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[Durin Stronginthearm]

Slippery slope fallacy

'Slippery slope' is a logical device. It can be used in a fallacious manner, but it can also be logically valid. If you think it's fallacious you need to argue why, not just pull three words out of your arse.

[Durin Stronginthearm]

Spoiler: Bacon in the UK is a kind of flabby monstrosity. (click to show/hide)

Essentially, anything is better than that.

If that's what Scottish bacon is like then that's a pretty strong argument against independence right there South of the border our bacon is lovely, crisp and tasty.

[Flying Dice]

Slippery slope fallacy

'Slippery slope' is a logical device. It can be used in a fallacious manner, but it can also be logically valid. If you think it's fallacious you need to argue why, not just pull three words out of your arse.

To be perfectly honest, the argument should have been clear simply from mentioning that. The guy argued that a small, reasonable thing would lead to much greater, much worse things, despite there being no logical connection between the two. He made a slippery slope argument in which the conclusion did not follow, ergo it was fallacious. You don't need to write a thesis paper to point out that someone misused a logical device.

[Darvi]

Spoiler: Bacon in the UK is a kind of flabby monstrosity. (click to show/hide)

Essentially, anything is better than that.

If that's what Scottish bacon is like then that's a pretty strong argument against independence right there South of the border our bacon is lovely, crisp and tasty.

If that's true, then our uni serves Scottish bacon.

[ZetaX]

Slippery slope fallacy

What Chairmain said. There's a sight of difference between doing something which has the potential to result in injury and doing something which has been exhaustively documented as causing serious medical problems in all but a few rare cases.

Where is the effective difference between something that (over your entire life) with a probability of 50% causes medical expenses costing 10000$ and something that with a probability of 5% causes costs of 100000$¿ Just to list some things which I can imagine to be of similar costs per person doing them extensively:
- sun bathing
- mountain hiking
- climbing
- smoking.
So the argument that you would require bans on lots of other things still stands.

[10ebbor10]

The earlier ones wouldn't be banned, simply because it's impossible to control. There're two scenarios how they could be restricted.

-1. If evidence of harmful activity exists, pay-out's are reduced.
-2. If you want to do harmful activity, you have to pay a premium on your health insurance.

*Also, don't make up numbers just to give legitimacy to an argument.

[FearfulJesuit]

Doing that will just piss people off, there are better ways. For example, we already put high taxes on cigarettes, so why not just put those taxes into the national health care system?

[ZetaX]

*Also, don't make up numbers just to give legitimacy to an argument.

I have no idea what you try to tell me with this. I never claimed those numbers to be correlated to any of the mentioned things. There were also no numbers for the claim that obesity costs more than the other things mentioned given. I was simply pointing out that while one thing might very often lead to costs, there might be others that do the same without being as common, e.g. by head injuries and/or its consequences being pretty cost intensive.

[Flying Dice]

Slippery slope fallacy

What Chairmain said. There's a sight of difference between doing something which has the potential to result in injury and doing something which has been exhaustively documented as causing serious medical problems in all but a few rare cases.

Where is the effective difference between something that (over your entire life) with a probability of 50% causes medical expenses costing 10000$ and something that with a probability of 5% causes costs of 100000$¿ Just to list some things which I can imagine to be of similar costs per person doing them extensively:
- sun bathing
- mountain hiking
- climbing
- smoking.
So the argument that you would require bans on lots of other things still stands.

Doesn't follow. It's reasonable to drive/hike/whatever without expecting to be injured. It's not reasonable to start smoking without expecting to be injured. One is a slight possibility, the other is a near-certain eventuality. Hence why a car wreck is called an "accident" while emphysema from smoking is not.

That aside, you're also ignoring the obvious differences between things which are necessary (and slight) risks (for example, driving: there's a small chance that you'll be in an accident that injures you, but not driving is virtually impossible given the lives of most people); things which are hobbies that carry a possibility of injury (using your example, hiking in the mountains), but which cannot be rationally claimed to cause injury in the vast majority of cases; and habits which are (like hobbies) unnecessary, but which almost invariably lead to personal injury (smoking).

Since you enjoy pulling numbers out of your arse to support yourself, I'll answer with two things:

1. First, an equally-useless anecdote to make a point. Speaking from personal experience with my family, the medical costs of a smoker are far higher than those of someone who is injured in an accident.

2. Second, real numbers.

According to the U.S. Federal Highway Administration, there were ~205 million registered drivers in the U.S. in 2009. In that year, according to the NHTSA, there were 33,808 deaths and injuries related to auto accidents in the U.S. I couldn't find numbers on accidents or injuries in crashes without fatalities, but that's workable enough.

That means that if you were a driver in the U.S. in 2009, you had (roughly) a 0.0164 % chance of being injured or killed in an auto accident.

According to the CDC, roughly 43.8 million people in the U.S. are smokers. The average annual number of tobacco-related deaths in the U.S. in recent years is estimated to be around 440,000. This is a bit trickier to calculate, given that mortality due to tobacco use isn't instant. Still, it gives us a useful baseline of comparison.

The smoking population of the U.S. is only ~21% the size of the driving population, and yet smoking leads to 130% as many deaths as driving, using flat numbers.


I used smoking driving there both to make a point and because, for fairly obvious reasons, it'd be a major project to try and estimate the number of injuries and deaths due to relatively low-risk hobbies, much less leverage a comparison of average medical costs, and the ways in which obesity can affect health are more complex and unfortunately less documented than smoking.

Note that I'm not arguing against allowing people to overeat, I'm arguing against letting them do it and then have taxpayers front their medical bills when they're going in for yet another bypass operation. Of course, in a sense that presupposes that we have a sensible public health care system in the first place, so...

---

And now it's time to eat lunch.

[Helgoland]

Doing that will just piss people off, there are better ways. For example, we already put high taxes on cigarettes, so why not just put those taxes into the national health care system?

Yup, re-internalize those externalities through strategic application of taxes. Works for tobacco, works for food, works for... basically anything, I guess.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

But there is a flip side to the short and long term risk arguments, FD. You can smoke for years, stop, and eventually not have an elevated risk of cancer. Meanwhile, you can drive once and be injured to the point of needing life-long care. Or get drunk once and die from impaired stupidity, but also drink for years and stop without long-term consequences.

[Flying Dice]

True enough. But many of the short-term risks can be alleviated with simple precautions. That aside, the long-term risks we're discussing are by-and-large habit forming, which makes it less likely for a given individual to stop in time to avoid the risks. I'd also question what you mean by "drink for years"; a glass of wine or beer  one or twice a week for years won't cause much damage, if any, but being an alcoholic for years will. Same with heavy smokers; tar buildup and liver damage don't just magically disappear once you stop smoking or drinking. For that matter, if you're obese, cutting back on how much you eat won't make you shed pounds and unclog arteries with no further effort.

It's a matter of risk: Some things are necessary and carry a high degree of risk (pregnancy in pre-modern times), some necessary and low-risk (driving), some unnecessary and low-risk (hiking), some unnecessary and high-risk (smoking). There's a pretty clear difference between things which are or are not necessary, and ones which are dangerous to pursue and which are not.

For that matter, the long-term risks also act as short term risks. You might smoke one cigarette and never smoke again, but there's a short-term risk of developing an addiction, which paths into the long-term risk of lung cancer, etc.

[ZetaX]

You are using the death toll, which is worthless in the sense of not saying anything about the costs created by doing this. I also am sceptical on the subtle statement that obesity has such high costs at all, as most obese people are not in need of immediate attention, and those operations often are one of the lesser expensive ones. It is definitely a real problem and of significance, but is it really beating e.g. alcohol¿

You also somehow made a big suckpuppet out of necessities (e.g. driving), while I only used things that are not at all necessary for everyday life (hiking, sun bathing, smoking, climbing). Please stop that.
Also stop attacking my "number out of my arse" as you are obviously not getting the point, namely that you will have to use the expected value of the costs, not the probability of it causing problems. That I made up numbers on the spot to give an _example_ is irrelevant.

[Eotyrannus]

If you do a dangerous activity, then you get some sort of insurance. (At least, I think you do, I'm a bit young to know when insurance is used, but my aikedo sensei is insured.) Most dangerous activities are extremely close to being safe when performed correctly, and unhealthy foods and alcohol have a similar effect if it's used in moderation. Tobacco is an entirely different thing, and I'd put some sort of restriction on it if it was my decision, but nyeh.

[ZetaX]

Well, some insurances are for the most deadly thing of all: life. Health insurance is an example of this. So yeah, you could ask whether (too much) food is part of life or at least covered by insurances for it. I think, for example, but have no direct proof, that death by obesity is considered a natural death regarding life insurance.