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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

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If the FAA hadn't foreclosed it all at the start by freezing the technology in place with regulations we might indeed live in a different world already. If the NHTSA existed back when the model T was current, we might need checklists for driving cars and have regulations based on needing to turn a crank to start.

If you're going to just ignore everything I wrote, then we're probably not going to make any progress. Perhaps we could leave this tangent where it is, and you can actually specify your claim, so that we can determine whether this tangent is even meaningful to your actual claim. Or if, ya know, you're just whining about the world.

Or, of course, you could read what I wrote and actually respond to it. You could show your expertise in flight navigation and control, particularly with regards to automation technology. You could make an argument that actually competes with mine, in order to show that I have mistaken some points of fact or something. What is non-responsive is just pure imagination about hypothetical alternative realities, completely disconnected from any facts about the world.

If you're going to just ignore everything I wrote

I'm not ignoring it, I'm rejecting it. I'm saying requirements to fly an aircraft have frozen in place because FAA regs froze them in place.

I'm not going to argue about the specific regulations because that's implicitly accepting that the regulatory framework is a good thing, and I think it's a bad thing.

The Motte and Bailey. You Bailey your way to claims about the FAA and navigation automation, but then immediately retreat from defending it. You simply refuse to argue any specifics about any portion of the Bailey.

You retreat to a Motte of simply rejecting any epsilon of regulation ever, but refuse to acknowledge any actual claim that this position makes.

This is the quintessential form of reasoning that this place was made to reject.

No motte-and-bailey; slippery slope. I'm not going to argue about the specifics about any particular spot on the slippery slope because the main problem is that it is on the slippery slope.

Ok, so once we're epsilon onto a slippery slope, you're "not going to argue about the specifics". Got it. So, you could just respond to those comments by explicitly stating this, yes?

Do you hold this position for all possible claims of slippery slopes? Do you agree that gay marriage is just one more spot on the slippery slope to marrying dogs, and any argumentation about specifics is somewhere between fruitless and an entirely misguided endeavor? Or do you think there is room to discuss some sort of framework for claims of slippery slopes, that perhaps all slopes might not be equally slippery, or something along these lines? Or just nah to all that. "Gay marriage, slippery slope, dog marriage, QED." ?

Gay marriage was on a slippery slope down to all the trans stuff we have today. I don't know if the slope ends before dog marriage. Not sure what that has to do with a regulatory framework being a slippery slope towards the death of innovation.

Because not all slippery slopes logically entail exactly whatever anyone can just throw out there as a possible conclusion? So, perhaps, you're throwing out "death of innovation" as the end of the slope, but that's actually akin to "dog marriage". And someone else might throw out a different possibility as the end of the slope, and that's akin to trans stuff. A reasonable conversation can be had about the connection between gay marriage and those two different possible end points, just like a reasonable conversation can be had here about this regulation and different possible end points. You would simply terminate the conversation immediately and conclude that it must be dog marriage/death of innovation. This seems like a pretty obvious non sequitur, a conversation killer, a mind killer, and the enemy of rational discussion.

You're trying to use "rational discussion" as a cudgel to get people to accept your conclusion that a regulatory framework is a good idea and the rational thing to do is argue over the details. And you're doing it clumsily.

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