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The "Nothing to hide" argument is (still) a logical fallacy (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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Almost one year ago I made this post about how the Wikipedia page for the "Nothing to hide" argument removed the text stating that it is a logical fallacy. I advocated for it to be added back. Three days after that post it was added back.

Exactly one year, to the day, after the logical fallacy text was removed, it got removed again. On October 19th of this year, a different user removed the text from the Wikipedia page, despite plenty of evidence that the "Nothing to hide" argument is a logical fallacy.

I am back here, once again, advocating that the text be added back.

P.S. It's an absolutely crazy coincidence that the same edit happened to the same page on the same day exactly one year apart.

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[–] 3 points 1 year ago (5 children)

it seems to me that people are arguing over semantics why it shouldn't be listed as a "logical fallacy". kinda reminds me of people arguing about semantics on why i shouldn't call people nazis when they're not actually members of the NSDAP. fucking infuriating.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

    It's more like calling "nazi" to all forms of authoritarian positions, even the left-wing authoritarians in the opposite side of the spectrum.

    There's a distinction between "informal fallacy" and "formal / logical fallacy". Both have separate articles in wikipedia as well. Why not just call it "fallacy" without categorizing it into a specific subcategory it does not fit anyway?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    Why does it need to be considered "formal" by some arbitrary standard to be both a fallacy and related to logic.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    The "formal" part comes from "formal system", which is essentially the use of rules of inference based on an initial set of presuppositions, with an exact/mathematical approach to "truth".

    The idea of "informal logic" is something some people have wanted to put forward, but it's a much younger and not as well defined term, and whether it should really be considered "logic" is something that has criticisms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_logic#Criticisms

    Perhaps in the end all logic is formal logic, the problem is that we know from Gödel's incompleteness theorems that not everything is computable and translatable into a formal system.. to solve this you'd have to model the statements into a Gödel/Lobian machine (at which point you are essentially building an AI).

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