Looking at the history of politics and law, it looks like slippery slope arguments are right more often than they’re wrong.
That’s really vague. Examples would help, preferably ones from long ago so as to avoid the mind-killer: for instance, the Reign of Terror could be an example of a slippery slope.
The other side, of course, is that not all slippery slopes lead to bad outcomes- consider the civil rights movement.
Anyway, of course every policy change affects the likelihood of other policy changes, but only occasionally is it a runaway effect- usually it stops there or peters out.
Senses of history are vague, but still informative. It’s not clear to me there’s much value in digging up examples.
preferably ones from long ago
I don’t consider 1950 to be long ago.
that not all slippery slopes lead to bad outcomes
No, and I did not mean to imply that they did. Many intentionally begin slippery slopes to lead to outcomes they like; foot-in-the-door techniques can be seen as an example. The takeaway is that the slippery slope meme doesn’t appear to actually be fallacious- if you think that A will increase the chance of B, and you dislike B, it’s often the correct strategic move to oppose A, even if you think A in isolation is a good thing. The challenge is getting the correct model of how A will impact the chances of B.
I don’t think we disagree here. As far as 1950 being “long ago”, my point was that I picked examples that I really don’t expect to be live issues for Less Wrong readers; there were other issues being discussed in 1950 that are still subjects of disagreement between LW-type people, and those I shouldn’t use.
The other side, of course, is that not all slippery slopes lead to bad outcomes- consider the civil rights movement.
Many very smart people wouldn’t unreservedly agree that this wasn’t a bad outcome; perhaps a different example could be found though? (Ideally one that isn’t as politically charged?)
Many very smart people wouldn’t unreservedly agree that the Terror was bad, either. If you’re far left enough to cheer the Terror or far right enough to boo civil rights or rebel in a clown suit enough to do both, you should be used to not being the default audience and practiced at separating such “obvious” examples from the formal role they play in the argument.
You are ignoring the fact that the historical developments commonly known as “civil rights” have in fact led to a progression of ever more extreme policies (i.e. a slippery slope) whose present outcome is controversial even in the mainstream. This is indisputable no matter what position (if any) you happen to support in these controversies.
This slippery slope can be roughly described with the following progression:
1: Government-mandated discrimination across racial/ethnic/religious groups.
2: Libertarian/classical liberal position: procedural equality for everyone as far as the government is concerned, freedom to discriminate (or not) for private parties.
3: Prohibition of overt discrimination even for private businesses and organizations.
4(a): Affirmative action -- the government (and private parties under its influence and pressure) actively try to equalize statistical outcomes across groups by favoritism towards members of groups that do worse on average.
4(b): Disparate impact doctrine—even if there is no overt discrimination, unequal statistical group outcomes are considered as evidence of discrimination by themselves, and any institution that produces such outcomes can be held legally liable on that basis alone.
While 1-3 are no longer controversial in the mainstream, 4(a) and 4(b) are still matters of intense public controversy. (Admittedly, for unclear reasons, 4(b) gets far less publicity than 4(a), despite its arguably even greater impact in practice.)
Yes, you’re right. (And if we like we can extend this slope further out until it includes the Terror, and tada, we’ve constructed the classical one-axis political spectrum.)
Obligatory face-saving : I still think my claim stands that people (especially “very smart people” like LW members consider themselves) should be able to read the comment, recognize the formal nature of the argument, substitute in slopes they themselves thing are good or bad, and then evaluate it on those corrected terms, even if we generalize it to include normal people and not just nutcases like me or you. But maybe I shouldn’t think it stands, because Will (who is very smart, and a nutcase to boot) apparently can’t think of any self-reinforcing social changes that he thinks are good. (Or maybe he can, but lays emphasis on universal agreement for some reason? Idunno.)
apparently can’t think of any self-reinforcing social changes that he thinks are good.
(I’m very, very bad at this sort of coming up with examples, so I don’t think my inability to come up with any is much evidence for anything. I’m also very, very bad at finding physical objects amongst other objects, e.g. looking in the fridge for a certain jar. I strongly suspect that those two skills are strongly related.
Eliezer also claims to be very bad at coming up with examples and has told an anecdote about his inability to find things in the fridge (which he then ascribed to males in general—there are many reasons to be skeptical of the generalization). I suspect something interesting is going on here, and I tentatively wonder if it has to do with damage to, or atrophy of, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.)
Hmm, its curious. I am pretty good at coming up with examples or picking out items from crowded environments. Well, for the social changes… what’s about gradual abolition of religious fundamentalism? It can be self enforcing (just as introduction of fundamentalism is; instability implies self-enforcing effects both ways).
In general if you can come up with some self-reinforcing social change that you think is bad, the same change, starting from the bad state (assuming that it can start at all), would be self-reinforcing in the good direction. A steel object falling off from under a magnet is a self-reinforcing process—the further it falls, the lower is the attraction—and so is the steel object snapping onto a magnet—the closer it gets, the stronger is the attraction force.
edit: ahh, i looked up in comment thread. Indeed, the problem is that it is hard to keep unstable process in equilibrium, and the self-reinforcing processes go too far. At same time, if you take a terribly religious population where we burned witches, or where they stone the rape victims to death, it is easy to imagine that on the other end of the slippery slope—if the slope is at all inclined in the other direction—the life is massively better.
I made a magnetic levitation device once—it would suspend iron nail under electromagnet. It seems deceptively simple—when nail goes up, turn off magnet, when nail goes down, turn it on—but if you do so you get rapidly increasing oscillations—you have to have a circuit that blends in first and second derivatives of the position into the control signal. A great deal of complexity for a very simple unstable system.
I made a magnetic levitation device once—it would suspend iron nail under electromagnet. It seems deceptively simple—when nail goes up, turn off magnet, when nail goes down, turn it on—but if you do so you get rapidly increasing oscillations—you have to have a circuit that blends in first and second derivatives of the position into the control signal. A great deal of complexity for a very simple unstable system.
Tangent: A similar problem was described in Sebastian Thrun’s Udacity CS373 couse with respect to steering a self-driving car. It seems the similar principles should apply, except that the distance from the magnet will change the effect of gravity on the nail, which makes the problem more complicated.
Indeed, the problem is that it is hard to keep [an] unstable process in equilibrium, and the self-reinforcing processes go too far. At [the] same time, if you take a terribly religious population where we burned witches, or where they stone the rape victims to death, it is easy to imagine that on the other end of the slippery slope—if the slope is at all inclined in the other direction—the life is massively better...
...It seems deceptively simple—when nail goes up, turn off magnet, when nail goes down, turn it on—but if you do so you get rapidly increasing oscillations—you have to have a circuit that blends in first and second derivatives of the position into the control signal. A great deal of complexity for a very simple unstable system.
This is the best one-paragraph technical argument against “small-c conservatism” (social, cultural, etc) that I’ve ever read.
Edit: “the best” doesn’t necessarily mean “totally overwhelming”; I just find it a very good illustration of the inherent problems and opportunity costs.
This is the best technical argument against “small-c conservatism” (social, cultural, etc) that I’ve ever read.
If this is the case, i.e., if this really is the best argument against conservatism you can come up with, it strikes me that you should become a conservative. Notice that this type of argument is even stronger against anything else, i.e., what makes you think you can manage social change?
Um, I really don’t think so. This argument appears to imply that, if “conservatism” is a costly, complex and unreliable effort to keep a system somewhere between two or more “attractor” end-points, then one should seriously try to predict what those end-points could be like, and whether facilitating a gradual “slide” towards one of them could not be a better use of time and resources then keeping up the unstable equilibrium.
E.g. consider how increasingly open and permissive Western culture has been growing in regards to sex, or how privacy norms have been eroding in the last decades, or how “democracy” has been losing substance and legitimacy in favour of de facto oligarchic or bureaucratic rule in the post-war world order. It might make more sense even for a person who dislikes some particular accompanying changes to consider the range of probable outcomes for such trends—and whether trying to ensure a better, less destructive transition to such an outcome could be more worthwhile than a hopeless defense of the current state or trying to launch a counter-trend.
(With the above examples: improving sex ed and correcting biased feminist/etc dogma instead of preaching puritanism/monogamy. Providing citizens with ways to spy back on their governments and corporations instead of trying to curb the ominpresent surveillance. Developing better expert-driven, liberty-preserving political systems, like futarchy, instead of clinging to the facade of elected officials driving policy.)
what makes you think you can manage social change?
We see that similar kinds of social change can be managed or steered in better or worse ways (e.g. the denazification of Germany versus its treatment after WW1 or the West’s handling of USSR’s collapse). Meanwhile, attempting to keep a society, its politics or culture in a stasis has had ended with an uncontrollable shift (late USSR) or an explosion (Chinese Empire, Japanese Shogunate) every single time.
Um, I really don’t think so. This argument appears to imply that, if “conservatism” is a costly, complex and unreliable effort to keep a system somewhere between two or more “attractor” end-points, then one should seriously try to predict what those end-points could be like, and whether facilitating a gradual “slide” towards one of them could not be a better use of time and resources then keeping up the unstable equilibrium.
Um no, conservatism is an attempt to keep society at a relatively stable point.
What makes societies stable is being at Schelling points, and one way a Schelling point can be stable is to have an established tradition behind it. Another way to have a stable Schelling point is to move it to a maximally extreme position, the problem with this approach is that it’s nearly always possible to become more extreme and the society will collapse before you can become extreme enough. Ok, a counter movement frequently occurs when society starts to collapse pushing the trend in the other direction, but you seem to be arguing against such movements.
It might make more sense even for a person who dislikes some particular accompanying changes to consider the range of probable outcomes for such trends—and whether trying to ensure a better, less destructive transition to such an outcome could be more worthwhile than a hopeless defense of the current state or trying to launch a counter-trend.
Looking at history there are also many inevitable-seeming trends that failed or were even reversed, e.g., the trend towards absolute monarchy in the 18th century, the rise of eugenics in the early 20th century, the expansion of communism in the late 20th century.
(With the above examples: improving sex ed and correcting biased feminist/etc dogma instead of preaching puritanism/monogamy. Providing citizens with ways to spy back on their governments and corporations instead of trying to curb the ominpresent surveillance. Developing better expert-driven, liberty-preserving political systems, like futarchy, instead of clinging to the facade of elected officials driving policy.)
I have another example for you: with the trend towards a wider acceptance of torture (e.g., war on terror) we should manage it my formulating rules for when torture is and isn’t acceptable rather than keeping to a no torture policy.
Meanwhile, attempting to keep a society, its politics or culture in a stasis has had ended with an uncontrollable shift (late USSR) or an explosion (Chinese Empire, Japanese Shogunate) every single time.
It only seems this way because the instances when a society failed to change are less memorable.
I’m very, very bad at this sort of coming up with examples, so I don’t think my inability to come up with any is much evidence for anything. I’m also very, very bad at finding physical objects amongst other objects, e.g. looking in the fridge for a certain jar.
FWIW, me too, on both counts. Though I don’t classify myself so much as very bad at finding physical objects anymore, since I default to systematic search pretty quickly, and while it’s slow, it almost always works. Interestingly, I noticed I can do it the ‘normal’ way when on Adderall—it feels almost like having a HUD that’s highlighting relevant objects for me (very useful when driving a car).
Good point, but still: does anyone know of any slippery slope [ETA: by which I mean a cascade of self-reinforcing changes in laws or social norms] that most everyone can agree was clearly not-bad? I ask because there are various theoretical reasons why one should almost never expect slippery slopes to have good consequences, but if empirically that’s not the case then I need to revise my sociological and historiographical models.
(ETA2: My bad, I confused levels of abstraction; I agree with the criticisms that such an analysis is unfeasible even if possible.)
Aren’t you smuggling in the conclusion? Incremental change that builds on previous changes is generally called a “slippery slope” only when the consequences are undesired. Is the gradual increase in homosexual rights good? Then it won’t be called a slippery slope.
More generally, there aren’t many changes that “most everyone can agree was clearly not-bad.” If everyone thought it would be a good idea, society wouldn’t have been doing things some other way.
This runs into the general problem of determining whether moral progress exists. Namely, after your morals change the change is always good as judged by your (new) morals.
Could you elaborate on these theoretical reasons? Because obviously the desirability of a slippery slope isn’t a relation between the slope and possible desirers, not a property of the slope as such, and it’s difficult to see what dynamics of slopes in action could be affected by the attitudinal relations of later persons towards them. Bad from the perspective of those who initiated them, perhaps?
Since history tends to ebb and flow even when it does have a secular direction, examples of self-reinforcing changes in laws or social norms can be found sloping in both directions across any dimension, so if e.g. you think that civil rights was bad, it is not hard to find periods and places where movements in the opposite direction had a self-reinforcing nature. So leaving aside very strong formalist conservatives who oppose changes in laws or social norms a priori, even if there are no slippery slopes that everyone considers good, I would expect that every person would be able to see at least one slippery slope that is by their lights good.
does anyone know of any slippery slope that most everyone can agree was clearly not-bad?
I doubt it, but because of the difficulty of citing any such social or political change, rather than because of some special property of slippery slopes.
As others have said, this seems like a confused question. The legalization of interracial marriage in the US would seem like the obvious example, but I don’t know what you want to count or not count as part of the trend. And I’m just guessing at how to interpret “most everyone”.
Seems to me that rationalism as a living ideal is a slippery slope with a positive outcome. Once someone takes the initial steps to use rationalism, they then seek to learn more about rationalism, they practice it more and they become more effective and efficient at utilising it.
That looks like a slippery slope to me, but obviously one that has a different outcome type than a traditional negative outcome orientated slippery slope.
That’s really vague. Examples would help, preferably ones from long ago so as to avoid the mind-killer: for instance, the Reign of Terror could be an example of a slippery slope.
The other side, of course, is that not all slippery slopes lead to bad outcomes- consider the civil rights movement.
Anyway, of course every policy change affects the likelihood of other policy changes, but only occasionally is it a runaway effect- usually it stops there or peters out.
Senses of history are vague, but still informative. It’s not clear to me there’s much value in digging up examples.
I don’t consider 1950 to be long ago.
No, and I did not mean to imply that they did. Many intentionally begin slippery slopes to lead to outcomes they like; foot-in-the-door techniques can be seen as an example. The takeaway is that the slippery slope meme doesn’t appear to actually be fallacious- if you think that A will increase the chance of B, and you dislike B, it’s often the correct strategic move to oppose A, even if you think A in isolation is a good thing. The challenge is getting the correct model of how A will impact the chances of B.
I don’t think we disagree here. As far as 1950 being “long ago”, my point was that I picked examples that I really don’t expect to be live issues for Less Wrong readers; there were other issues being discussed in 1950 that are still subjects of disagreement between LW-type people, and those I shouldn’t use.
Many very smart people wouldn’t unreservedly agree that this wasn’t a bad outcome; perhaps a different example could be found though? (Ideally one that isn’t as politically charged?)
Many very smart people wouldn’t unreservedly agree that the Terror was bad, either. If you’re far left enough to cheer the Terror or far right enough to boo civil rights or rebel in a clown suit enough to do both, you should be used to not being the default audience and practiced at separating such “obvious” examples from the formal role they play in the argument.
You are ignoring the fact that the historical developments commonly known as “civil rights” have in fact led to a progression of ever more extreme policies (i.e. a slippery slope) whose present outcome is controversial even in the mainstream. This is indisputable no matter what position (if any) you happen to support in these controversies.
This slippery slope can be roughly described with the following progression:
1: Government-mandated discrimination across racial/ethnic/religious groups.
2: Libertarian/classical liberal position: procedural equality for everyone as far as the government is concerned, freedom to discriminate (or not) for private parties.
3: Prohibition of overt discrimination even for private businesses and organizations.
4(a): Affirmative action -- the government (and private parties under its influence and pressure) actively try to equalize statistical outcomes across groups by favoritism towards members of groups that do worse on average.
4(b): Disparate impact doctrine—even if there is no overt discrimination, unequal statistical group outcomes are considered as evidence of discrimination by themselves, and any institution that produces such outcomes can be held legally liable on that basis alone.
While 1-3 are no longer controversial in the mainstream, 4(a) and 4(b) are still matters of intense public controversy. (Admittedly, for unclear reasons, 4(b) gets far less publicity than 4(a), despite its arguably even greater impact in practice.)
Yes, you’re right. (And if we like we can extend this slope further out until it includes the Terror, and tada, we’ve constructed the classical one-axis political spectrum.)
Obligatory face-saving : I still think my claim stands that people (especially “very smart people” like LW members consider themselves) should be able to read the comment, recognize the formal nature of the argument, substitute in slopes they themselves thing are good or bad, and then evaluate it on those corrected terms, even if we generalize it to include normal people and not just nutcases like me or you. But maybe I shouldn’t think it stands, because Will (who is very smart, and a nutcase to boot) apparently can’t think of any self-reinforcing social changes that he thinks are good. (Or maybe he can, but lays emphasis on universal agreement for some reason? Idunno.)
(I’m very, very bad at this sort of coming up with examples, so I don’t think my inability to come up with any is much evidence for anything. I’m also very, very bad at finding physical objects amongst other objects, e.g. looking in the fridge for a certain jar. I strongly suspect that those two skills are strongly related.
Eliezer also claims to be very bad at coming up with examples and has told an anecdote about his inability to find things in the fridge (which he then ascribed to males in general—there are many reasons to be skeptical of the generalization). I suspect something interesting is going on here, and I tentatively wonder if it has to do with damage to, or atrophy of, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.)
Hmm, its curious. I am pretty good at coming up with examples or picking out items from crowded environments. Well, for the social changes… what’s about gradual abolition of religious fundamentalism? It can be self enforcing (just as introduction of fundamentalism is; instability implies self-enforcing effects both ways).
In general if you can come up with some self-reinforcing social change that you think is bad, the same change, starting from the bad state (assuming that it can start at all), would be self-reinforcing in the good direction. A steel object falling off from under a magnet is a self-reinforcing process—the further it falls, the lower is the attraction—and so is the steel object snapping onto a magnet—the closer it gets, the stronger is the attraction force.
edit: ahh, i looked up in comment thread. Indeed, the problem is that it is hard to keep unstable process in equilibrium, and the self-reinforcing processes go too far. At same time, if you take a terribly religious population where we burned witches, or where they stone the rape victims to death, it is easy to imagine that on the other end of the slippery slope—if the slope is at all inclined in the other direction—the life is massively better.
I made a magnetic levitation device once—it would suspend iron nail under electromagnet. It seems deceptively simple—when nail goes up, turn off magnet, when nail goes down, turn it on—but if you do so you get rapidly increasing oscillations—you have to have a circuit that blends in first and second derivatives of the position into the control signal. A great deal of complexity for a very simple unstable system.
Tangent: A similar problem was described in Sebastian Thrun’s Udacity CS373 couse with respect to steering a self-driving car. It seems the similar principles should apply, except that the distance from the magnet will change the effect of gravity on the nail, which makes the problem more complicated.
This is the best one-paragraph technical argument against “small-c conservatism” (social, cultural, etc) that I’ve ever read.
Edit: “the best” doesn’t necessarily mean “totally overwhelming”; I just find it a very good illustration of the inherent problems and opportunity costs.
If this is the case, i.e., if this really is the best argument against conservatism you can come up with, it strikes me that you should become a conservative. Notice that this type of argument is even stronger against anything else, i.e., what makes you think you can manage social change?
Um, I really don’t think so. This argument appears to imply that, if “conservatism” is a costly, complex and unreliable effort to keep a system somewhere between two or more “attractor” end-points, then one should seriously try to predict what those end-points could be like, and whether facilitating a gradual “slide” towards one of them could not be a better use of time and resources then keeping up the unstable equilibrium.
E.g. consider how increasingly open and permissive Western culture has been growing in regards to sex, or how privacy norms have been eroding in the last decades, or how “democracy” has been losing substance and legitimacy in favour of de facto oligarchic or bureaucratic rule in the post-war world order.
It might make more sense even for a person who dislikes some particular accompanying changes to consider the range of probable outcomes for such trends—and whether trying to ensure a better, less destructive transition to such an outcome could be more worthwhile than a hopeless defense of the current state or trying to launch a counter-trend.
(With the above examples: improving sex ed and correcting biased feminist/etc dogma instead of preaching puritanism/monogamy. Providing citizens with ways to spy back on their governments and corporations instead of trying to curb the ominpresent surveillance. Developing better expert-driven, liberty-preserving political systems, like futarchy, instead of clinging to the facade of elected officials driving policy.)
We see that similar kinds of social change can be managed or steered in better or worse ways (e.g. the denazification of Germany versus its treatment after WW1 or the West’s handling of USSR’s collapse). Meanwhile, attempting to keep a society, its politics or culture in a stasis has had ended with an uncontrollable shift (late USSR) or an explosion (Chinese Empire, Japanese Shogunate) every single time.
Um no, conservatism is an attempt to keep society at a relatively stable point.
What makes societies stable is being at Schelling points, and one way a Schelling point can be stable is to have an established tradition behind it. Another way to have a stable Schelling point is to move it to a maximally extreme position, the problem with this approach is that it’s nearly always possible to become more extreme and the society will collapse before you can become extreme enough. Ok, a counter movement frequently occurs when society starts to collapse pushing the trend in the other direction, but you seem to be arguing against such movements.
Looking at history there are also many inevitable-seeming trends that failed or were even reversed, e.g., the trend towards absolute monarchy in the 18th century, the rise of eugenics in the early 20th century, the expansion of communism in the late 20th century.
I have another example for you: with the trend towards a wider acceptance of torture (e.g., war on terror) we should manage it my formulating rules for when torture is and isn’t acceptable rather than keeping to a no torture policy.
It only seems this way because the instances when a society failed to change are less memorable.
FWIW, me too, on both counts. Though I don’t classify myself so much as very bad at finding physical objects anymore, since I default to systematic search pretty quickly, and while it’s slow, it almost always works. Interestingly, I noticed I can do it the ‘normal’ way when on Adderall—it feels almost like having a HUD that’s highlighting relevant objects for me (very useful when driving a car).
4b needs “statistical significance of discrimination” and “concentrated responsibility” clauses, and then it becomes an antitrust law.
Good point, but still: does anyone know of any slippery slope [ETA: by which I mean a cascade of self-reinforcing changes in laws or social norms] that most everyone can agree was clearly not-bad? I ask because there are various theoretical reasons why one should almost never expect slippery slopes to have good consequences, but if empirically that’s not the case then I need to revise my sociological and historiographical models.
(ETA2: My bad, I confused levels of abstraction; I agree with the criticisms that such an analysis is unfeasible even if possible.)
Aren’t you smuggling in the conclusion? Incremental change that builds on previous changes is generally called a “slippery slope” only when the consequences are undesired. Is the gradual increase in homosexual rights good? Then it won’t be called a slippery slope.
More generally, there aren’t many changes that “most everyone can agree was clearly not-bad.” If everyone thought it would be a good idea, society wouldn’t have been doing things some other way.
This runs into the general problem of determining whether moral progress exists. Namely, after your morals change the change is always good as judged by your (new) morals.
Could you elaborate on these theoretical reasons? Because obviously the desirability of a slippery slope isn’t a relation between the slope and possible desirers, not a property of the slope as such, and it’s difficult to see what dynamics of slopes in action could be affected by the attitudinal relations of later persons towards them. Bad from the perspective of those who initiated them, perhaps?
Since history tends to ebb and flow even when it does have a secular direction, examples of self-reinforcing changes in laws or social norms can be found sloping in both directions across any dimension, so if e.g. you think that civil rights was bad, it is not hard to find periods and places where movements in the opposite direction had a self-reinforcing nature. So leaving aside very strong formalist conservatives who oppose changes in laws or social norms a priori, even if there are no slippery slopes that everyone considers good, I would expect that every person would be able to see at least one slippery slope that is by their lights good.
I doubt it, but because of the difficulty of citing any such social or political change, rather than because of some special property of slippery slopes.
Edit: oops, didn’t see TimS beat me.
Going further back in history, you have the process by which the King of England lost power and Parliament gained it...
As others have said, this seems like a confused question. The legalization of interracial marriage in the US would seem like the obvious example, but I don’t know what you want to count or not count as part of the trend. And I’m just guessing at how to interpret “most everyone”.
reduced levels of violence in society? e.g. the reverse of this slippery slope
Seems to me that rationalism as a living ideal is a slippery slope with a positive outcome. Once someone takes the initial steps to use rationalism, they then seek to learn more about rationalism, they practice it more and they become more effective and efficient at utilising it. That looks like a slippery slope to me, but obviously one that has a different outcome type than a traditional negative outcome orientated slippery slope.