https://www.tiltak.no/d-flytte-eller-regulere-trafikk/d2-reg...

Which to be fair everyone does all the time (driving habits, eating habits, etc).

It's: "I'd rather have other people have higher risk of dying than me having to do something I'd kinda of not want to do even though the inconvenience is minimal".

Me, me, me, me and me. Fuck the rest.

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the parent here; I'm just saying your rebuttal is a strawman.

Alternatively, driving is sometimes necessary to deliver goods and travel. But the funny thing is, is that I would GLADLY ban cars in all cities and heavily invest in high speed rail. Cars would still be needed in this world, but again it's the relative change.

So no, it's not a strawman. If anything it was an ad hom.

Of course, we are not doing proper logic, which is why I balk at bringing up fallacies anyway, it's bad form and idiotic. Nevertheless, the argument that we shouldn't try to improve safety on the roads because that would lead us to the conclusion that we need to ban driving altogether is so incredibly pathetic that you should feel embarrassed for defending it.

The premises of the slippery slope argument are that a) doing X makes Y more likely, and b) Y is bad. The conclusion to be drawn is that doing X has a negative consequence, namely making the bad thing more likely, which actually follows whenever the premises are satisfied.

> This type of argument is sometimes used as a form of fear mongering in which the probable consequences of a given action are exaggerated in an attempt to scare the audience. When the initial step is not demonstrably likely to result in the claimed effects, this is called the slippery slope fallacy.

> This is a type of informal fallacy, and is a subset of the continuum fallacy, in that it ignores the possibility of middle ground and assumes a discrete transition from category A to category B. Other idioms for the slippery slope fallacy are the thin edge of the wedge, domino fallacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_fallacy

> Informal fallacies are a type of incorrect argument in natural language. The source of the error is not necessarily due to the form of the argument, as is the case for formal fallacies, but is due to its content and context. Fallacies, despite being incorrect, usually appear to be correct and thereby can seduce people into accepting and using them.

For the record, I don't really think slippery slope was invoked there (nor do I think ad hominem was), but I do think it's an actual fallacy. I actually even disagree with them claiming it wasn't a strawman, too - they dramatized and reframed the original point.

It's possible in some cases that the conclusion is weak, e.g. if Y is a negative outcome but not a very significant one, but that doesn't make it a fallacy and in particular doesn't justify dismissing arguments of that form as a fallacy when X does make Y significantly more likely and Y is a significant concern.

Not only weak, but completely void, which is why it is an informal fallacy, and thus a fallacy, if I understand it right. You're correct that it's not a logical fallacy specifically, and I do see in retrospect that that was the point of contention (in literal terms anyways). But I'm really not sure that it really was in literal terms you guys were talking, really didn't seem like it.

In those cases the premises wouldn't even be satisfied. It's like saying that "all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal" is a fallacy because you're disputing that Socrates is a man rather than a fictional character in Plato's writings. That doesn't make the argument a fallacy, it makes the premise in dispute and therefore the argument potentially inapplicable, which is not the same thing.

In particular, it requires you to dispute the premise rather than the form of the argument.

It's not just a Wikipedia thing or me wordsmithing it into existence. As far as I'm concerned though, arguments the premises of which are not reasonable to think they apply / are complete, or are not meaningfully possible to evaluate, are decidedly fallacious - even if they're logically sound.

> Arguments of this form may or may not be fallacious depending on the probabilities involved in each step.

In other words, it depends on the premises being correct. But all arguments depend on their premises being correct.

The fact that something is widely parroted doesn't mean it's correct -- that's just this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum

Argumentum ad populum [0] is itself an informal fallacy, as described on both of our links. What I said wasn't an argumentum ad populum anyways: we're discussing definitions, and definitions do not have truth values.

> But all arguments depend on their premises being correct

But not all incorrect premises are formulated in a reasonable manner. There are degenerate premises that have telltale signs of being misguided. These would be what make informal fallacies. In a way, you could think of them as being incorrect about the premises of what counts as sound logic.

In fact, I ran into this the other day here when while someone said something potentially true, they were also engaging in a No True Scotsman fallacy (also an informal fallacy). One of them claimed that "if it's a fallacy, it's nonsensical to call it true" - except no, that's not the point. The statement can absolutely be true in that case, it's the reasoning that didn't make sense in context. Context they were happy to deny of course, because they were not there to make people's days any better.

Similar here: the slippery slope can be true and real, it's just fallacious to default to it. Conversely [0], it is absolutely possible that people all think the same thing, are actually right, and some other thing becomes true because of it, just super uncommon, so it is fallacious to invert it.

Which gets to the difference between one and the other.

"This is correct because everybody says it is" is a fallacy because it can be true or false independent of whether everybody says it is or not. Even if the premise is true, the conclusion can be false, or vice versa.

Whereas if the premises that X likely leads to Y and Y is bad are both true, then the conclusion that X likely leads to something bad is not independent.

> What I said wasn't an argumentum ad populum anyways: we're discussing definitions, and definitions do not have truth values.

Categories have definitions. Whether a particular thing fits into a particular category can be reasoned about, and a particular miscategorization being common doesn't make it correct.

> But not all incorrect premises are formulated in a reasonable manner. There are degenerate premises that have telltale signs of being misguided. These would be what make informal fallacies. In a way, you could think of them as being incorrect about the premises of what counts as sound logic.

The general form of informal fallacies is that they take some reasoning which is often true (e.g. if everybody believes something then it's more likely to be true than false) and then tries to use it under the assumption that it's always the case, which is obviously erroneous, e.g. the majority of people used to think the sun revolved around the earth.

The category error with slippery slope is that the probability is part of the argument. If 60% of the things people believe are true, that doesn't tell you if "sun revolves around the earth" is one of those things, so you can't use it to prove that one way or the other.

Whereas arguing that taking on a 60% chance of a bad thing happening is bad isn't a claim that the bad thing will definitely happen.

Except of course when there is a dependence between the trueness of the statement and how many people are saying it. For example, if I bring up that a certain taxonomization exists and is established, it is pretty crucial for it to be popularly held, otherwise it would cease to both exist and be established.

> Whether a particular thing fits into a particular category can be reasoned about, and a particular miscategorization being common doesn't make it correct.

But you reject the category of informal fallacies being fallacies overall, despite them being definitionally fallacies, no?

For example, they might be of the opinion that danger doesn't increase linearly with speed, but more aggressively. This would result in a scenario where they could argue for lower speed limits without having to argue for complete car elimination. Case in point, this piece of news.

Of course in general you can avoid potential bad consequences of a thing by not doing the thing but that's just a tautology.

We don't even ban drugs here and cars are more useful than drugs. It's all about harm reduction and diminishing returns. Also, autoluwe (but not autovrije) districts exist and are a selling point when buying/renting a house, so your attempt at a strawman is rather amusing.

If you're willing to risk people dying just to get to your preferred McDonald's three minutes earlier, then the problem is you.

For example in Switzerland on some highways during rush hour the speed limit goes down to 80km/h. They analyzed it and it turns out it's an optimal speed limit for throughput.

Suppose a trip is 5km.

At 50km/h, that trip takes 6 minutes.

At 30km/h, that trip takes 10 minutes.

In practice, this naive way of calculating this doesn’t even reflect reality, because odds are the average speed of a driver through Helsinki was around 30km/h anyways. Going 50km/h between red lights doesn’t actually make your trip faster.

This is a wonderful explanation.

Though I've lived in Europe (Düsseldorf and London), my default sense of urban density is still American so it was hard to fathom such a low potential average speed. In London, I didn't bother with a car.

Except when it does, due to horrible traffic engineering practices.

There were a pair of one-way streets in the downtown of my city. Both attempted to have "green wave" setups for the lights. One worked pretty well, the other was okay, but whatever.

The problem was that the road itself was signed at 30 mph, but the lights were timed at 40 mph. It literally encouraged people to speed if it were not too busy (e.g., after business hours).

If I'm being very charitable, I would say you might naively set this up so that the next light's stopped traffic clears just before the previous light's traffic arrives, and perhaps that's how it worked during the day (I was a teen, I didn't go downtown during business hours much). After 5, it just encouraged you to punch it to make them all in one go.

Yeah 66% is a higher number, so it seems worse if you literally don't think about it at all.

Its 4 minutes. If its that important your car would have lights and sirens on it.

And it isn't a bad example, unless things are quite different in Finland, the vast majority of car trips taken in the US are under 6 miles (~10km). If you're taking a 40 minute trip on crowded, surface streets in a dense city and not going on a motorway, that's your choice, and frankly, quite selfish of you to not expect to go slow. I frankly don't care how long it takes you to get somewhere in a huge car through a city going faster means endangering other people.

I’m an avid cyclist in a US city. There’s a pretty large radius around me in which driving is <= 5 minutes quicker, not counting time to park. Plus cycling often leaves me directly by my destination. I can’t imagine how much more convenient it would be in a dense European city.

Anyways, what the hell is everyone in such a hurry for? Leave five minutes earlier. Cars are absolutely magical. Drivers sitting on mobile couches while expending minimal effort? Magical. So, ya know, adding a few minutes should really be no big deal. Which I doubt it does.

Big, open highways are different. Or at least I’d imagine them to be.

And on the cons side… hurts oil execs, national and international retailers, and people who define freedom as having to pay $5 to exxon to get groceries.

This seems like a weird argument. If your commute is an hour at 50 km/h then it's an hour and 40 minutes at 30 km/h, every day, each way. That seems like... quite a lot?

In other words, it's 2km at 30km/h plus 48km at 80km/h, versus 2km at 50km/h plus 48km at 80km/h. That's a difference of 1 minute 36 seconds.

It's like that since last December and was somewhat controversial when introduced (expanded), because muh freedoms, but not the kind of enduring controversy.

The separating part is already done, so what you see is lowering the speed from 50 tp 30 even on the roads where the cars were funnelef into.

(in support of the above thesis)

It’s city centre driving that the article talks about.

When the 20 limits were first introduced, lots of people would speed & overtake, but then you'd catch them up at the next traffic light & the one after etc.

I know London's quite an extreme case, but all a 20 limit means in a lot of stop/start urban areas is that you travel to the next stop at a speed which is less hazardous should you hit something/someone, with far more time to react to all the unpredictable things which happen in busy urban areas, thus decreasing the chances of hitting anything in the first place.

Yeah, it's mildly boring, but driving in cities pretty much always is. Just put on some music or a podcast and take it easy.

Which is why most of this is really a housing problem. If you make it too difficult to add new housing in and around cities, people have to live farther away, and in turn show up to the city in cars.

I don't think most are math-minded enough to factor commute time and cost into any salary calculation, if there's a 10% pay bump they'll take it even if all the gains get eaten up travel.

No, they only made it more painful to get into the city streets by car. And probably not by much, as it only matters if you are not stuck in traffic or waiting at a red light. Helsinki is a walkable city with good public transport, cars are not the only option.

> Mass surveillance under the ever present and weak excuse of “safety”

Speed traps (that's probably what is talked about here) are a very targeted from of surveillance, only taking pictures of speeding vehicles. And if it results in traffic deaths going down to zero, that's not a weak excuse. Still not a fan of "automatic speed enforcement" for a variety of reasons, but mass surveillance is not one of them.

Speed cameras in practice will use ALPR, and by the time the hardware capable of doing ALPR is installed, they'll then have the incentive to record every passing vehicle in a database whether it was speeding or not, and whether or not they're "allowed" to do that when the camera is initially installed.

It's like banning end-to-end encryption while promising not to do mass surveillance. Just wait a minute and you know what's coming next.

Heck, just leave the ALPR part out of the cameras altogether in order to save costs: have them upload the images to an ALPR service running somewhere in the cloud. You're probably already going to need the uploading part anyways in order to provide evidence, so why even bother with local ALPR?

Photo cameras would still be doing ALPR. Changing from "take a photo of cars that are speeding" to "take a photo of every car and only send tickets to the ones that are speeding" is a trivial software change that can be done retroactively at any point even after the cameras are installed.

> Heck, just leave the ALPR part out of the cameras altogether in order to save costs: have them upload the images to an ALPR service running somewhere in the cloud. You're probably already going to need the uploading part anyways in order to provide evidence, so why even bother with local ALPR?

How does this address the concern that they're going to use ALPR for location tracking? They would just do the same thing with the cloud service.

s/will/are/

Freedom to move around the city anonymously does not mean freedom to move around the city in a 2000kg, 100kW heavy machine anonymously.

Even the US recognises that the right to bear arms doesn't extend to an M1A1 Abrams.

So while 30km/h might be the limit for most of the roads, you mostly run into those only in the beginnings and ends of trips.

The average American mind can't comprehend European public transport and not sitting in a traffic jam and smog for 1 hr to go to their workplace. Some of us walk or cycle for 15 min on our commutes, and some of us even ride bicycles with our children to school. It takes me as much time to reach my workplace with a bike as with a car if you take parking, and one of those things makes me fitter and is for free.

I guess that's one of the reasons people in the US live shorter and sadder than us Europeans. Being stuck in traffic sure makes people grumpy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...

And the air pollution in the French subway is much worse than what you have outside. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S143846392...

I suspect that most of the bike drivers are affluent service workers who can't be arsed to share the public transport with the plebs.

Fairly often they are postal or delivery workers. Are those the affluent service workers that we keep hearing about?

In the case of Helsinki, they don't have a particularly outstanding biking infrastructure, but they have stellar public transports. And clean, very clean. I'd choose that everyday, which is much more inclusive and far less dangerous for everyone. Especially in a aging society.

Like others have pointed out making road speeds faster barely makes a dent in travel times. The absolute best way to reduce travel times is to build denser cities, which incidentally means less parking, narrower roads, and, most importantly, fewer cars. In a densely populated area it's impossible to match the throughput of even a small bike path with anything built for cars. Safety is just a bonus you get for designing better, more efficient, more livable cities.