The Worst Argument In The World

Christian. Muslim. Jewish. Buddhist. Hindu. Republican. Democrat. Moderate. Independent.

Odds are most people who read the above section had some sort of archetypal or stereotypical vision of most or all of those and all of us can identify some of the associated types. And most of us can also realise that not all Christians are fundies (or even vocal), that Jews are greedy with roughly equal proportion of more general populations, that not all moderates have weak political views, etc. But we all get to live with these, though admittedly some are worse than others.

Perhaps he is simply at a loss for examples? We could help. Here's a neutral one (from the comments):

- "George Washington was a traitor!" (should probably be used BEFORE the Martin Luther King argument; in extremely conservative circles, even mentioning Dr. King's name rings the "ding! ding! liberal!" bells)

Here are some left-leaning "argumentoids" that you sometimes hear and that have elements of TWAITW:

- "But guns kill people!" I realized shortly after reading the article that this is not only an instance of TWAITW, but shows the logic behind the retort "Guns don't kill people, people kill people". This might be rephrased as saying "yes, guns kill people, but not in the way that murderers kill people, which is to say, with malicious intent. That requires a person, so let's concentrate on whether removing guns from the economy will prevent those with malicious intent from obtaining them."

- "Evolution is a fact!" Yes, but maybe not in the "totality of the truth is plain for all to see" perspective. It is true that PARTS of evolution are plain fact, but the creationist has a point that some of the more fantastic parts of evolution are harder to directly observe in the same way as, say, gravity.

- "Reproductive freedom is a choice!" Perhaps, but you can't just dismiss the argument at that point. Choice can mean "choosy moms choose Jiff" or it can mean "the difference between life and death". Saying it is a choice ignores the fact that not all personal "choices" are accepted by society (i.e. it is your choice and you can make one, but sometimes there are consequences).

- "Tax breaks for the rich are unfair!" Perhaps, but there are many levels of unfair. You must argue why tax breaks for the rich are at the same level of unfair as, say, separate water fountains for whites and blacks and not unfair as in "it's unfair that I always have to pull the cookie jar from the top shelf just because I happen to be the tall one."

Note that all of these lean more toward "equivocation" than the author's technical definition of TWAITW. But then, perhaps that's what TWAITW boils down to.

Also, I note in all of these that they are all caricature arguments. They are all cliched. The arguments in the article have a similar nature.

This leads to a disturbing point: it is helpful to have TWAITW as an analytical tool when having a serious debate, but if you are "debating" with a person who shouts soundbites like these in your face, do you really think they are going to understand or care if you try to explain to them that they are using TWAITW? Seems like more preaching to the choir, unfortunately.

As you mentioned, slippery slopes are not inherently invalid. In fact, the real fallacious use of a slippery slope is hardly related to it being a slippery slope at all!

Assume a slope A->B->...->Z. Further, assume that each step of this chain is known to be true with 100% accuracy. That is to say that we can perfectly predict that if A happens then B will happen and if Q happens R will happen. Thus, simple transitivity shows that if A will happen Z will definitely happen. If Z is complete destruction of the Earth you probably won't find many people saying that it will be perfectly okay if we do A because slippery slopes are invalid.

However, slippery slope arguments often have a much smaller probability of occurring at each step of the chain. You often get things like "if we don't have a death penalty then people won't be afraid of killing people so murder rates will go up so you'll get pregnant and die". Clearly there is no part of this chain that occurs with probability 1 (except, as Mean Girls tells us, getting pregnant->death). In fact, most of the chain is fairly low probability and composing them as such makes it even smaller.

To make this a bit clearer again, let's take our A->B->...->Z chain and make each step of the chain have a .9 probability. If A happens, B will occur with .75 chance and if Q happens, R will occur with .75 chance. Since there are 25 hops on this we can see that the probability of Z occurring given A is actually .75^25 = .00075 (ish). Even if each individual step seems reasonable (I mean, hey, it will happen 3 out of 4 times!) the full composition is just laughably unlikely.

However, it seems that GP was actually talking about a continuum fallacy rather than a slippery slope as we've discussed.