deck) will come out an equal amount of times...roughly. This won't help you tell what number will come out next though. Not even which one won't.

Interestingly, if we stick to a Doom theme, Doom's RNG has a very specific sequence of random numbers, and firing with certain weapons only yields a finite amount of outcomes, due to the usage pattern. More details in my infamous shotgun anal-ysis, known to have wrinkled many an e-shaft (starts here but spawns the entire thread, culminating with sim code). The results are interesting ;-)

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It's funny because some people are being sarcastic, and other people are not realizing that they are doing so, and really they're just pissing in the wind.

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People? On the internet nobody knows you're a dog.

As for the bump, I say just use whatever words you want without compressing them into a a named 'logical fallacy' like 'the luddite fallacy' or something, because anyone you say 'the luddite fallacy' too will have to decompress it by going to wikipedia, or possibly wookieepedia, anyway.
Wiki's 'logical fallacy list' is more useful as a list of troll techniques.. ok, its not useful there either. Maybe its useful for The Amazing Atheist to win a couple races in the special olympics.

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It's funny because some people are being sarcastic, and other people are not realizing that they are doing so, and really they're just pissing in the wind.


Fair enough, consider me trolled ; but having seen so many stupid things said seriously on forums, including this one, it didn't seem too far fetched to assume he was genuine.

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